as to hold the enemy's front and
throw out a column to march round the flank and attack his rear, the
method of Howe at the Brandywine; the other method was to advance on the
enemy by lines converging at a common center. This form of attack had
proved most successful eighteen years earlier when the British had
finally secured Canada by bringing together, at Montreal, three armies,
one from the east, one from the west, and one from the south. Now there
was a similar plan of bringing together three British forces at or near
Albany, on the Hudson. Of Clinton, at New York, and Burgoyne we know.
The third force was under General St. Leger. With some seventeen hundred
men, fully half of whom were Indians, he had gone up the St. Lawrence
from Montreal and was advancing from Oswego on Lake Ontario to attack
Fort Stanwix at the end of the road from the Great Lakes to the Mohawk
River. After taking that stronghold he intended to go down the river
valley to meet Burgoyne near Albany.

On the 3d of August St. Leger was before Fort Stanwix garrisoned by some
seven hundred Americans. With him were two men deemed potent in that
scene. One of these was Sir John Johnson who had recently inherited
the vast estate in the neighborhood of his father, the great Indian
Superintendent, Sir William Johnson, and was now in command of a
regiment recruited from Loyalists, many of them fierce and embittered
because of the seizure of their property. The other leader was a famous
chief of the Mohawks, Thayendanegea, or, to give him his English name,
Joseph Brant, half savage still, but also half civilized and half
educated, because he had had a careful schooling and for a brief day had
been courted by London fashion. He exerted a formidable influence with
his own people. The Indians were not, however, all on one side. Half of
the six tribes of the Iroquois were either neutral or in sympathy with
the Americans. Among the savages, as among the civilized, the war was a
family quarrel, in which brother fought brother. Most of the Indians on
the American side preserved, indeed, an outward neutrality. There was
no hostile population for them to plunder and the Indian usually had no
stomach for any other kind of warfare. The allies of the British, on the
other hand, had plenty of openings to their taste and they brought on
the British cause an enduring discredit.

When St. Leger was before Fort Stanwix he heard that a force of eight
hundred men, led by a G