Ticonderoga Essex New York United States

The British army begins an unopposed landing at the north end of Lake George on the morning of July 6.

Abercrombie first lands an advance force to check the area where the forces were to disembark, and finds it recently deserted; some supplies and equipment had been left behind by the French in their hasty departure.

The bulk of the army lands, forms into columns, and attempts to march up the west side of the stream that connects Lake George to Lake Champlain, rather than along the portage trail, whose bridges Montcalm had destroyed.

However, the wood is very thick, and the columns cannot be maintained.

Pitt had wanted George Howe, rather than Abercrombie, in command of the assault on Fort Carilllon, but Abercrombie has more political contacts and seniority, so Howe has been made second-in-command.

Abercrombie's force marches north from the shore of Lake George in four columns.

General Howe leads one of these columns, with the 55th regiment accompanied by a unit of Connecticut militia, with Major Israel Putnam as a scout and guide.

Near the area where Bernetz Brook enters the La Chute, Captain Trépezet and his troop, who are attempting to return to the French lines, encounter Phineas Lyman's Connecticut regiment, sparking a skirmish in the woods.

General Howe's column is near the action, so he leads it in that direction.

A column of Massachusetts provincials, also drawn to the battle, cut off the French patrol's rear.

In desperate fighting, about one hundred and fifty of Trepézet's men are killed, and another one hundred and forty-eight are captured.

Fifty men, including Trepézet, escape by swimming across the La Chute.

Trepézet will die the next day of wounds suffered in the battle.

The British fight well, taking one hundred and forty-eight prisoners, and causing an estimated three hundred enemy casualties with limited losses to their own number, but one of those casualties is General Howe, who, killed almost instantly by a musket ball, dies in Putnam's arms.

Sources disagree on the number of casualties suffered.

William Nester claims British casualties were light, only ten dead and six wounded, while Rene Chartrand claims that there were about one hundred killed and wounded, including the loss of General Howe.

The British, frustrated by the difficult woods, demoralized by Howe's death, and exhausted from the overnight boat ride, camp in the woods, and will return to the landing point early the next morning.

Howe will be widely mourned on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Massachusetts Assembly (or general court) will later vote two hundred and fifty pounds to place a monument in Westminster Abbey, something for which Howe's brothers will express extreme gratitude.

Abercrombie sends Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet and a sizable force down the portage path on July 7.

On reaching the first crossing, where Bourlamaque had camped, they rebuild the bridge there, and proceed on to the sawmill crossing.

The army follows, and sets up its camp there.

Scouts and prisoners report to Abercrombie that Montcalm has six thousand men and is expecting the Chevalier de Lévis to arrive at any moment with three thousand reinforcements.

Abercrombie orders his engineer, Lieutenant Matthew Clerk, and one of his aides, Captain James Abercrombie (it is uncertain if the Abercrombies were related or not) to reconnoiter the French defenses.

After ascending Rattlesnake Hill (as Mount Defiance is known at this time), they report that the French position appears to be incomplete.

They are unaware that the French have disguised much of the works with shrubs and trees, and that they are in fact largely complete.

Clerk's report includes recommendations to fortify both the summit and the base of Rattlesnake Hill.

Abercrombie decides that they have to attack the next morning before Lévis and his supposed three thousand arrive.

Lévis arrives at the fort on the evening of July 7 with his troop of four hundred regulars.

Abercrombie holds a war council in the evening.

The options he presents to his staff are limited to asking if the next day's attack should be in three ranks or four; the council opts for three.

Abercrombie's plan of attack omits Clerk's recommendation to fortify the summit of Rattlesnake Hill; in addition to the frontal assault, four six-pound guns and a howitzer are to be floated down the La Chute River and mounted at the base of Rattlesnake Hill, with twenty bateaux of troops to support the effort.

The French and Indian War, which had started in 1754 over territorial disputes in what are now western Pennsylvania and upstate New York, had finally turned in the favor of the British in 1758 following a string of defeats in 1756 and 1757.

The British had been successful in capturing Louisbourg and Fort Frontenac in 1758.

The only significant French victory in 1758 had come when a large British army commanded by James Abercrombie was defeated by a smaller French force in the Battle of Carillon.

During the winter, French commanders withdraw most of the garrison from Fort Carillon (called Ticonderoga by the British) to defend Quebec City, Montreal and French-controlled forts on the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River.

Carillon, located near the southern end of Lake Champlain, occupies a place that was strategic in importance even before Samuel de Champlain discovered it in 1609, controlling access to a key portage trail between Champlain and Lake George along the main travel route between the Hudson River valley and the Saint Lawrence River.

When the war began, the area was part of the frontier between the British province of New York and the French province of Canada, and the British had stopped French advances further south in the 1755 Battle of Lake George.

Montcalm has decided to focus French manpower on defending the core territory of Canada: Montreal, the city of Quebec, and the Saint Lawrence River Valley.

He places three thousand troops from the la Reine and Berry regiments under Brigadier General François-Charles de Bourlamaque for the defense south of Montreal, of which around twenty-three hundred are assigned to Fort Carillon.

He knows (after his own experience in the previous year's battle there) that this force is too small to hold Carillon against a determined British attack by competent leaders.

Instructions from Montcalm and New France's governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, to de Bourlamaque are to hold Carillon as long as possible, then to destroy it, as well as the nearby Fort St. Frédéric, before retreating toward Montreal.

When Amherst's troops land and begin advancing on the fort, he is pleased to learn that the French have abandoned the outer defenses.

He still proceeds with caution, occupying the old French lines from the 1758 battle on July 22, amid reports that the French are actively loading bateaux at the fort.

His original plan had been to flank the fort, denying the road to Fort St. Frédéric as a means of French escape.

In the absence of French resistance outside the fort, he decides instead to focus his attention on the fort itself.

The British entrench for the next three days and begin laying siege lines to establish positions near the fort.

This work is complicated by the fact there is little diggable ground near the fort, and sandbags are required to protect the siege works.

During this time, the French gun batteries fire, at times quite heavily, on the British positions.

On July 25, a detachment of Rogers' Rangers launches some boats onto the lake north of the fort and cut a log boom the French had placed to prevent ships from moving further north on the lake.

By July 26, the British have pulled artillery to within six hundred feet (one hundred and eighty meters) of the fort's walls.

Bourlamaque had withdrawn with all but four hundred of his men to Fort St. Frédéric as soon as he learned that the British were approaching.

The cannon fire by this small force kills five and wounds another thirty-one of the besieging British.

Captain Louis-Philippe Le Dossu d'Hébécourt, who has been left in command of the fort, judges on the evening of July 26 that it is time to leave.

His men aim the fort's guns at its walls, lay mines, and put down a powder trail to the overstocked powder magazine.

They then light the fuse and abandon the fort, leaving the French flag flying.

The British are notified of this action by the arrival of French deserters.

General Amherst offers one hundred guineas to any man willing to enter the works to find and douse the fuse; but no one is willing to take up the offer.

The entire works goes off late that evening with a tremendous roar.

The powder magazine is destroyed, and a number of wooden structures catch fire due to flying embers, but the fort's walls are not badly damaged.

After the explosion, some of Gage's light infantry rush into the fort and retrieve the French flag.

Fires in the fort will not be entirely extinguished for two days.

The British begin occupying the fort the next day.

In one consequence of the French forces' hasty departure from Carillon, one of their scouting parties returns to the fort, believing it to still be in French hands; forty men are taken prisoner.

Amherst, worried that Bourlamaque's retreat might be leading him into a trap, has spent August and September overseeing the construction of a small navy, Fort Crown Point (a new fort next to the ruins of Fort St. Frédéric), and supply roads to the area from New England.

Amherst's army begins on October 11 to sail and row north on Lake Champlain to attack Bourlamaque's position at the Île-aux-Noix in the Richelieu River.

Over the next two days, one of the French ships is captured; the French abandon and burn the others to prevent their capture.

He receives word of Quebec's fall on October 18.

As there is an "appearance of winter" (parts of the lake are beginning to freeze), and provincial militia enlistments are set to end on November 1, Amherst calls off his attack, dismisses his militia forces, and returns the army to winter quarters.
 
The British definitively gain control of Canada with the surrender of Montreal in 1760.

The fort, which had always been called Ticonderoga by the British (after the place where the fort is located), will be held by them through the end of the French and Indian War.

Following that war, it will be manned by small garrisons until 1775, when it will be captured by American militia early in the American Revolutionary War.

General Horatio Gates, given command of the Continental Army's northern forces in early July, had promptly moved the bulk of the army to Ticonderoga, leaving a force of about three hundred at Crown Point.

The army has been busied improving the defenses at Ticonderoga, while Arnold has been given the task of building up the American fleet at Crown Point.

Throughout the summer, reinforcements have poured into Ticonderoga, until the army is estimated to be ten thousand strong.

A smaller army of shipwrights has labored at Skenesborough (present-day Whitehall) to build the ships needed to defend the lake.

Carleton had begun to move on October 7.