Moreover, a successful attack on Ticonderoga would be a great psychological victory. Three thousand British soldiers had fallen in an abortive attack on the French-built Fort Carillon, as it was then known, in 1758, when four thousand Frenchmen held out against five times their number. Now only forty-six British soldiers under two officers were sleeping peacefully less than a mile from Allen’s growing force.

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Even without reinforcements from Montreal, if Allen’s surprise attack failed, the veteran British detachment inside the heavily armed fort could be expected to put up a fight. If they could hold out until several hundred more regulars arrived from Montreal, capturing Fort Ticonderoga and its heavy guns would be virtually impossible. It was these weapons, scores of fine brass cannons on the fortress’ ramparts and even more reputedly buried at Crown Point by the retreating French at the end of the French and Indian War, that made Ticonderoga such a prize.

Seizing this arsenal could make a key difference in the American confrontation with the British forces in Boston. If Allen and his backwoods Boys succeeded, they would be renowned for turning the tide against the British. If they failed, they would likely be shipped off to England in irons to be tried for treason, hanged, and drawn and quartered.

For Allen, crossing Lake Champlain into New York was an especially bold move. Master of New England’s first successful iron foundry, which would produce cannons for the Americans throughout the Revolution, Allen had become legendary as a professional hunter. He was also the senior partner in the Onion River Land Company, which owned and was developing thousands of acres of rich hardwood forests. Allen would eventually be known as the founding father of the fourteenth state, Vermont, the first independent republic in the New World.

When he crossed Lake Champlain, however, Allen was crossing his own personal Rubicon. For a dozen years, he had worked hard to organize the settlers who had flocked into the Green Mountains from the south. Their claim was that the recently vacated French territory existed in a state of nature. It was they, and not New York’s absentee landlords, who really owned all the land in present-day Vermont, having bought the land patents from New Hampshire. Because of his armed defiance, Allen carried a price on his head in New York. When he arrived on the New York shore, Allen was risking arrest and punishment by the province’s royal government. Anyone who captured him would receive a fortune in gold. If he was captured inside New York, he faced summary execution by hanging, without a trial.

But when Allen heard the news from Lexington and Concord, he shrewdly calculated that a dozen years of claims, counterclaims, and armed clashes between neighboring colonies over land ownership would, at this exciting moment, be subsumed into a general American rebellion against every colony’s common oppressor, the mother country. Old rivals would become allies; old friends, enemies.

By sunset on May 9, three hundred men chafed at Hand’s Cove, anxiously waiting for boats to be rounded up by detachments Allen had sent north along the lake toward Crown Point and south to Skene’s plantation. But six hours later, as the wind whipped the lake into whitecaps, there still were no boats. A fierce storm lashed the lake half the night, nearly wrecking the expedition. When it died down there was barely enough time to ferry a fraction of the force over to the New York shore before daybreak.

What Allen wouldn’t learn for several days was that Captain Samuel Herick and the thirty men he’d sent to seize Skenesboro couldn’t find the schooner Allen was relying on because it was cruising a hundred miles farther up the lake, delivering grain and iron from the manor to the British garrison at St. John’s in Quebec province. Another detachment he’d dispatched to the north could only locate a single thirty-three-foot scow sailed by a terrified young black slave along the shore near Crown Point. Warner told the slave he wanted to pay him to take him and his men hunting.

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