Scientists Found Out What Really Happened Inside The Last of the Mohicans Fort

In August 1757, after six days of bombardment, the British garrison of Fort William Henry surrendered on Lake George. The next morning, as the column marched out under a promise of safe conduct, French-allied warriors attacked. Early chroniclers claimed as many as 1,500 dead, and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans fixed that massacre in American memory for two centuries. But when historian Ian Steele traced the column regiment by regiment, he counted between 69 and 184 dead and missing, a fraction of the legend. Then the bones came out of the ground. Five men from a mass grave beneath a barracks floor, displayed to tourists for forty years in a room the fort called “the crypt”, turned out to be sick and wounded soldiers who could not walk, killed with axes and knives after the fort changed hands. In 1993 the fort held a public reburial before tribal leaders and British dignitaries, yet twelve of the fifteen skeletons never went into the ground. One of them, buried in a British uniform, turned out to be a Native American man from the far western Plains. This video follows the archives, the forensic evidence and the hidden graves of the real Last of the Mohicans fort, down to the parking lot where the remaining answers still lie unexamined. Video Timestamps: 0:00: The Last of the Mohicans Fort 0:52: The Siege of 1757 2:20: The Massacre 3:06: Counting the Dead 4:01: The Smallpox Blankets 4:42: The Barracks Mass Grave 6:07: What the Bones Revealed 7:33: The 1993 Reburial 9:22: Burial 14 10:54: The Parking Lot Graves Scientific and Historical Insights: - Historical Reconstruction: Ian Steele’s Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (Oxford University Press, 1990) traced the surrendered garrison through surviving records and put British dead and missing among the prisoners at between 69 and 184, at most 8% of those who surrendered, against early claims of up to 1,500. - Skeletal Trauma Analysis: Maria Liston and Brenda Baker’s 1996 study in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology examined five men from a mass grave beneath the east barracks. Four had leg injuries that would have prevented them walking, one had a recent surgical amputation, and all five carried axe and knife marks. One man had been beheaded. The authors concluded the historical accounts of mutilation were, if anything, understatements. - Disease and the Cemetery: Several hundred of the garrison were already sick during the siege, some with smallpox. After the surrender, graves in the fort’s cemetery were opened and clothing and blankets taken from the dead, and smallpox subsequently spread into Native communities in Canada. - Ancient DNA and Isotope Analysis: In 2012, forensic anthropologist Michelle Hamilton of Texas State University and colleagues examined Burial 14, a man buried in a British uniform. DNA from a tooth root identified him as Native American, and carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis placed his childhood roughly two thousand miles to the west, most likely among a Plains nation. - The Unexcavated Cemetery: Archaeologist David Starbuck, who excavated the fort between 1997 and 2004, estimated that hundreds of skeletons may still lie beneath the fort’s modern parking lot. The cemetery has never been systematically excavated, ground-penetrating radar has not been permitted there, and the site of the massacre itself has never been found.