General Burgoyne came nearer Albany than did St. Leger. Indeed he went to Albany, but not until he had lost his army. He had promptly captured Ticonderoga on lake Champlain, and this success gave him high hopes and sent rejoicing throughout Great Britain; but the patriots, by felling trees and cutting away bridges, hindered his southward march in every way. He sent a thousand of his German soldiers across to Bennington, among the Green mountains, to capture stores which he knew were there. But General Stark was there also, with a little army from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and the thousand Hessians did not go back to help Burgoyne. He had left another thousand to guard Ticonderoga, and so he was two thousand short. All this time the patriot army was growing, for the men of the Hudson valley were maddened when they saw the bloodthirsty Indians marching with the English, and, to Burgoyne’s surprise, they had no mind to fight for the king. Howe did not come, St. Leger did not come, and the provisions were getting short. These could only come along the road from the north, and the colonists were already marching in behind Burgoyne’s army to cut his line of communications. He knew that he must fight or starve. He chose to fight. The battle was fought on Bemis Heights, a range of hills west of the Hudson, a short distance north of the little village of Stillwater. The British general, after his defeat, withdrew a few miles northward and surrendered his army near the present town of Schuylerville. A tall monument marks the place. This was the battle of Saratoga, fought in old Saratoga, which is several miles from the famous resort of that name. So it was that up and down these beautiful valleys went armies and scouting bands, as well as peaceful emigrants with their oxen, their stages, and their small freight boats. One cannot go far along the Hudson or the Mohawk without finding the site of an Indian village, the foundations of an old fort, the homestead of a Revolutionary hero, or an ancient place of worship. When we see the great railways and swift trains, the bundles of telegraph wires, the noisy cities and great mills of to-day, we can remember Philip Schuyler, Sir William Johnson, Marinus Willett, Peter Gansevoort, and Nicholas Herkimer. There were no nobler patriots, even in Virginia and Massachusetts, than these men of the Mohawk valley. CHAPTER IV THE ERIE CANAL