III. PHYSICAL SETTING

A. Natural Features

5. General Character of Ground and Cover in Relation to Season of Year

Spring comes early to this region, and the deciduous trees would be in leaf.

The fields, between the fort and habitant coast, would be plowed and planted in wheat and corn. The corn would be about knee-high, the wheat 6 to 8 inches tall.

Nuttall, who visited the post in the fourth week of February 1819, reported: “After crossing this horrid morass, a delightful tract of high ground again occurs, over which the floods had never yet prevailed; here the fields of the French settlers were already of a vivid green.”[10]

Captain Rousseau, in February 1793, observed: “Below the fort there are about a dozen quite pretty houses [ or plots] of four by four arpents, where [sic] there are very beautiful fields of wheat on the highland.”[11]

Francois Perrin du Luc, who visited the post in 1803, wrote that the settlers “only cultivate maize for the support of their horses and beasts of burthen.”[12]

6. Weather and Time of Day

The attack took place on April 17, 1783, beginning under cover of darkness at 2:30 A.M. The event to be depicted, the sortie, took place at mid-morning, a little after 9 o’clock.[13]

Neither Dubreuil nor Malcom Clark, in their accounts of the raid, make any mention of the weather on April 17, so we do not know whether the day was clear or cloudy, fair or rainy.

B. Man-made Features

1. Relative Positions of Principal Features

a) Habitant Coast

According to Stanley Faye, the ten habitant families resided on the riverbank about half a mile below the post. Here they cultivated their fields. The habitant coast was a “rural suburb,” but was considered part of the post.[14]

As stated earlier in this section, Captain Rousseau in 1793 observed: “Below the fort there are about a dozen quite pretty houses [or plots] of four by four arpents, where [sic] there are very beautiful fields.”[15]

Nuttall, in 1819, reported: “after emerging out of the swamp, in which I found it necessary to wade about ankle deep, a prairie came in view, with scattering houses spreading over a narrow and elevated tract for about three miles parallel to the bend of the river.”[16]