During the withdrawal of the army from Canada, the services of Warner and his Green Mountain Boys again became conspicuous. Following in the rear, but little in advance of the pursuing enemy, he was chiefly employed in gathering up the sick and wounded. Some straggling in the woods, some sheltered in the garlick-reeking cabins of the least unfriendly habitants, he succeeded in bringing a great number of them to Isle aux Noix. Thence embarked, in leaky open boats, the wretched invalids voyaged to Crown Point, their misery mocked by the brightness of the June skies, the beauty of the shores clad in the luxuriant leafage of early summer, and the glitter of the sunlit waters. The condition of the broken army gathered at Crown Point was miserable in the extreme. More than half of the 5,200 men were sick, and those reported fit for duty were weak and half clad, broken in spirit and discipline. A few were in tents, some in poor sheds, while the greater part had only the shelter of bush huts. Colonel Trumbull says: "I did not look into a tent or hut in which I did not find either a dead or dying man." More than 300 new-made graves marked the brief tarry of the troops at Crown Point. Those whom Colonel Warner did not succeed in bringing off, and who fell into General Carleton's hands, were treated by him with the greatest kindness. So closed this unprofitable campaign, in whose prosecution such heroism had been expended in vain, such valuable lives wasted. Beginning with a series of successes, it ended in disaster, and was fortunate only in that it did not achieve the conquest of a province to hold which would have required the presence of an army that could ill be spared elsewhere,--a province which was chiefly peopled by a race alien in language and religion, too abject to strike for its own freedom, and so priest-ridden and steeped in ignorance that its incorporation with it could prove but a curse to the young republic. FOOTNOTES: [65] _Governor and Council_, vol. i. p. 6. [66] Allen's _Narrative_. [67] Williams, vol. ii. [68] Hall's _Early History of Vermont_. CHAPTER IX. LAKE CHAMPLAIN. General Gates having been appointed to the command of the northern army, General Sullivan resigned it to him on the 12th of July, receiving the thanks of his officers and the approval of Congress for the ability with which he had conducted the retreat. In conformity to the decision of a council of war, General Gates withdrew his troops from Crown Point, where not a cannon was mounted, to Ticonderoga, and began strengthening the works there and erecting new ones upon a hill on the opposite side of the lake. While this new work, a star fort, was in progress, news came of the Declaration of Independence, and in honor of the event the place was named Mount Independence. The smallpox patients were removed to a hospital at Fort George, and the recruits, now coming in considerable numbers, were assembled at Skenesborough.