ber day in 1755 to check Dieskau
until Fort William Henry could be completed. In the action that ensued,
Colonel Williams, founder of Williams College, and Captain Grant, of the
Connecticut line, great-grandfather of the President who bore that name,
were killed. The victims, dead and wounded alike, having been flung into
Bloody Pond, it was thick and red for days, and tradition said that in
after years it resumed its hue of crimson at sunset and held it until
dawn. The captured, who were delivered to the Indians, had little to
hope, for their white allies could not stay their savagery. Blind Rock
was so called because the Indians brought a white man there, and tearing
his eyes out, flung them into embers at the foot of the stone. Captives
were habitually tortured, blazing splinters of pine being thrust into
their flesh, their nails torn out, and their bodies slashed with knives
before they went to the stake. An English prisoner was allowed to run the
gauntlet here. They had already begun to strike at him as he sped between
the lines, when he seized a pappoose, flung it on a fire, and, in the
instant of confusion that followed, snatched an axe, cut the bonds of a
comrade who had been doomed to die, and both escaped.

But the best-known history of this region is that of Rogers's Rock, or
Rogers's Slide, a lofty precipice at the lower end of Lake George. Major
Rogers did not toboggan down this rock in leather trousers, but his
escape was no less remarkable than if he had. On March 13, 1758, while
reconnoitring near Ticonderoga with two hundred rangers, he was surprised
by a force of French and Indians. But seventeen of his men escaped death
or capture, and he was pursued nearly to the brink of this cliff. During
a brief delay among the red men, arising from the loss of his trail, he
had time to throw his pack down the slide, reverse his snow-shoes, and go
back over his own track to the head of a ravine before they emerged from
the woods, and, seeing that his shoe-marks led to the rock, while none
pointed back, they concluded that he had flung himself off and committed
suicide to avoid capture. Great was their disappointment when they saw
the major on the frozen surface of the lake beneath going at a lively
rate toward Fort William Henry. He had gained the ice by way of the cleft
in the rocks, but the savages, believing that he had leaped over the
precipice, attributed his preservation to the Great Spirit and forbore to
fir