In the evening exciting news was brought them from Schenectady. A battle had been fought between a party of Canadian Indians and the militia and villagers just beyond Schenectady, in which twenty whites had been killed and a number taken prisoners. The drums at once beat to quarters, and Captain Chew with one hundred militiamen and two hundred of the Indians, told off from those in convention, marched at once in pursuit. The Indians from Albany expected to head off the raiders, and hence went along the usual trails to Canada; but this time the Canada savages had retreated along the Sacandaga road and creek, “by a different road from what they used to go,” as Onnasdego, an Onondaga sachem, said to Clinton in his oration a few days afterward. Johnson remained in Albany attending to his horde of guests; while Captain Chew and his band made vain pursuit. On the 22d, the day of the opening of the council, he received a letter from Albert Van Slyck, dated “Schonaictaiday, July 21st, 1749,” giving a brief detail of the bloody affray. Van Slyck was an honest Dutch farmer, whose defective powers in English composition were in contrast with his courage; and his Dutch-English account is difficult to make certain sense of, especially in its blotted, time-stained, and torn condition in the Johnson manuscripts at Albany; but, except some entries in the family Bibles of people in or near the town, this is the only known contemporaneous writing by one who was in the fight. It is not mentioned even in Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” nor in the colonial or more recent histories, except Drake’s, though sometimes referred to inaccurately. Further, it was difficult, until 1752, for an intelligent Hollander or American of Holland descent, whose ancestors since 1581 had adopted the calendar of Christendom to keep the run of English chronology, which was eleven days behind the rest of the world. For over a century and a half, England was very much in the condition of Russia of the present day, as compared with the rest of Europe. The English used “the old style,” or the calendar of Julius Cæsar, while the continental nations made use of the modern or Gregorian calendar. It may be that this explains why Van Slyck dated his letter one year ahead, 1749, instead of 1748. Van Slyck’s letter describes an event which for a generation formed a leading topic at the evening firesides of the people of Schenectady, and of many in Connecticut. The tremendous loss in men, chiefly heads of families, that fell upon this frontier town is almost unknown to history; yet the fight at Beechdale was one of the most stubbornly contested little battles of the Old French War. Instead of being “an autumnal foray” upon a party of woodmen, it was a stand-up, hand-to-hand fight by the Schenectady men against savages who were consummate ambuscaders, and well versed in all the arts of woodcraft and the tricks most likely to confound raw militiamen.