TICONDEROGA, N.Y. (AP) — The site of a history-changing battle lies somewhere amid the dense tangle of forest along the Lake Champlain shoreline in this Adirondack town.

Four-hundred years after French explorer Samuel de Champlain went to war against the Iroquois on July 30, 1609, the battleground’s exact location remains elusive.

“Nobody can point to a spot on the ground where the actual battle took place,” Chris Fox, curator of collections at Fort Ticonderoga, said during a tour of the historic site on the west shore of the lake about 85 miles north of Albany.

Champlain’s clash with the Mohawks, the easternmost tribe in the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, was more of a skirmish than a battle, yet its impact would ripple across generations. France and Britain spent much of the next 150 years fighting for control of North America, with the Iroquois generally supporting the English while Canadian tribes backed the French.

“The memory of that few minutes’ encounter lasted a long, long time,” Fox said.

For the Iroquois, their first experience of battle against firearms changed Indian warfare forever.

“We wore elm bark armor. That went obsolete overnight,” said Mike Tarbell of the Iroquois Museum at Howes Cave in Schoharie County.

In July 1609, a year after he founded the French settlement of Quebec, Champlain became the first European to explore the lake that would bear his name. Along with two fellow Frenchmen and a force of 60 warriors from the Algonquin, Huron and Montagnais tribes, Champlain’s canoe voyage took him to areas that would later become part of New York and Vermont.

Late in the month they encountered a large war party of Mohawks, the traditional enemies of Champlain’s Indian allies, near a bluff on a peninsula on the lake’s western shore.

On the morning of July 30, with about 200 Mohawks massed on a beach, Champlain fired his harquebus, a type of musket he had loaded with four lead balls. The single blast killed two Mohawk chiefs and mortally wounded a third. The two other Frenchmen, hidden in the woods nearby, then opened fire, forcing the stunned Mohawks to retreat.

Champlain would later write that the battle was fought near “the extremity of a cape” on the lake’s western shore. Some historians long believed that was a reference to Crown Point, another peninsula located 10 miles north of Ticonderoga.

For years, the two locations claimed bragging rights as the site of Champlain’s 1609 battle. But other historians have taken a closer look at the explorer’s own account of the battle, and they are now convinced it took place somewhere along the 10 miles of shoreline within the boundary of the town of Ticonderoga.

“I think the evidence is as conclusive as this type of evidence gets,” said historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Hackett Fischer, who authored a Champlain biography published last year.

Steve Dechame needs no convincing. His great-grandfather rebuilt Fort Ticonderoga as a tourist attraction a century ago, and Dechame grew up exploring the area’s forests and shoreline, in addition to researching the battle for the past decade. He’s firmly convinced it happened in a cove on the fort’s property, not far from a state historical marker telling visitors Champlain and his Indian allies fought the Iroquois “near here.”

“Absolutely, positively,” said Dechame, a 61-year-old public defender in Boston. “I don’t think there can be any doubt.”

No artifacts from the battle are known to exist. The short duration of the fight and its proximity to a shoreline subjected to four centuries of erosion make it unlikely any physical evidence remains undiscovered.

“It was a site of so many other conflicts that if we should find the lead balls that Champlain fired, it would be very difficult to distinguish them from the evidence of so many other battles that followed at Ticonderoga,” Fischer said.

No ceremonies marking the 1609 battle’s anniversary are planned at Ticonderoga on Thursday. Fort Ticonderoga, originally built by the French in 1755, held a rededication ceremony at the Champlain historical marker last weekend.

While no formal observance of the anniversary is planned at the Iroquois Museum, many American Indians recognize the battle’s significance as a culture-altering event, said Tarbell, a member of the Mohawks’ turtle clan.

“It’s the moment we mark as Iroquoians, especially as Mohawk people, that we would jump from the Stone Age into the Iron Age,” he said.

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On the Net:

Fort Ticonderoga: www.fort-ticonderoga.org