The day was not quite finished with killing. As the beaten French streamed back south down the road, a relief party was coming north toward the sound of the guns from the Hudson post: about eighty New Hampshire provincials under Captain Nathaniel Folsom and roughly forty New York men under Captain William McGinnis. Late in the afternoon, perhaps two miles south of the camp, they came on a body of around three hundred French, mostly Canadian militia and Native allies, resting near a small pool, their rearguard and baggage with their guard down after the long retreat. Folsom's men fired into them from cover and drove them off as the light failed. McGinnis was mortally wounded leading it; Folsom lost about six men. The dead French were said to have been thrown into the pool, which ran red with their blood, and the place has been called Bloody Pond ever since. The stories of it are local and traditional, but the name stuck, and the men killed there were mostly Canadians and Native warriors rather than French regulars.

When the firing stopped, Lake George was a British victory, and after the summer Britain had had, that was no small thing. The cost was heavy on both sides and the counts are contested, as they almost always are in this war, the more so because Native losses went under-recorded. The British and their Mohawk allies lost on the order of three hundred and thirty killed, wounded, and missing all told, the heaviest of it in the morning ambush. The French, Canadians, and Native allies lost somewhere in the range of two hundred and thirty to three hundred and forty, and very possibly more, with the grenadier regiments of La Reine and Languedoc bled white in the charge against the guns. The Mohawk loss inside those numbers fell heaviest of all: estimates of Mohawk dead in the Bloody Morning Scout alone run from roughly thirty to eighty, out of the two to two hundred and fifty who went out that morning, a share of a small people's fighting men that could not be made good. The exact numbers are beyond recovering; the ranges are what the honest record will bear.

And then the victory stopped short. Johnson did not push on to Crown Point, the whole reason the expedition had marched. He had real reasons to stop. His was a provincial militia army with no siege artillery, and Crown Point was a stone fort that could not be taken without it; the season was closing, and the lakes would soon freeze the campaign out; his Mohawk allies had largely withdrawn after the morning; and the French were already fortifying Ticonderoga, the place they called Carillon, to the north, even as Johnson stood at Lake George. The northern end of the corridor was hardening at the same moment he was deciding what to do with the southern end. So instead of driving up the corridor he dug in. He built a real fort at the south end of Lake George and named it Fort William Henry, and the supply post on the Hudson was finished and renamed Fort Edward. The British now held the southern end of the corridor in strength, which was real, but the French still held Crown Point and Ticonderoga to the north, which was the point of the campaign. The contest for the invasion highway was not settled; it was only dug in deeper. The historian Julian Gwyn, weighing the rewards against what was actually accomplished, put it flatly.

Never was such an insignificant encounter so generously rewarded.

The rewards were the strange afterlife of the battle. Britain, starved for a hero after the Monongahela, made Johnson a baronet (an inherited British title of nobility) and Parliament voted him five thousand pounds. But in New England the credit went to a different name. The men of Connecticut and Massachusetts held that the fight had really been won by Phineas Lyman, who had directed the defense at the barricade after Johnson was carried off wounded early, and they resented that Lyman got the work and Johnson got the title and the money. It is a grievance handed down through New England's own telling of the day, and it has hung over the battle's memory since.

The forts that came out of this day would have their own bloody futures, but those are other stories and should not be folded into this one. Fort William Henry, raised here in triumph, would be besieged and surrendered to the French two years later, in 1757. The struggle for the corridor would grind north to Ticonderoga, called Carillon by the French, in 1758. The door that Lake George was meant to open stayed, for years, only half open.

The deepest cost was the one that does not appear in the bounty or the baronetcy. The Mohawk had been central to the victory, and the Mohawk had paid for it out of all proportion. Hendrick was dead, an old and irreplaceable sachem killed in a fight not finally his own, and dozens had died with him in the ravine, a loss a small people could not absorb. And the day had asked of the Haudenosaunee the thing they had most reason to refuse: to kill their own kin for the empires that wanted their land. On the field the Mohawk on both sides had largely refused. After the morning, most of the allied Iroquois on both sides withdrew rather than spend more relatives in a quarrel between France and Britain, and the strain of having been asked at all sat heavily on Haudenosaunee participation in the war that followed. The corridor the empires fought for, the lake Johnson renamed for his king, the trade and the land underneath it all, had been Haudenosaunee country first, and the surest thing the Battle of Lake George proved was how little either empire would let that fact stand in its way.