In Colonial days, four of our most notable Founding Fathers traveled to Lake George in horse-drawn coaches lumbering mile by mile over unpaved roads. An unpleasant trip taking weeks. Today, for our little frolic at the Lake, we’ve brought back their modern equivalents by more rapid and comfortable means in trips measured in hours on interstate highways.

 Our ‘Lads’ are the skilled actors playing their respective Founder roles, an honorable designation for loyal mates borrowed from the Brits. We think the label apt. Aren’t we all bound together on a long hard road, and don’t we share with the Founders a singular spirit informing a dedicated mission?

 First of the originals to arrive, Ben Franklin traversed the Lake at the onset of the Revolution, bound for Canada from Philadelphia in a failed pre-Trumpian attempt to persuade Quebec to join the rebels as the 14th Colony.  No spring chicken, or even summer rooster, he would soon turn three score and ten but was tapped to lead the important mission as the Colonies’ most accomplished diplomat. Unfortunately, even Ben could not bat 1000, although he was to later hit a home run in France when he tapped King Louis’ largesse to tip the scales against the British.

 George came next to the Lake. With a successful Revolution winding down and military action reduced to desultory hit-and-run skirmishes after the stunning British surrender at Yorktown, Washington took temporary leave from his New Jersey headquarters to inspect Fort Ticonderoga, so pivotal in earlier Colonial era warfare. A Virginian by birth, plantation ownership and temperament, it was to be the furthest north he ever ventured.

Erected by the French, coveted by the British and readily accessible from both Lake Champlain and Lake George, Fort Ti had changed first French and British, then British and American hands depending on the fortunes of war, the competence of generals and in Ethan Allen’s case, the element of surprise coupled with a favorable wink from the Great Jehovah. Back in 1776 it was the Fort Ti cannons captured by Ethan and transported by Henry Knox that Washington had deployed to drive the British out of Boston. Perhaps the Great Jehovah had that outcome in mind when Ethan and the Green Mountain Boys were able to slip in and take the fort unawares.

 During the 1800’s, with the French long gone and the British finally dispatched from upstate New York, the Fort, no longer on the front lines, was abandoned, to be vandalized and crumble over time into a pile of shameful rubble. But its strategic contribution was not forgotten and early in the 20th century Fort Ti was restored to its original glory as a permanent monument to its role in our Nation’s founding. In pallid attempts to recreate the past, sham mock battles are re-enacted with predictable results for the edification of hordes of I-Phone armed visitors uniformed comfortably, if not stylishly, in T-shirts and shorts, the preferred summer garb of the modern tourist.

 So much for Franklin’s political doings and Washington’s military maneuvers. The final pair of Lads, fast friends and sympatico intellectuals, Jefferson and Madison, came as tourists post-Revolution to admire the Lake’s vaunted beauty. True, propulsion over water then was no simple tap of a dashboard button or turn of a wheel; paddles and oars were the order of the day, just ask the precursors of Uber showing Tom and James the sights. Change would come, but slowly. More than a century would elapse before the doughty Mohican would steam proudly over the waters of the Lake. A century later, no worse for wear, she still rules. Check the schedule, a special cruise may be coming up. You won’t want to miss it.

 My previous novel, Lady of Lake George, played quite fast and somewhat loose with the characters in The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s famous Lake George-based tale. In his ‘Mohicans,’ passionate Cora, the beautiful young woman paired spiritually with Indian warrior Uncas was precluded by the social conventions of her day from physical coupling with a man of another race, no matter how eligible, and no matter that she herself was mixed-race. Faced with this dilemma, Cooper had no choice but to kill off his would-be lovers, a literary denouement dismaying me ever since my initial teen-age reading of the classic novel.

So, given the opportunity, I felt compelled to bring Cora back. If, by chance, you read ‘Lady’ you found Cora re-imagined as Cort, the part Sioux Indian deep-water diver and avatar of diversity who locates the lost Henry Knox cannons in the depths of Lake George. Her beau Uncas also re-appears as Archer the TV journalist, acceptable in our day as her actual lover. But she is the star. As the novel concludes, it is Cort, no longer the homeless teen waif roaming the back roads of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who has become Lady of Lake George and a social media celebrity.

So honoring the dictum that past is prologue and instructive when understood; we admit we’re up to our old borrowing from yesteryear tricks again with a slight variation. This time we’ve raided the pages of history, not literature, to bring back Ben, George, Tom and James as the Lake George Lads at the heart of our adventure.  Well, not the real dudes, but actors playing their roles in a movie being shown at a new Imax Theater in Lake George Village. The film vividly depicts the major events of the Lake’s famous large scale military history and celebrates the respective roles of the Founders in birthing the new Nation.

After each showing, the actors, in character, field questions from the filmgoers. Since all the Lads owned slaves, and were less than saintly in other respects, it can and does get rough. And not only with the audience. The times being what they are, sinister outside forces use ugly means to discredit the Lads with a view to undermine their considerable accomplishments.

True the Lads had their faults, but do their arguable defects diminish their enormous contributions? Would applying an exacting standard inevitably discredit all human progress initiated by imperfect great leaders? Is our Constitution any less viable because its creators lacked hands totally free of moral detritus? Think about it.

Look at the marquee, the Theater is about to light up. Come see the Lads. Have an open mind when they come on stage. It should get very interesting. And keep an eye peeled when they are out and about. You won’t want to miss the action.