Edward P. Hamilton's Fort Key to a Continent remains an important book today. Here you will find the dramatic story of the Fort told in lively, concise prose. You will meet first-hand, and hear in their own words, everyone from officers to private soldiers, telling both of broad strategy and the daily slog and tedium of army food and fatigue duty. You never forget the geographical significance of this narrow chokepoint on the great water highway linking New York and Montreal. You taste the spruce beer, smell the musket's black powder, and heft countless bateaux over the portages. No fort anywhere in the world has a history such as that possessed by Fort Ticonderoga, yet it's active life was but a score of years. Six times armies had marched against the little fort in the course of twenty years; thrice it held, and thrice it fell. No other fort in history can boast of such a record, Such was Ticonderoga, the key to the vital Champlain Valley.