Bunker Hill

Ticonderoga at the western edge of New England, on the southern end of Lake Champlain. After a journey of more than three hundred miles over the ice and snow, the Knox brothers and a primarily horse-drawn train of forty-two sledges bearing fifty-nine iron and brass cannons, howitzers, and mortars—more than sixty tons of artillery—were about to arrive in Framingham.
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    At first they had prayed for warm weather. The plan was to transport the armaments by boat from the northern tip of Lake George (only a few miles from Fort Ticonderoga) to Fort George on the lake’s southern end—a distance of about thirty-two miles. As soon as they began rowing the guns down the lake in early December, contrary winds and dropping temperatures slowed their progress, forcing them at some points to hack their way through the newly formed ice. Knox decided to push ahead of what he called his “little fleet” so that he could make preparations for the guns’ arrival at Fort George. As evening approached on December 10, he and his boat crew were making good progress down the lake, but “knowing [the men] to be exceedingly weary,” he decided it was time he allowed them to go ashore to rest. Using “very large quantities of dry wood ready cut,” they made a roaring fire. “We warmed ourselves sufficiently,” Knox recorded in his diary, “and took a comfortable nap—laying with our feet to the fire.” About a half hour before daylight, they set out once again, and after more than six hours “of excessive hard pulling against a fresh head breeze,” they finally arrived at Fort George.
    One of the scows fetched up on a rock and filled with water, but eventually all the deeply laden boats reached Fort George. Knox had made arrangements to build a group of “exceeding strong sleds” for the intended journey south over the frozen Hudson River to Albany, where they would begin to make their way east across the breadth of Massachusetts. On December 17 he wrote Washington that he hoped for “a fine fall of snow, which will enable us to proceed further and make the carriage easy. If that shall be the case I hope in 16 or 17 days’ time to be able to present to your Excellency a noble train of artillery.”

    But it was not to be. On December 28, the man who was to provide him with sleds walked off in a huff after General Philip Schuyler complained that he was charging too much for his services. Knox took some consolation in knowing that it had actually snowed too much for his cannons to have begun their journey, since the heaping drifts made it impossible for the horses and oxen to make any headway. As his brother remained at Fort George waiting for the sleds to be provided by another source, Knox ventured ahead to the Hudson River, where he took steps to strengthen the ice in anticipation of the cannons’ arrival, “getting holes cut in the different crossing places in the river” so that water flowed up through the holes and, upon freezing, added to the thickness of the ice.
    Soon they had the sleds they needed, and the cannons had begun to make their way south toward the Hudson from Fort George. But now there was a different problem. From Albany on January 5, Knox wrote Washington,
    I was in hopes that we should have been able to have had the cannon at Cambridge by this time. The want of snow detained us some days, and now a cruel thaw hinders from crossing Hudson River, which we are obliged to do four times from Lake George to this town. The first severe night will make the ice on the river sufficiently strong, till that happens the cannon and mortars must remain where they are. . . . These inevitable delays pain me exceedingly, as my mind is fully sensible of the importance of the greatest expedition in this case. . . . My utmost endeavors have been and still shall be used to forward them with the utmost dispatch.
    Logistical practicalities required Knox to break up his caravan into several smaller groups of sleds, and in early January a sled bearing one of the largest of his cannons broke through the ice of the Hudson River. After successfully getting most of the other sleds across the river, Knox was able to save “the drowned cannon” with the help of the local citizenry, and from that day forward the piece of artillery was known as “The Albany.”
    Crossing and recrossing the Hudson had proven difficult, but the hills and mountains of western and central Massachusetts were just as