George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

The French are still more adventurous. A detachment of fifteen hundred men, part regulars, and part Canadians, are to follow the younger Vaudreuil in a winter's expedition¹ against Fort William Henry. They must travel sixty leagues; the snowshoes on their feet, their provisions on sledges, drawn, where the path is smooth, by dogs; for their couch at night, they spread on the snow-bank a bearskin, and break the evening breeze with a simple veil; thus they go over Champlain, over Lake George.² On St. Patrick's night, a man in front tries the strength of the ice with an axe; the ice-spurs ring, as the party advances over the crystal highway, with scaling ladders, to surprise the English fort.³ But the garrison was on the watch, and the enemy could only burn the English batteaux and sloops, the storehouses, and the huts of the rangers within their pickets.

For the campaign of 1757, the northern colonies, still eager to extend the English limits, at a congress of governors in Boston, in January, agreed to raise four thousand men.⁴ The Southern governors of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, meeting at Philadelphia, settled the quotas for their governments,⁵ but only as the groundwork for complaints to the Board of Trade; they said plainly,