the Canadian bands, aided them now with snowdrifts heaped to the top of the low ramparts about the garrison houses, and upon them the assailants made entrance. All the inhabitants were slain or captured, the village plundered and set on fire, and an hour after sunrise the victorious party was on its way to Canada with its booty and wretched captives.[5] Such warfare was waged for years, the French and Indians making frequent attacks on the most exposed settlements of the English, and they, at times, retaliating by invasions of the Canadian frontier. In 1709 another grand expedition was planned to operate against Canada in the same manner as that undertaken in 1690. But the troops, which under Nicholson were to advance by the way of Lake Champlain, got no farther than Wood Creek, where Winthrop's advance had ended nineteen years before, for while they were there awaiting the arrival at Boston of the English fleet, with which they were to cooperate, a terrible mortality[6] broke out among them, the fleet never came, and the undertaking was abandoned. In 1711 a still more formidable attempt was made to conquer Canada. But the fleet, commanded by Sir Hovenden Walker, with nine thousand troops on board, met with disaster in the St. Lawrence, and the land force, which again under Nicholson was to invade the French province by Lake Champlain, was not far beyond Albany when news of the fleet's disaster reached it and it was disbanded. Thus, as miserably as had the two preceding ones, this third attempt to conquer Canada failed, and a heavier cloud of humiliation and discouragement overcast the English colonies. But after the treaty of Utrecht the eastern Indians made a treaty of peace with the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire which gave some assurance of tranquillity to the long-suffering people of those provinces. FOOTNOTES: [1] The Indians themselves pronounce the word as here given. It signifies The White Land. It has been thought better to follow this, than the more common spelling, Abenaki, which has come to us from the French. [2] Wohjahose, signifying The Forbidder, is the Waubanakee name of Rock Dunder, which was supposed to be the guardian spirit of Petowbowk. Some dire calamity was certain to befall those who passed his abode without making some propitiatory offering. [3] Petowbowk, interpreted by some "Alternate Land and Water," by others, "The Water that Lies Between," is the Waubanakee name of Lake Champlain. [4] _Doc. Hist. N. Y._ vol. ii. p. 160. [5] White's _Incidents in the Early History of New England_. See _The Redeemed Captive returning to Zion_, by Rev. John Williams, who was one of the Deerfield captives. [6] In _Summary, Historical and Political_, by William Douglass, M. D., this is said to have been yellow fever. CHAPTER II. THE WILDERNESS DURING THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS.