The Lake George outlet stream, which the French called Carillon, from its waterfalls, was known by the Indians as Ticonderoga, or "the sounding waters." It winds through a ridge about four miles wide between the lakes, is pretty but turbulent, and falls down two series of cascades, giving music and water-power to the paper and other mills at the villages of Alexandria and Ticonderoga, the descent being two hundred and thirty feet. The upper cascade at Alexandria goes down rapids descending two hundred feet in a mile, and the lower cascade is a perpendicular fall of thirty feet at Ticonderoga, this village being called by its people "Ty," for short. Here stood the original French Fort Carillon guarding the pass at the verge of Lake Champlain. After the horrible massacre at Fort William Henry, the British colonists determined upon revenge, and General James Abercrombie, who had been made the Commander-in-Chief of all the British forces in North America through political influence, gathered an army of nearly sixteen thousand men at the head of the lake, while Montcalm was at Carillon with barely one-fourth the number. Abercrombie, however, was little more than the nominal British commander. General Wolfe described him as a "heavy man;" and another soldier wrote that he was "an aged gentleman, infirm in body and mind." The British Government meant that the actual command should be in the hands of General Lord Howe, who was in fact the real chief, described by Wolfe as "that great man" and "the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best soldier in the British army;" while Pitt called him "a character of ancient times; a complete model of military virtue." This young nobleman, then in his thirty-fourth year, was Viscount George Augustus Howe, in the Irish peerage, the oldest of the three famous Howe brothers who took part in the American wars. The army, Parkman says, "felt him from General to drummer-boy." In that army were also two future famous men, Israel Putnam and John Stark.