We have one other glimpse of these impetuous Frenchmen widening this first portage path from the Great Lakes toward the Ohio. Samuel Shattuck was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1741. In 1752 he went from his native town on a ranging expedition and was at Fort Oswego when Marin's party went down Lake Ontario. An officer and five soldiers--one of whom was this eleven-year-old lad--were instantly sent out to watch the French squadron of canoes. They followed them to Niagara and into Lake Erie. An autobiographical story has been taken down by Dr. Taylor from the lips of Shattuck's grandson. Soon after passing Niagara, the story goes, the boats were lost to sight; "but we expected to overtake them easily, and in fact did so sooner than was agreeable to us as we came near discovering ourselves to the Indians that belonged to the expedition scattered through the woods. They had landed at the mouth of Chautauqua creek, as now called, and were already felling trees on the west side of the Creek, apparently for some sort of fortification. We were confident they had chosen this as a carrying place to some waterway south of the highlands.... From some cause not apparent to us there was a cessation of work, and after three or four days the whole of both parties, with the exception of a few Indians, embarked in their boats and moved westward." Young Shattuck went on with the party and remained near Presque Isle spying on the French movements until September, when his party returned to Oswego. In October--such was the anxiety of the English concerning this fort and road-building--the same scouts were sent back toward Presque Isle. In the meantime, as before stated, the French had started back for Niagara; landing at the Chautauqua portage to make a road. "On the seventh day out [from Oswego]," reads Shattuck's autobiographical story, "or near October 30th, as near as I remember, in the afternoon we came upon a party of nearly or quite a hundred Frenchmen rolling logs into a ravine in the bottom of a deep gulf, and digging into the steep sides of the gulf for a road, apparently, at a point that I now (1826) know to have been on the south border of the village of Westfield.... We came upon this party very suddenly and unexpectedly, for we had supposed that the whole matter of a carrying place had been transferred to Erie.... As it was we escaped and witnessed the completion of the road from Lake Erie to Lake Chautauqua. on the third or fourth day the whole party embarked in their boats and moved eastward."[64]