EXPLORING THE GREAT WARPATH
On a bluff above the southern shore of the picturesque Lake George stands a small granite memorial. A bronze plaque commemorates the burial of four soldiers who died nearby during the 1755 Battle of Lake George, an early skirmish in the French and Indian War, which pitted British forces against the French and their Native American allies. The men’s remains had been unexpectedly disturbed during road construction in the 1930s, and were eventually reinterred in their present location beneath the monument. They are believed to be the oldest unknown American soldiers in the United States.
This grim discovery is not altogeth er unusual for this region. There are many forgotten graves here, vestiges of a time when tens of thousands of soldiers roamed, fought, and died in these woods. “Given the long history of intense military activity here, I would expect that many additional unknown burials remain undiscovered in the area,” says Charles Vandrei, historic preservation officer with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation. The sporadic encounters with fallen soldiers are reminders of a contentious chapter in North American history, when this frontier region was the chessboard on which two European superpowers played a bloody game that would determine the destiny of a continent.
Although today this section of upstate New York is bustling with throngs of summer tourists, 250 years ago it was harsh wilderness covered by tangled forests, marshy wetlands, and otherwise inhospitable terrain. It was also critically strategic territory, as it comprised a kind of no-man’s-land between French possessions in Canada
