In two or three weeks the French garrison was reduced to the last extremity. The walls and defences were riddled with shot and broken through; more than a hundred of the defenders were killed or seriously wounded, and all were worn out with the strain of the constant defence day and night. Captain Pouchot still held out, for ever since the siege began he had been watching for expected assistance from the western posts. An army of thirteen hundred French and Indians had been gathered from the stations of the Illinois River and from Detroit, Michilimackinac, Le Bœuf, and Venango, to defend the Ohio Valley. As soon as Pouchot heard that the English were coming to attack Niagara he had sent a summons to the leaders of this force to come to his aid, and now he was daily and hourly expecting their arrival, together with the garrison of Fort Duquesne, which had abandoned that place on the approach of an English army under General Forbes. The western reënforcement was even now coming up Lake Erie under the leadership of two French generals. It was an oddly assorted force, such as no other time or place could have produced. A company of well-drilled colonial militia paddled their boats beside the canoes of a war-party of Indians who had been induced by traders to come from their distant homes to take part in the white men’s strife. Hardly less savage than the Indian warriors were the western traders and coureurs de bois, who had lived so long in Indian wigwams that they had adopted the dress, the war-paint, and the customs of their neighbors. All the members of this mixed company were alike, however, in one thing,--they were skilled in the warfare of the woods. From Lake Erie the fleet paddled past the site of Buffalo and down the swift-moving Niagara River around Grand Island, and, on the morning of July 24, 1759, the soldiers and Indians landed at the head of the portage path, a mile and a half above the falls. Here the French found the ruins of their Fort of the Portage, of Fort Little Niagara, a trading station which had been fortified in 1750. Joncaire, a son of the Joncaire who built the first trading house on the river, had occupied this post till recently, but had burned it at the approach of the British. The army made its way up over the rough seven-mile portage path and down over the rocks to the old French trading house. From here they proceeded cautiously along the bank of the river.