For the moment, however, these two bastions confronted each other inertly, even if defiantly, thirty three miles of disputed water apart. In response to the English aggression, the French began building another fort at the north end of the lake, Fort Carillon (later to be renamed Fort Ticonderoga). Wounded in the previous battle, he now passed the command of the fort to Lieutenant Colonel George Munro and left him with a garrison of two thousand troops, half red-coat British regulars, half blue-coat colonials.Īll this, however, was an utterly insulting blow to the French who for over a hundred years had considered the lake irrevocably theirs, calling it by their own name, Lac du Saint Sacrement. Commandant Sir William Johnson had just renamed the lake after the English king, thus claiming all of it for the crown. Currently all was quiet on this front as the English put the last touches on new Fort William Henry. It’s a year after the battle in which Ephraim Williams gave his life, and at the same Lake George location. However hyped and mythicized it is based on a true and terrible historical event.

The latest film in 1992, starring heart-throb Daniel Day Lewis as hero Hawkeye, beautiful Madeleine Stowe as the heroine Cora, and sinister Wes Studi as villainous Magua, is well worth a Netflix review since it has so much to do with what will be here related. Nonetheless, the book has inspired no less than four American movies, an opera, a Marvel Comic, and a half a dozen more foreign versions. James Fenimore Cooper’s classic 1826 novel may tell one of the most romantic tales in American literature, but its writing style is hopelessly turgid (as Mark Twain attested).

Jf cooper the last of the mohicans