“Our armament here was a great curiosity.”

A couple of Boston 1775 readers have asked me whether Col. Henry Knox took any precautions to hide the artillery he moved from New York to eastern Massachusetts in 1775-76. Did he guard against Loyalists or British spies watching those cannon?

I’ve seen no indication in Knox’s or Gen. George Washington’s papers that they worried about secrecy on this mission. At that time the American cause was very popular in the New England and northern New York countryside. Few people had experienced serious deprivations from the war, the British forces were almost all confined to Boston and Québec, and drastic steps like declaring independence and allying with the French Empire were off in the future.

Furthermore, western Massachusetts was especially radical. The farmers there had been the first in the province to close their courts in 1774 to protest the Massachusetts Government Act, and they kept them closed through the whole war. Local friends of the Crown had decamped for Boston or were keeping quiet.

Even if Loyalists did see the cannon on the move, it’s unclear what they could have done with that information. They would have had to carry the news through the winter landscape and across the siege lines into Boston, or up to Québec, or perhaps to Newport. The British garrison in Boston was already holding out against some cannon; would more old guns really make a difference?

Young teamster John P. Becker’s reminiscence indicates that, far from keeping their cargo secret, Knox’s men welcomed attention in the towns along the way. About Albany, for example, Becker recalled: “Our appearance excited the attention of the Burghers.”

And in Westfield:

We then reached Westfield, Massachusetts, and were much amused with what seemed the quaintness and honest simplicity of the people. Our armament here was a great curiosity. We found that very few, even among the oldest inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon. They were never tired of examining our desperate “big shooting irons,” and guessing how many tons they weighed; others of the scientific order, were measuring the dimensions of their muzzles, and the circumference at the breach. The handles, as they styled the trunnions, were reckoned rather too short, but they considered on the whole, that the guns must be pretty nice things at a long shot.

We were great gainers by this curiosity, for while they were employed in remarking upon our guns, we were, with equal pleasure, discussing the qualities of their cider and whiskey. These were generously brought out in great profusion, saying they would be darned, if it was not their treat.

One old mortar, well known during the revolution, as the old sow, and which not many years since, was the subject of eulogy on the floor of our own Legislature, by no less a personage than Gen. [Erastus] Root, was actually fired several times by the people of Westfield, for the novel pleasure of listening to its deep toned thunders.

Col. Knox was surrounded by visitors at the inn that evening. And the introductions that took place gave to his acquaintance, hosts of militia officers of every rank and degree. Every man seemed to be an officer. What a pity, said Colonel Knox to some of us who stood near him, what a pity it is that our soldiers are not as numerous as our officers.

That sounds like Knox, but it doesn’t sound like he was trying to keep stuff quiet.

As for Becker’s memory of the “old sow,” he might have mixed up a big mortar that Knox brought east with the big mortar of that nickname that Gen. Richard Montgomery was using in the invasion of Canada at the same time. Or there might have been two “old sows.”

TOMORROW: Col. Knox and Gen. Washington.

[The photograph above shows the Henry Knox Trail monument in the center of Westfield (look on the lower right side). The big stately building was a post office but is now a restaurant. The photograph, by Henry W. Ohlhous, comes courtesy of the Historical Marker Database.]

“A heavy plunge to the bottom of the stream”

In 1833, John P. Becker looked back on his experience as a eleven-year-old helping his father haul heavy cannon for Col. Henry Knox in a book called The Sexagenary. In particular, Becker remembered a frightening moment crossing the Hudson River at Lansing’s or Half Moon Ferry north of Albany:

As the ice was not uncommonly strong, some precautions were taken to get across with safety. The method adopted was this: A rope forty feet long was fastened to the tongue of the sleigh, and the other end was attached to the horses. The first gun was started across in this way, and my father walked along aside the horses with a sharp hatchet in his hand, to cut the rope, if the cannon and sled should break through.

In the centre of the river the ice gave way, as had been feared, and a noble 18 [pounder] sank with a crackling noise, and then a heavy plunge to the bottom of the stream. With a desperate hope of overcoming its downward tendency, and just as the cracking of the ice gave the alarm, the horses were whipped up into a full jump, but to no purpose. The gun sank, fortunately not in very deep water.

The horses kept their feet, and the rope was used to secure a buoy over the place where the cannon was lying, and afterwards materially aided its recovery. In this dilemma, we had no alternative but to abandon the idea of getting on the east side of the Hudson. It began to rain, the weather was changing, and we were forced to retrace our steps in some measure, and seek a passage across the Mohawk.

The men managed to pull that cannon out of the water. But a few days later, another heavy gun broke through the ice east of Albany. Becker didn’t mention that one, so I suspect he and his father had gone ahead.

Col. Knox wrote in his journal for 8 Jan 1776:

Went on the Ice about 8 o’clock in the morning & proceeded so cautiously that before night we got over three sleds & were so lucky as to get the Cannon out of the River, owing to the assistance the good people of the City of Albany gave, in return for which we christen’d her—The Albany.

Knox pressed on. By 11 January, as I quoted two days ago, he found the lead teams stopped in Blandford, Massachusetts. The teamsters “refus’d going any further, on accot. that there was no snow beyond five or six miles further.” Once again, Col. Knox’s biggest problem in hauling heavy guns to the siege lines wasn’t a harsh winter but a mild one.

TOMORROW: Spectators along the way.

[Image above of the historical marker noting Knox’s journey through Alford, Massachusetts, from M. McCormack’s Who’s Henry Knox? blog.]

Knox’s Oxen

Still on the broad topic of Henry Knox, Derek W. Beck has shared news of his article “No Ox for Knox?” in the July/August issue of American Revolution magazine. He writes:

My “No Ox for Knox?” article questions the famous story of Col. Henry Knox leading a team of ox-drawn sleds laden with artillery through the snowy mountains of western Massachusetts. This story is a staple of both history books and the American subconscious, and has been immortalized in at least two artworks. . . . But could it be wrong? Read the article to see my argument that Knox had no oxen after all.

I haven’t seen the magazine yet, but I assume that Derek focuses on the particular leg of Knox’s trek from Lake Champlain to Cambridge in the winter of 1775-76.

The colonel definitely used oxen to move the heavy guns south from Fort Ticonderoga, as shown by a receipt that the New England Historic and Genealogical Register published in 1876:

Recd. of Henry Knox twenty six dollars which Capt. John Johnson paid to different Carters for the use of their Cattle, in dragging Cannon from The Fort of Ticonderoga to the North Landing of Lake George

The heavy guns were then floated down the lake. Knox planned to use more oxen for the overland journey, as he wrote in his journal in mid-December (published at the same time):

I sent an Express to Squire [George] Palmer of Stillwater to prepare a number of Sleds & oxen to drag the Cannon presuming that we should get there, & on Wednesday the 13th he came up & agreed to provide the necessary number of sleds & oxen & they to be ready by the first snow.

17 December Knox wrote to Gen. George Washington about having “provided 80 yoke of oxen to drag them as far as Springfield where I shall get fresh cattle to carry them to camp.”

But then on 28 December, Knox recorded that Palmer and Gen. Philip Schuyler were still at odds on the price for those ox teams. Instead, the next day Schuyler “Sent out his Waggon Master & other people to all parts of the Country to immediately send up their slays with horses suitable.” Thereafter Knox’s journal mentions horses. John P. Becker’s memoir, The Sexagenary, briefly describes the ensuing trek from the perspective of an eleven-year-old driver, son of the man who supplied most of those horses.

But then Knox’s train came to Blandford, Massachusetts, on the eastern edge of the Berkshire Mountains. On 11 Jan 1776 he wrote:

At Blanford we overtook the first division who had tarried here untill we came up, and refus’d going any further, on accot. that there was no snow beyond five or six miles further in which space there was the tremendous Glasgow or Westfield mountain to go down. But after about three hours persuasion, I hiring two teams of oxen, they agreed to go.

Those teams are probably connected to the second receipt published with the journal:

Blanford Jany 13. 1776 Recd of Henry Knox eighteen shillings lawful money for Carrying a Cannon weighing 24C. 3 from this Town to Westfield being 11 Miles

That was signed by Solomon Brown (1737-1786). Above is his gravestone, courtesy of Find-a-Grave.

So Knox, contrary to his initial plans, didn’t need any oxen to get the cannon up the Massachusetts mountains, but he hired four to get them down. By then, the colonel was convinced of the value of horses. The Gilder-Lehrman Institute displays a 13 January letter in which Knox tells a colleague what to offer teamsters: “offer them 14/ York currency today for each Span of horses that is after they leave Springfield—After they get down the next Hill they will be able to travel much farther than Oxen.”

TOMORROW: Knox’s weather reports.