Sappers

I had a chapter in the original version called 'Sappers'. Sappers were trench diggers. It was a specialty. They worked in teams of five or so, and the first one had the job of breaking the soil. He was usually a small guy, and I pictured some Welsh digger. He got followed by others who dug deeper and wider. In preparation for trenching they would chop saplings and tree branches and weave them into baskets, and as they dug they threw the dirt into the baskets - fascines - and the dirt-filled baskets would be used to build up batteries, where the cannons were placed.
They would start hundreds of yards outside the fort, beyond cannon range, and dig towards the fort, mostly at night. The goal was to get close enough to the fort to roll in the artillery and blast the log walls with heavy cannons.
In the siege of 1759, Pouchot understood perfectly what was going to happen and it's widely written that he ordered his artillery to blaze away at the digging. He had sent a 'recall' message to the half of his army he'd sent away, and felt confident the siege would be lifted when these reinforcements arrived. In the meanwhile he had to slow the sappers down, and the best way to do that was try to collapse their trenches with cannon fire. They would rebuild, of course, but that would take time, and he was fighting for that time.
He began the siege with plenty of ordnance, and the British sappers were able to collect and sell back to the army some of these, which were ultimately fired back into the fort. In its way, early recycling.
I spent a long time creating a sapping team, and put in extensive details. The problem was that the chapter was largely surplus. A friend reading it said, it's good, but you don't need it.
Sigh. She was right. But I miss it.

The French Military Chest

This is the legend 'Where the Gold is Buried' is based on:
‘In the year 1789…there came as a Settler from the United States a man with a large family professing to be Quakers. .. Immediately on his arrival at the fort he waited upon the Commandant and informed him, that after the reduction of the French Garrison [in 1759]…a sick soldier, being unable to proceed, was received in his father’s house, where he was hospitably Entertained until his death. Shortly before that Event, the Frenchman gave them to understand that he was not ungrateful for the kindness he had experienced, but that he had no means to mark his sense of it except a small folded paper in a little pocket book, which might possibly turn out a prize to some of the children: in which hope he requested Jeremiah Sinclair to accept the pocket book.
It contained a folded paper on which was some writing in the French language understood by none of the family. After the death and burial of the Prisoner occasion was sought to ascertain the purport of the paper writing and it was found to be a memorandum of the burial of the French Military Chest, previous to the surrender of the Fort of Niagara. It stated that early in the day a fatigue party was ordered of which he, the Frenchman, was one – that it proceeded to the Flagstaff and opened the ground close to it as deep as they could, with their spades, threw the earth clear of the pit or well: that the Fort Adjutant with the Paymaster and Commandant attended with a large iron chest, which was carefully deposited on the bottom of the pit, before it was quite daylight. That as soon as it was left, the party began to cover it with the earth and had perhaps filled up about three feet, when a Battery opened upon the Fort and one of the first shots killed one of the laborers and precipitated the body into the pit, about seven feet below the surface; that the officer would not wait to get the body, but urged the filling in and making the surface of the ground even: that the capitulation taking place that day, the writer supposed that the chest remained, and that at the peace it might be a prize which would be well paid for.’
Ontario Historical Society papers. ‘The French Military Chest’.

Old Fort Niagara

Where the Gold is Buried is based on a legend of Old Fort Niagara. Visitors to the fort may see an exhibit on legends of the fort, including the ghost of a French soldier who fought another over an Indian maiden, and the legend of 'The French Military Chest'. As readers of Where the Gold is Buried will learn - or which they may already know - is that the French, in a panic over the loss of the fort in 1759, buried the regiment's valuables within the fort. The burial spot was marked by at least one soldier, a Hessian, and when the Hessians were released from military prison in 1783, the one with the map staggered as far as the farm of Jeremiah Moore's father.

More on this later.