Within only a few days, 230 Boys had arrived, as well as seventy volunteers from Connecticut and Massachusetts, and more were coming in every hour. Farmers and hunters, lawyers, bartenders, tavern owners, town clerks, a poet, even the odd Yale College graduate and a future congressman had arrived on the Champlain shore in their work clothes or in buckskin hunting shirts made by their wives, sisters, or mothers. They pelted down from their hill farms and from river towns to Hand’s Cove, where Allen had set up his headquarters in Paul Moore’s farmhouse. Allen was not only the leader of a clan that spanned Vermont and Connecticut but also the head at that moment of the largest armed force in North America.

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Only hours before the attack was scheduled to begin, Allen’s plans were almost wrecked by the arrival of Colonel Benedict Arnold of Connecticut, bearing a commission from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Arnold, all spit and polish, arrived in the scarlet uniform he had designed for the 2nd Company of Connecticut Footguards, which he had founded, armed, and bankrolled. He was a wealthy New Haven shipowner, ship’s captain, and smuggler of luxury goods.

Marching his militiamen to aid the Bostonians, Arnold had met Colonel Samuel Holden Parsons, head of Connecticut’s militia, on the road. Parsons, returning from Massachusetts, bemoaned the lack of artillery. Arnold, who had frequently visited the Champlain Valley as a horse trader and merchant, told Parsons about the hundreds of French cannons in the Champlain forts before marching on with his company toward Boston. A member of Connecticut’s Committee of Safety, Parsons had dashed to Hartford with this intelligence, triggering Allen’s expedition.

Now Arnold was insisting that Massachusetts had authorized him to seize the cannons and arrange to haul them to the makeshift lines taking shape around Boston. Without cannons, it would be impossible to stave off the expected British onslaught. Arnold demanded that Allen turn over command of the Green Mountain Boys and all other recruits to him.

The two men faced off in front of the Boys in a field at Shoreham on May 9. At first Allen, nearly a head taller than Arnold, seemed to cave in before Arnold’s ramrod-straight physical presence, but it was only an act. Allen knew that he had no more and no less legal authority than Arnold, but he also knew that the Green Mountain Boys around him, clutching their guns, would only follow his orders. He had successfully wielded de facto authority in the forests for five years, and he did not intend to relinquish it now.

In a loud, mocking voice, Allen announced that Colonel Arnold would henceforth command the Boys. If they followed Arnold, their pay would be the same $2 a day. His unusual tone sent a signal to his men. Without a word, they silently drifted to the edges of the clearing and stacked their guns. To a man, they refused to fight under anyone but the officers they had already elected. If they could not have Allen as their leader, they would club their muskets over their shoulders and march home. Arnold had no choice but to back down.

Allen’s demeanor suddenly changed. He now proposed a joint command, with Allen leading the Boys and any Connecticut troops, and Arnold commanding any soldiers who showed up from Massachusetts. As a token of reconciliation, Allen lent Arnold a short brass blunderbuss. The hair-triggered Arnold had ridden off to war without a gun.

By 5 a.m. the next morning, scabbards clanging against each other’s, Allen and Arnold had jumped out of the crowded boats onto the New York shore just north of Willow Point, scarcely a quarter mile from Fort Ticonderoga. Years later, in his best-selling memoir A Narrative of the Captivity of Colonel Allen, Allen would claim that just after coming ashore he had halted long enough to inspire his men with a speech. The plan “concerted at Hartford,” he told them, was an “important expedition…to provide us a key to all Canada.” But Allen would have had little chance to deliver an oration at that point. Any speech loud enough to be heard by his strung-out column would have alerted a British sentry just a musket shot away.

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