"The night previously to this ambuscade and slaughter, Putnam's Company of rangers having been to the lake to secure supplies, encamped at the flats near the southern spur of the French mountain. In the early morning they were aroused from their slumbers by the sound of heavy firing in a southerly direction, and rolling up their blankets they sprang to their arms and hastened rapidly forward to the scene of action, a distance of about four miles. They arrived only in time to find the slaughtered carcasses of some two hundred and fifty oxen, the mangled remains of the soldiers, women and teamsters, and the broken fragments of the two wheeled carts, which constituted in that primitive age the sole mode of inland transportation. "The provisions and stores had been plundered and destroyed. Among the supplies was a large number of boxes of chocolate which had been broken open and their contents strewed upon the ground, which dissolving in the fervid heat of the summer sun, mingled with the pools and rivulets of blood forming a sickening and revolting spectacle. The convoy had been ambushed and attacked immediately after leaving the protection of the stockade post, and the massacre took place upon the flats, between the Half-Way Brook, and the Blind rock, or what is more commonly known at the present day as the Miller place. "Putnam with his command, took the trail of the marauders, which soon became strewed with fragments of plunder dropped by the rapidly retreating savages, who succeeded in making their escape, with but little loss of life. The Provincials unable to catch up with the savages, returned immediately to the scene of the butchery, where they found a company from Fort Edward engaged in preparing a trench for the interment of the dead. "Over one hundred of the soldiers composing the escort were slain, many of whom were recognized as officers, from their uniforms, consisting in part of red velvet breeches. The corpses of twelve females were mingled with the dead bodies of the soldiery. All the teamsters were supposed to have been killed. While the work of burial was going forward the rangers occupied themselves in searching the trails leading through the dense underbrush and tangled briars which covered the swampy plains. Several of the dead were by this means added to the already large number of the slain. On the side of one of these trails, the narrator of these events found the corpse of a woman which had been exposed to the most barbarous indignities and mutilations, and fastened in an upright position to a sapling which had been bent over for the purpose. All of the bodies had been scalped, and most of them mangled in a horrible manner.