For almost a year, in desultory fashion, the campaign against Canada dragged on, Carleton reoccupying and fortifying Montreal, Three Rivers, St. John's, and Chamby, then pushing up Champlain Lake in October of 1776, with three large vessels and ninety small ones. Between Valcour Island and the mainland he caught Benedict Arnold with the Congress boats on October 11, and succeeded in battering them to pieces before {310} Arnold could extricate them. As the boats sank, the American crews escaped ashore; but the English went no farther south than Crown Point this year. If Carleton had failed at Quebec, there can be no doubt Canada would have been permanently lost to England; for the following year France openly espoused the cause of Congress, and proclamations were secretly smuggled all through Canada to be posted on church doors, calling on Canadians to remain loyal to France. Curiously enough, it was Washington, the leader of the Americans, who checkmated this move. With a wisdom almost prophetic, he foresaw that if France helped the United States, and then demanded Canada as her reward, the old border warfare would be renewed with tenfold more terror. No longer would it be bushrover pitted against frontiersmen. It would be France against Congress, and Washington refused to give the aid of Congress to the scheme of France embroiling America in European wars. The story of how Clark, the American, won the Mississippi forts for Congress is not part of Canada's history, nor are the terrible border raids of Butler and Brant, the Mohawk, who sided with the English, and left the Wyoming valley south of the Iroquois Confederacy a blackened wilderness, and the homes of a thousand settlers smoking ruins. It is this last raid which gave the poet Campbell his theme in "Gertrude of Wyoming." By the Treaty of Versailles, in 1783, England acknowledged the independence of the United States, and Canada's area was shorn of her fairest territory by one fell swath. Instead of the Ohio being the southern boundary, the middle line of the Great Lakes divided Canada from her southern neighbor. The River Ste. Croix was to separate Maine from New Brunswick. The sole explanation of this loss to Canada was that the American commissioners knew their business and the value of the ceded territory, and the English commissioners did not. It is one of the many conspicuous examples of what loyalty has cost Canada. England is to give up the western posts to the United States, from Miami to Detroit and Michilimackinac and Grand Portage. In return the United States federal government is to recommend to the States {311} Governments that all property confiscated from Royalists during the war be restored. [Illustration: GENERAL HALDIMAND]