[Footnote 74: "General Shirley's troops, after the attack on Niagara was relinquished in the autumn of the preceding year, had been employed in the erection of two new forts, one of them 450 yards from the old Fort Oswego, and bearing the same name, the other on the opposite side of the Onondaga River, to be called Fort Ontario. They were erected on the south side of Lake Ontario, at the mouth of the Onondaga, and constituted a port of great importance. The garrison, as we have already observed, consisted of 1400 men, chiefly militia and new-raised recruits, under the command of Colonel Mercer, an officer of experience and courage; but the situation of the forts was very ill chosen, the materials mostly timber or logs of wood, the defenses wretchedly continued and unfinished, and, in a word, the place altogether untenable against any regular approach."--Smollett's _History of England_, vol. iii., p. 535.] [Footnote 75: "Such an important magazine, deposited in a place altogether indefensible, and without the reach of immediate succor, was a flagrant proof of egregious folly, temerity, and misconduct."--Smollett's _Hist. of England_, vol. iii., p. 536.] [Footnote 76: _Ibid._, p. 535.] [Footnote 77: "Montcalm, in direct violation of the articles, as well as in contempt of common humanity, delivered up above twenty men of the garrison to the Indians, in lieu of the same number they had lost during the siege."--_Ibid._] [Footnote 78: "The negligence and dilatoriness of our governors at home,[85] and the little-minded quarrels of the regulars and irregular forces,[86] have reduced our affairs in that part of the world (America) to a most deplorable state. Oswego, of ten times more importance even than Minorca, is so annihilated that we can not learn the particulars."--Walpole's _Letters to Sir H. Mann_, Nov. 4, 1756.] [Footnote 79: "The massacre at Oswego happily proves a romance. Part of the two regiments[87] that were made prisoners there are actually arrived at Plymouth, the provisions at Quebec being too scanty to admit additional numbers."--Walpole's _Letters to Sir H. Mann_, Nov. 13, 1756.] [Footnote 80: Wood Creek was one of the streams that formed a nearly uninterrupted water communication between Albany, in New York, and the mouth of the River Onondaga, where Oswego was situated.] [Footnote 81: Crown Point, or Fort Frederic, and Ticonderoga, which had been lately fortified.]