The great campaigns of 1759 were planned by the new commander-in-chief, Sir Jeffrey Amherst. The Niagara attack was placed in the hands of General John Prideaux, who was ready to sail from Oswego to his death at Fort Niagara on the 1st of July, 1759, with twenty-two hundred regulars and provincials and seven hundred of the Six Nations, brought very quickly to their senses after the successes of British arms in the year previous when Fort Duquesne was captured, under Sir William Johnson. On the 6th of July a hunter brought word to Pouchot that the English were at the doors of Niagara, the army having landed down the shore of the lake at a distance of four miles. The commander, realising that the crucial moment had come, sent a messenger post-haste to Little Fort Niagara, at the upper end of the portage, and on to the forts in the West for aid; Niagara had assisted Fort Duquesne and the Allegheny forts in their days of trial and it was now turn for them to help her. Little Fort Niagara, or, more properly, Fort du Portage, previously mentioned, was erected probably about ten years before this to defend the portage landing. It was now commanded by the Joncaire--son of the famous French emissary among the Senecas who had given New France a foothold at Niagara--who had proved such a diplomatic guide to Celoron in his western trip; Pouchot ordered him to move the supplies at Fort du Portage across to the mouth of the Chippewa Creek and hasten to Fort Niagara. It is worth while to pause a moment to observe that we have here one of the first references to that shadowy western shore of the Niagara, where Forts Erie, George, and Mississauga were soon to appear; though the town of Newark, or Niagara-on-the-Lake, as it is known to-day, was the first settlement on this side of the river, it is clear that there was at least a storehouse at Chippewa Creek in 1759; unquestionably the portage path on the western shore of the river was a well-worn highway long before even Fort Niagara itself was proposed, for we know that it was the northern shore of Lake Erie that was the common route of the French rather than the southern from the record left by the Celoron expedition and Bonnecamp's map. [Illustration: A Sketch of Fort Niagara and Environs; by the French Commander Pouchot, Showing Improvements of 1756-1758.]