By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
New book describes Benedict Arnold’s pre-traitor heroism

LEWISTON – A taboo hero helps.

Had it been somebody else’s march – rather than Benedict Arnold’s – the desperate 1775 trek he led across the Maine wilderness would be common legend.

“I wouldn’t have been able to write about it,” Lewiston-native Thomas Desjardin said Monday. Too many people would already know the details, of the hundreds of men who weathered starvation, floods and sickness to attack Quebec City, “a giant stone, mountain with a giant, stone fort on top.”

The most remarkable thing is that it almost succeeded, said Desjardin, who has chronicled the trek in his new book, “Through a Howling Wilderness.”

“Everything that could go wrong did, and still Arnold almost took Quebec,” Desjardin said. The what-ifs, including the knowledge that an earlier attack might have easily been won, can spin any historian’s mind.

“There might not be a Canada,” he said.

On Monday, Desjardin led a discussion at the Lewiston Public Library of the story he wrote, published by St. Martin’s Press.

It’s only the second nonfiction book ever written specifically about the march. The last was published in 1903.

“Arnold was a bad guy,” Desjardin said. Historians and publishers didn’t want to examine his heroic acts.

“I am not trying to remake his image,” Desjardin said. “He was, in the purest sense, a traitor.”

But in an era when people can look back at a deservedly notorious character such as Richard Nixon and write about the good he did, Arnold’s March journey ought to be seen for what it was: a great and tragic adventure.

Desjardin, who has authored three previous books including the Civil War histories “Stand Firm Ye Boys from Maine” and “These Honored Dead,” said he has been intrigued by the march since he was a boy, stopping along the Kennebec River with his parents to read the roadside histories that marked the trek’s early stops.

The descriptions of men fighting starvation by eating their moccasins captured his 9-year-old imagination. It was fueled further by Kenneth Roberts’ fictional account, “Arundel.”

The hardships were extreme.

Of the 1,100 men who left Cambridge, Mass., for Quebec, one third deserted before they reached the halfway point.

The deserters took most of their food and supplies with them. Before reaching friendly French Canadians, men were flooded and frozen, lost in swamps and subsisted on eating anything that might fill their stomachs, from their cartridge boxes to their soap.

Of the men who made it to Quebec, 454 were either killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

In some ways, it still proved a success, Desjardin said.

The attack forced the British to weaken its hold on the Lake Champlain valley and Fort Ticonderoga, delaying its move to cut the colonies in two.

It made the American success at the Battle of Saratoga possible, Desjardin said.

“That was the turning point in the war,” he said.

Arnold still changed sides, eventually leading British soldiers against his home state of Connecticut, Desjardin said.

“It’s still his picture beside the word traitor’ in the dictionary,” he said. “And deservedly so.”

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