FROM 1812 TO 1820

While Canada waged war for her national existence against her border neighbors to the south, as in the days of the bushrovers’ raids of old, afar in the west, in the burnt-wood, iron-rock region of Lake Superior, on the lonely wind-swept prairies, at the foothills where each night’s sunset etched the long shadows of the mountain peaks in somber replica across the plains, in the forested solitude of the tumultuous Rockies was the ragged vanguard of empire blazing a path through the wilderness, voyageur and burnt-wood runner, trapper, and explorer, pushing across the hinterlands of earth’s ends from prairie to mountains, and mountains to sea.

It was but as a side clap of the great American Revolution that the last French cannon were pointed against the English forts on Hudson Bay. When France sided with the American colonies a fleet of French frigates was dispatched under the great Admiral La Perouse against the fur posts of the English Company. One sleepy August afternoon in 1782, when Samuel Hearne, governor of Fort Churchill, was sorting furs in the courtyard, gates wide open, cannon unloaded, guards dispersed, the fort was electrified by the sudden apparition of three men-of-war, sails full blown, sides bristling with cannon, plowing over the waves straight for the harbor gate. French colors fluttered from the masthead. Sails rattled down. Anchors were cast, and in a few minutes small boats were out sounding the channel for position to attack the fort. Hearne had barely forty men, and the most of them were decrepits, unfit for the hunting field. As sunset merged into the long white light of northern midnight, four hundred French mariners landed on the sands outside Churchill. Hearne had no alternative. He surrendered without a blow. The fort was looted of furs, the Indians driven out, and a futile attempt made to blow up the massive walls. Hearne and the other officers were carried off captives. Matonabbee, the famous Indian guide, came back from the hunt to find the wooden structures of Churchill in flame. He had thought the English were invulnerable, and his pagan pride could not brook the shame of such ignominious defeat. Withdrawing outside the shattered walls, Matonabbee blew his brains out. A few days later Port Nelson, to the south, had suffered like fate. The English officers were released by La Perouse on reaching Europe. As for the fur company servants, they waited only till the French sails had disappeared over the sea. Then they came from hiding and rebuilt the burnt forts. Such was the last act in the great drama of contest between France and England for supremacy in the north.

For two hundred years explorers had been trying to find a northern passage between Europe and Asia by way of America, from east to west. Now that Canada has fallen into English hands; now, too, that the Russian sea-otter hunters are coasting down the west side of America towards that region which Drake discovered long ago in California, England suddenly awakens to a passion for discovery of that mythical Northwest Passage. Instead of seeking from east to west she sought from west to east, and sent her navigator round the world to search for opening along the west coast of America. To carry out the exploration there was selected as commander that young officer, James Cook, who helped to sound the St. Lawrence for Wolfe, and had since been cruising the South Seas. On his ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, was a young man whose name was to become a household word in America, Vancouver, a midshipman.

March of 1778 the Resolution and Discovery come rolling over the long swell of the sheeny Pacific towards Drake’s land of New Albion, California. Suddenly, one morning, the dim sky line resolved into the clear-cut edges of high land, but by night such a roaring hurricane had burst on the ships as drove them far out from land, too far to see the opening of Juan de Fuca, leading in from Vancouver Island, though Cook called the cape there “Flattery,” because he had hoped for an opening and been deluded. Clearer weather found Cook abreast a coast of sheer mountains with snowy summits jagging through the clouds in tent peaks. A narrow entrance opened into a two-horned cove. Small boats towed the ships in amid a flotilla of Indian dugouts whose occupants chanted weird welcome to the echo of the surrounding hills. Women and children were in the canoes. That signified peace. The ships were moored to trees, and the white men went ashore in that harbor to become famous as the rendezvous of Pacific fur traders, Nootka Sound, on the sea side of Vancouver Island.

Presently the waters were literally swarming with Indian canoes, and in a few days Cook’s crews had received thousands of dollars’ worth of sea-otter skins for such worthless baubles as tin mirrors and brass rings and bits of red calico. This was the beginning of the fur trade in sea otter with Americans and English. Some of the naked savages were observed wearing metal ornaments of European make. Cook did not think of the Russian fur traders to the north, but easily persuaded himself these objects had come from the English fur traders of Hudson Bay, and so inferred there must be a Northeast Passage. By April, Cook’s ships were once more afloat, gliding among the sylvan channels of countless wooded islands up past Sitka harbor, where the Russians later built their fort, round westward beneath the towering opal dome of Mount St. Elias, which Bering had named, to the waters bordering Alaska; but, as the world knows, though the ships penetrated up the channels of many roily waters, they found no open passage. Cook comes down to the Sandwich Islands, New Year of 1779. There the vices of his white crew arouse the enmity of the pagan savages. In a riot over the theft of a rowboat, Cook and a few men are surrounded by an enraged mob. By some mistake the white sailors rowing out from shore fire on the mob surrounding Cook. Instantly a dagger rips under Cook’s shoulder blade. In another second Cook and his men are literally hacked to pieces. All night the conch shells of the savages blow their war challenge through the darkness and the signal fires dance on the mountains. By dint of persuasion and threats the white men compel the natives to restore the mangled remains of the commander. Sunday, February 21, amid a silence as of death over the waters, the body of the dead explorer is committed to the deep.

The chance discovery of the sea-otter trade by Cook’s crew at Nootka brings hosts of English and American adventurers to the Pacific Coast of Canada. There is Meares, the English officer from China, who builds a rabbit hutch of a barracks at Nootka and almost involves England and Spain in war because the Spaniards, having discovered this region before Cook, knock the log barracks into kindling wood and forcibly seize an English trading ship. There is Robert Gray, the Boston trader, who pushes the prow of his little ship, Columbia, up a spacious harbor south of Juan de Fuca in May of 1792 and discovers Columbia River, so giving the United States flag prior claim here. There is George Vancouver, the English commander, sent out by his government in 1791-1793 to receive Nootka formally back from the Spaniards of California and to explore every inlet from Vancouver Island to Alaska. As luck would have it, Vancouver, the Englishman, and Gray, the American, are both hovering off the mouth of the Columbia in April of 1792, but a gale drives the ships offshore, though turgid water plainly indicates the mouth of a great river somewhere near. Vancouver goes on up north. Gray, the American, comes back, and so Vancouver misses discovering the one great river that remains unmapped in America. Up Puget Sound, named after his lieutenant, up Fuca Straits, round Vancouver Island, past all those inlets like seas on the mainland of British Columbia, coasts Vancouver, rounding south again to Nootka in August. In Nootka lie the Spanish frigates from California, bristling with cannon, the red and yellow flag blowing to the wind above the palisaded fort. In solemn parade, with Maquinna, the Nootka chief, clad in a state of nature, as guest of the festive board, Don Quadra, the Spanish officer, dines and wines Vancouver; but when it comes to business, that is another matter! Vancouver understands that Spain is to surrender all sovereignty north of San Francisco. Don Quadra, with pompous bow, maintains that the international agreement was to surrender rights only north of Juan de Fuca, leaving the rest of the northwest coast free to all nations for trade. Incidentally, it may be mentioned, Don Quadra was right, but the two commanders agree to send home to their respective governments for instructions. Meanwhile Robert Gray, the American, comes rolling into port with news he has discovered Columbia River. Vancouver is skeptical and chagrined. Having failed to discover the river, he goes down coast to explore it. It may be added, he sends his men higher up the river than Gray has gone, and has England’s flag of possession as solemnly planted as though Robert Gray had never entered Columbia’s waters. The next two years Vancouver spends exploring every nook and inlet from Columbia River to Lynn Canal. Once and for all and forever he disproves the myth of a Northeast Passage. His work was negative, but it established English rights where America’s claims ceased and Russia’s began, namely between Columbia River and Sitka, or in what is now known as British Columbia.

As the beaver had lured French bushrovers from the St. Lawrence to the Rockies, so the sea otter led the way to the exploration of the Pacific Coast. Artist’s brush and novelist’s pen have drawn all the romance and the glamour and the adventure of the beaver hunter’s life, but the sea-otter hunter’s life is almost an untold tale. Pacific Coast Indians were employed by the white traders for this wildest of hunting. The sea otter is like neither otter nor beaver, though possessing habits akin to both. In size, when full-grown, it is about the length of a man. Its pelt has the ebony shimmer of seal tipped with silver. Cradled on the waves, sleeping on their backs in the sea, playful as kittens, the sea otters only come ashore when driven by fierce gales; but they must come above to breathe, for the wave wash of storm would smother them. Their favorite sleeping grounds used to be the kelp beds of the Alaskan Islands. Storm or calm, to the kelp beds rode the Indian hunters in their boats of oiled skin light as paper. If heavy surf ran, concealing sight and sound, the hunters stood along shore shouting through the surf and waiting for the wave wash to carry in the dead body; if the sea were calm, the hunters circled in bands of twenty or thirty, spearing the sea otter as it came up to breathe; but the best hunting was when hurricane gales churned sea and air to spray. Then the sea otter came to the kelp beds in herds, and through the storm over the wave-dashed reefs, like very spirits of the storm incarnate, rushed the hunters, spear in hand. It is not surprising that the sea-otter hunters perished by tens of thousands every year, or that the sea otter dwindled from a yield of 100,000 a year to a paltry 200 of the present day.

Meanwhile Nor’west traders from Montreal and Quebec, English traders from Hudson Bay, have gone up the Saskatchewan far as the Athabasca and the Rockies. What lies beyond? Whither runs this great river from Athabasca Lake? Whence comes the great river from the mountains? Will the river that flows north or the river that comes from the west, either of them lead to the Pacific Coast, where Cook’s crews found wealth of sea otter? The lure of the Unknown is the lure of the siren. First you possess it, then it possesses you! Cooped up in his fort on Lake Athabasca, Alexander MacKenzie, the Nor’wester, begins wondering about those rivers, but you can’t ask business men to bank on the Unknown, to write blank checks for profits on what you may not find. And the Nor’westers were all stern business men. For every penny’s outlay they exacted from their wintering partners and clerks not ten but a hundredfold. And Alexander MacKenzie received no encouragement from his company to explore these unknown rivers. The project got possession of his mind. Sometimes he would pace the little log barracks of Fort Chippewyan from sunset to day dawn, trying to work out a way to explore those rivers; or, sitting before the huge hearth place, he would dream and dream till, as he wrote his cousin Roderick, “I did not know what I was doing or where I was.” Finally he induced his cousin to take charge of the fort for a summer. Then, assuming all risk and outlay, he set out on his own responsibility June 3, 1789, to follow the Great River down to the Arctic Ocean. “English Chief,” who often went down to Hudson Bay for the rival company, went as MacKenzie’s guide, and there were also in the canoes two or three white men, some Indians as paddlers, and squaws to cook and make moccasins.

Nevertheless, when the furs have been dispatched for Montreal, MacKenzie launches out on May 9 of 1793 with a thirty-foot birch canoe, six voyageurs, and Alexander Mackay as lieutenant, for the hinterland beyond the Rockies. This time the going was against stream, hard paddling, but safer than with a swift current in a river with dangerous rapids. Ten days later the river has become a canyon of tumbling cascades, the mountains sheer wall on each side, with snowy peaks jagging up through the clouds. To portage baggage up such cliffs was impossible. Yet it was equally impossible to go on up the canyon, and MacKenzie’s men became so terrified they refused to land. Jumping to foothold on the wall, a towrope in one hand, an ax in the other, MacKenzie cut steps in the cliff, then signaled above the roar of the rapids for the men to follow. They stripped themselves to swim if they missed footing, and obeyed, trembling in every limb. The towrope was warped round trees and the loaded canoe tracked up the cascade. At the end of that portage the men flatly refused to go on. MacKenzie ignored the mutiny and ordered the best of provisions spread for a feast. While the crew rested, he climbed the face of a rocky cliff to reconnoiter. As far as eye could see were cataracts walled by mighty precipices. The canoe could not be tracked up such waters. Mackay, who had gone prospecting a portage, reported that it would be nine miles over the mountain. MacKenzie did not tell his men what was ahead of them, but he led the way up the steep mountain, cutting trees to form an outer railing, and up this trail the canoe was hauled, towline round trees, the men swearing and sweating and blowing like whales. Three miles was the record that day, the voyageurs throwing themselves down to sleep at five in the afternoon, wrapped in their blanket coats lying close to the glacier edges. Three days it took to cross this mountain, and the end of the third day found them at the foot of another mountain. Here the river forked. MacKenzie followed the south branch, or what is now known as the Parsnip. Often at night the men would be startled by rocketing echoes like musketry firing, and they would spring to their feet to keep guard with backs to trees till morning; but presently they learned the cause of the pistol-shot reports. They were now on the Uplands among the eternal snows. The sharp splittings, the far boomings, the dull breaking thuds were frost cornices of overhanging snow crashing down in avalanches that swept the mountain slopes clear of forests.

A short portage from the Parsnip over a low ridge to a lake, and the canoe is launched on a stream flowing on the far side of the Divide, Bad River, a branch of the Fraser, though MacKenzie mistakes it for an upper tributary of the great river discovered by Gray, the Columbia. Then, before they realize it, comes the danger of going with the current on a river with rapids. The stream sweeps to a torrent, mad and unbridled. The canoe is as a chip in a maelstrom, the precipices racing past in a blur, the Indians hanging frantically to the gunnels, bawling aloud in fear, the terrified voyageurs reaching, . . . grasping, . . . snatching at trees overhanging from the banks. The next instant a rock has banged through bottom, tearing away the stern. The canoe reels in a swirl. Bang goes a rock through the bow. The birch bark flattens like a shingle. Another swirl, and, to the amazement of all, instead of the death that had seemed impending, smashed canoe, baggage, and voyageurs are dumped on the shallows of a sandy reach. One can guess the gasp of relief that went up. Nobody uttered a word for some time. One voyageur, who had grasped at a branch and been hoisted bodily from the canoe, now came limping to the disconsolate group, and had stumbled with lighted pipe in teeth across the powder that had been spread out to dry, when a terrific yell of warning brought him to his senses, and relieved the tension. MacKenzie spread out a treat for the men and sent them to gather bark for a fresh canoe. Other adventures on Bad River need not be given. This one was typical. The record was but two miles a day; and now there was no turning back. The difficulties behind were as great as any that could be before. June 15 Bad River led them westward into the Fraser, but somewhere in the canyon between modern Quesnel and Alexandria the way became impassable. Besides, the river was leading too far south. MacKenzie struck up Blackwater River to the west. Caching canoe and provisions on July 4, he marched overland. The Pacific was reached on July 22, 1793, near Bella Coola. By September, after perils too numerous to be told, MacKenzie was back at his fur post on Peace River. As his discoveries on this trip blazed the way to new hunting ground for his company, they brought both honor and wealth to MacKenzie. He was knighted by the English King for his explorations, and he retired to an estate in Scotland, where he died about 1820.

Meanwhile, Napoleon has sold Louisiana to the United States. The American explorers, Lewis and Clark, have crossed from the Missouri to the Columbia; and now John Jacob Astor, the great fur merchant of New York, in 1811 sends his fur traders overland to build a fort at the mouth of Columbia River. The Northwest Company in frantic haste dispatches explorers to follow up MacKenzie’s work and take possession of the Pacific fur trade before Astor’s men can reach the field. It becomes a race for the Pacific.

Simon Fraser is sent in 1806 to build posts west of the Rockies in New Caledonia, and to follow that unknown river which MacKenzie mistook for the Columbia, on down to the sea. Two years he passed building the posts, that exist to this day as Fraser planned them: Fort MacLeod at the head of Parsnip River, on a little lake set like an emerald among the mountains; Fort St. James on Stuart Lake, a reach of sheeny green waters like the Trossachs, dotted with islands and ensconced in mountains; Fraser Fort on another lake southward; Fort St. George on the main Fraser River. Then, in May of 1808, with four canoes Fraser descends the river named after him, accompanied by Stuart and Quesnel and nineteen voyageurs. This was the river where the rapids had turned MacKenzie back, canyon after canyon tumultuous with the black whirlpools and roaring like a tempest. Before essaying the worst runs of the cascades Fraser ordered a canoe lightened at the prow and manned by the five best voyageurs. It shot down the current like a stone from a catapult. “She flew from one danger to another,” relates Fraser, who was watching the canoe from the bank, “till the current drove her on a rock. The men disembarked, and we had to plunge our daggers into the bank to keep from sliding into the river as we went down to their aid, our lives hanging on a thread.” Like MacKenzie, Fraser was compelled to abandon canoes. Each with a pack of eighty pounds, the voyageurs set out on foot down that steep gorge where the traveler to-day can see the trail along the side of the precipice like basket work between Lilloet and Thompson River. In Fraser’s day was no trail, only here and there bridges of trembling twig ladders across chasms; and over these swinging footholds the marchers had to carry their packs, the river rolling below, deep and ominous and treacherous. At Spuzzum the river turned from the south straight west. Fraser knew it was not the Columbia. His men named it after himself. Forty days was Fraser going from St. George to tide water. Early in August he was back at his fur posts of New Caledonia.

Yet another explorer did the Nor’westers send to take possession of the region beyond the mountains. David Thompson had been surveying the bounds between the United States and what is now Manitoba, when he was ordered to explore the Rockies in the region of the modern Banff. Up on Canoe River, Thompson and his men build canoes to descend the Columbia. Following the Big Bend, they go down the rolling milky tide past Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes, a region of mountains sheer on each side as walls, with wisps of mist marking the cloud line. Then a circular sweep westward through what is now Washington, pausing at Snake River to erect formal claim of possession for England, then a riffle on the current, a smell of the sea, and at 1 P.M. on July 15, 1811, Thompson glides within view of a little raw new fort, Astoria. In the race to the Pacific the Americans have gained the ground at the mouth of the Columbia just two months before Thompson came. In Astor’s fort Thompson finds old friends of the Northwest Company hired over by Astor.

After war has broken out in open flame it is easy to ascribe the cause to this, that, or the other act, which put the match to the combustibles; but the real reason usually lies far behind the one act of explosion, in an accumulation of ill feeling that provided the combustibles.

So it was in the fratricidal war of 1812 between Canada and the United States. The war was criminal folly, as useless as it was unnecessary. What caused it? What accumulated the ill feeling lying ready like combustibles for the match? Let us see.

The United Empire Loyalists have, by 1812, increased to some 100,000 of Canada’s population, cherishing bitter memories of ruin and confiscation and persecution because Congress failed to carry out the pledge guaranteeing protection to the losing side in the Revolution. Then, because Congress failed to carry out her guarantee, England delayed turning over the western fur posts to the United States for almost ten years; and whether true or false, the suspicion became an open charge that the hostility of the Indians to American frontiersmen was fomented by the British fur trader.

Here, then, was cause for rankling anger on both sides, and the bitterness was unwittingly increased by England’s policy. It was hard for the mother country to realize that the raw new nation of the United States, child of her very flesh and blood, kindred in thought and speech, was a power to be reckoned with, on even ground, looking on the level, eye to eye; and not just a bumptious, underling nation, like a boy at the hobbledehoy age, to be hectored and chaffed and bullied and badgered and licked into shape, as a sort of protectorate appended to English interests.

I once asked an Englishman why the English press was so virulently hostile to one of the most brilliant of her rising men.

“Oh,” he answered, “you must be English to understand that. We never think it hurts a boy to be well ragged when he ’s at school.”

Something of that spirit was in England’s attitude to the new nation of the United States. England was hard pressed in life-and-death struggle with Napoleon. To recruit both army and navy, conscription was rigidly and ruthlessly enforced. Yet more! England claimed the right to impress British-born subjects in foreign ports, to seize deserters in either foreign ports or on foreign ships, and, most obnoxious of all, to search neutral vessels on the ocean highway for deserters from the British flag. It was an era of great brutality in military discipline. Desertions were frequent. Also thousands of immigrants were flocking to the new nation of the United States and taking out naturalization papers. England ignored these naturalization papers when taken out by deserters.

Let us see how the thing worked out. A passenger vessel is coming up New York harbor. An English frigate with cannon pointed swings across the course, signals the American vessel on American waters to slow up, sends a young lieutenant with some marines across to the American vessel, searches her from stem to stern, or compels the American captain to read the roster of the crew, forcibly seizes half a dozen of the American crew as British deserters, and departs, leaving the Americans gasping with wonder whether they are a free nation or a tail to the kite of English designs. It need not be explained that the offense was often aggravated by the swaggering insolence of the young officers. They considered the fury of the unprepared American crew a prime joke. In vain the government at Washington complained to the government at Westminster. England pigeonholed the complaint and went serenely on her way, searching American vessels from Canada to Brazil.

Or an English vessel has come to Hampton Roads to wood and water. An English officer thinks he recognizes among the American crews men who have deserted from English vessels. Three men defy arrest and show their naturalization papers. High words follow, broken heads and broken canes, and the English crew are glad to escape the mob by rowing out to their own vessel.

Is it surprising that the ill feeling on both sides accumulated till there lacked only the match to cause an explosion? The explosion came in 1807. H. M. S. Leopard, cruising off Norfolk in June, encounters the United States ship Chesapeake. At 3 P.M. the English ship edges down on the American, loaded to the water line with lumber, and signals a messenger will be sent across. The young English lieutenant going aboard the Chesapeake shows written orders from Admiral Berkeley of Halifax, commanding a search of the Chesapeake for six deserters. He is very courteous and pleasant about the disagreeable business: the orders are explicit; he must obey his admiral. The American commander is equally courteous. He regrets that he must refuse to obey an English admiral’s orders, but his own government has given most explicit orders that American vessels must not be searched. The young Englishman returns with serious face. The ships were within pistol shot of each other, the men on the English decks all at their guns, the Americans off guard, lounging on the lumber piles. Quick as flash a cannon shot rips across the Chesapeake’s bows, followed by a broadside, and another, and yet another, that riddle the American decks to kindling wood before the astonished officers can collect their senses. Six seamen are dead and twenty-three wounded when the Chesapeake strikes her colors to surrender; but the Leopard does not want a captive. She sends her lieutenant back, who musters the four hundred American seamen, picks out four men as British deserters, learns that another deserter has been killed and a sixth has jumped overboard rather than be retaken, takes his prisoners back to the Leopard, which proceeds to Halifax, where they are tried by court-martial and shot.

It isn’t exactly surprising that the episode literally set the United States on fire with rage, and that the American President at once ordered all American ports closed to British war vessels. The quarrel dragged on between the two governments for five years. England saw at once that she had gone too far and violated international law. She repudiated Admiral Berkeley’s order, offered to apologize and pension the heirs of the victims; but as she would not repudiate either the right of impressment or the right of search, the American government refused to receive the apology.

Other causes fanned the flame of war. The United States was now almost the only nation neutral in Napoleon’s wars. To cripple English commerce, Napoleon forbids neutral nations trading at English ports. By way of retaliation England forbids neutral nations trading with French ports; and the United States strikes back by closing American ports to both nations. It means blue ruin to American trade, but the United States cannot permit herself to be ground between the upper and nether millstones of two hostile European powers. Then, sharp as a gamester playing his trump card, Napoleon revokes his embargo in 1810, which leaves England the offender against the United States. Then Governor Craig of Canada commits an error that must have delighted the heart of Napoleon, who always profited by his enemy’s blunders. Well meaning, but fatally ill and easily alarmed, Craig sends one John Henry from Montreal in 1809 as spy to the United States for the double purpose of sounding public opinion on the subject of war, and of putting any Federalists in favor of withdrawing from the Union in touch with British authorities. Craig goes home to England to die. Henry fails to collect reward for his ignoble services, turns traitor, and sells the entire correspondence to the war party in the United States for $10,000. That spy business adds fuel to fire. Then there are other quarrels. A deserter from the American army is found teaching school near Cornwall in Canada. He is driven out of the little backwoods schoolhouse, pricked across the field with bayonets, out of the children’s view, and shot on Canadian soil by American soldiers, an outrage almost the same in spirit as the British crew’s outrage on the Chesapeake. Also, in spite of apologies, the war ships clash again. The English sloop Little Belt is cruising off Cape Henry in May of 1811, looking for a French privateer, when a sail appears over the sea. The Little Belt pursues till she sights the commodore’s blue flag of the United States frigate President, then she turns about; but by this time the President has turned the tables on the little sloop, and is pursuing to find out what the former’s conduct meant. Darkness settles over the two ships beating about the wind.

“What sloop is that?” shouts an officer through a speaking trumpet from the American’s decks.

“What ship is that?” bawls back a voice through the darkness from the little Englander.

Then, before any one can tell who fired first (in fact, each accuses the other of firing first), the cannon are pouring hot shot into each other’s hulls till thirty men have fallen on the decks of the Little Belt. Apologies follow, of course, and explanations; but that does not remedy the ill. In fact, when nations and people want to quarrel, they can always find a cause. War is declared in June of 1812 by Congress. It is war against England; but that means war against Canada, though there are not forty-five hundred soldiers from Halifax to Lake Huron. As for the American forces, they muster an army of some one hundred and fifty thousand; but their generals complain they are “an untrained mob”; and events justified the complaints.

There is nothing for Canada to do but stand up to the war of England’s making and fight for hearth and home. Canada on the defensive, there is nothing for the States to do but invade; and the American generals don’t relish the task with their “untrained mob.”

Upper Canada or Ontario has not four hundred soldiers from Kingston to Detroit River; but Major General Isaac Brock calls for volunteers. The clang of arms, of drill, of target practice, resounds in every hamlet through Canada. At Kingston, at Toronto, at Fort George (Niagara), at Erie where Niagara River comes from the lake, at Amherstburg, southeast of Detroit, are stationed garrisons to repel invasion, with hastily erected cannon and mortar commanding approach from the American side. And invasion comes soon enough. The declaration of war became known in Canada about the 20th of June. By July 3 General Hull of Michigan is at Detroit with two thousand five hundred men preparing to sweep western Ontario. July 3 an English schooner captures Hull’s provision boat coming up Detroit River, but Hull crosses with his army on July 12 to Sandwich, opposite Detroit, and issues proclamation calling on the people to throw off the yoke of English rule. How such an invitation fell on United Empire Loyalist ears may be guessed. Meanwhile comes word that the Northwest Company’s voyageurs, with four hundred Indians, have captured Michilimackinac without a blow. The fall of Michilimackinac, the failure of the Canadians to rally to his flag, the loss of his provision boat, dampen Hull’s ardor so that on August 8 he moves back with his troops to Detroit. Eight days later comes Brock from Niagara with five hundred Loyalists and one thousand Indians under the great chief Tecumseh to join Procter’s garrison of six hundred at Amherstburg. The Canadians have come by open boat up Lake Erie from Niagara through furious rains; but they are fighting for their homes, and with eager enthusiasm follow Brock on up Detroit River to Sandwich, opposite the American fort. Indians come by night and lie in ambush south of Detroit to protect the Canadians while they cross the river. Then the cannon on the Canadian side begin a humming of bombs overhead. While the bombs play over the stream at Sandwich, Brock rushes thirteen hundred men across the river south of Detroit, and before midday of August 16 is marching his men through the woods to assault the fort, when he is met by an officer carrying out the white flag of surrender. While Brock was crossing the river, something had happened inside the fort at Detroit. It was one of those curious cases of blind panic when only the iron grip of a strong man can hold demoralized forces in hand. The American officers had sat down to breakfast in the mess room at day dawn, when a bomb plunged through the roof killing four on the spot and spattering the walls with the blood of the mangled bodies. Disgraceful stories are told of Hull’s conduct. Ashy with fright and trembling, he dashed from the room, and, before the other officers knew what he was about, had offered to surrender his army, twenty-five hundred arms, thirty-three cannon, an armed brig, and the whole state of Michigan. The case is probably more an example of nervous hysterics than treason, though the other American officers broke their swords with rage and chagrin, declaring they had been sold for a price. It was but the first of the many times the lesson was taught in this war, that however well intentioned a volunteer’s courage may be, it takes a seasoned man to make war. Ten minutes later, a boy had climbed the flagstaff and hung out the English flag over Detroit. Of the captured American army Brock permitted the volunteer privates to go home on parole. The regulars, including Hull, were carried back prisoners on the boats to Niagara, to be forwarded to Montreal. At Montreal, Hull was given back to the Americans in exchange for thirty British prisoners. He was sentenced by court-martial to be shot for treason and cowardice, but the sentence was commuted.

At Niagara River, where the main troops of Ontario were centered, Brock’s victory was greeted with simply a madness of joy. From the first it had been plain that the principal fighting in Ontario would take place at Niagara, and along the river Brock had concentrated some sixteen hundred volunteer troops, raw farm hands most of them, with a goodly proportion of descendants from the United Empire Loyalists, who had furbished out their fathers’ swords. But the army was in rags and tatters; many men had no shoes; before Brock captured the guns at Detroit there had not been muskets to go round the men, and there were not cannon enough to mount the batteries cast up along Niagara River facing the American defenses. As the boats came down Lake Erie and disembarked the American prisoners on August 24, at Fort Erie on the Canadian side, opposite Black Rock and Buffalo, wild yells of jubilation rent the air. By nightfall every camp on the Canadian side for the whole forty miles of Niagara River’s course echoed to shout and counter shout, and a wild refrain which some poet of the haversack had composed on the spot:

We ’ll subdue the mighty Democrats and pull their dwellings down,
And have the States inhabited with subjects of the Crown.

Take a survey of the Niagara region. South is Lake Erie, north is Lake Ontario, between them Niagara River flowing almost straight north through a steep dark gorge hewn out of the solid rock by the living waters of all the Upper Lakes, crushed and cramped, carving a turbulent way through this narrow canyon. Midway in the river’s course the blue waters begin to race. The race becomes a dizzy madness of blurred, whirling, raging waters. Then there is the leap, the plunge, the shattering anger of inland seas hurling their strength over the sheer precipice in resistless force. Then the foaming whirlpool below, and the shadowy gorge, and the undercurrent eddying away in the swift-flowing waters of the river coming out on Lake Ontario. On one side are the Canadian forts, on the other the American, slab-walled all of them, with scarcely a stone foundation except in bastions used as powder magazines. Fort Erie on the Canadian side faces Buffalo and Black Rock on the American side. Where the old French voyageurs used to portage past the Falls, about halfway on the Canadian side south of the precipice, is the village of Chippewa. Here Brock has stationed a garrison with cannon. Then halfway between the Falls and Lake Ontario are high cliffs known as Queenston Heights, in plain view of the American town of Lewiston on the other side. Cannon line the river cliffs on both sides here. All about Lewiston the fields are literally white with the tents of General Van Rensselaer’s army, now grown from twenty-five hundred to almost eight thousand. On the Canadian side cannon had been mounted on the cliffs known as Queenston Heights. Possibly because the two hundred men would make poor showing in tents, Brock has his soldiers here take quarters in the farmhouses. For the rest it is such a rural scene as one may witness any midsummer, rolling yellow wheat fields surrounded by the zigzag rail fences, with square farmhouses of stone and the fields invariably backed by the uncleared bush land. Six miles farther down the river, where the waters join Lake Ontario, is the English post, Fort George, near the old capital, Newark, and just opposite the American fort of Niagara. With the exception of the Grand Island region on the river, it may be said that both armies are in full view of each other. Sometimes, when to the tramp tramp tramp of the sentry’s tread a loud “All’s well” echoes across the river from Lewiston to the Canadian side, some wag at Queenston will take up the cry through the dark and bawl back, “All’s well here too”; and all night long the two sentries bawl back and forward to each other through the dark. Sometimes, too, though strictest orders are issued against such ruffian warfare by both Van Rensselaer and Brock, the sentries chance shots at each other through the dark. Drums beat reveille at four in the morning, and the rub-a-dub-dub of Queenston Heights is echoed by rat-tat-too of Lewiston, though river mist hides the armies from each other in the morning. Iron baskets filled with oiled bark are used as telegraph signals, and one may guess how, when the light flared up of a night on the Canadian heights, scouts carried word to the officers on the American side. One may guess, too, the effect on Van Rensselaer’s big untrained army, when, with the sun aglint on scarlet uniform, they saw their fellow-countrymen of Detroit marched prisoners between British lines along the heights of Queenston opposite Lewiston. Rage, depression, shame, knew no bounds; and the army was unable to vent anger in heroic attack, for England had repealed her embargo laws, and when Brock came back from Detroit he found that an armistice had been arranged, and both sides had been ordered to suspend hostilities till instructions came from the governments. The truce, it may be added, was only an excuse to enable both sides to complete preparations for the war. In a few weeks ball and bomb were again singing their shrill songs in mid-air.

Brock’s victory demoralized the rabble under the American Van Rensselaer. Desertions increased daily, and discipline was so notoriously bad Van Rensselaer and his staff dared not punish desertion for fear of the army as one of them put it “falling to pieces.” Van Rensselaer saw that he must strike, and strike at once, and strike successfully, or he would not have any army left at all. Two thousand Pennsylvanians had joined him; and on October 9, at one in the morning, Lieutenant Elliott led one hundred men with muffled paddles from the American side to two Canadian ships lying anchored off Fort Erie. One was the brig captured from Hull at Detroit, the other a sloop belonging to the Northwest Fur Company, loaded with peltries. Before the British were well awake, Elliott had boarded decks, captured the fur ship with forty prisoners, and was turning her guns on the other ship when Port Erie suddenly awakened with a belch of cannon shot. The Americans cut the cables and drifted on the captured ship downstream. The fur ship was worked safely over to the American side, where it was welcomed with wild cheers. The brig was set on fire and abandoned.

Van Rensselaer decided to take advantage of the elated spirit among the troops and invade Canada at once.

Over on the Canadian side, Brock, at Fort George, wanted to offer an exchange of Detroit prisoners for the voyageurs on the captured fur ship, and Evans was ordered to paddle across to Lewiston with the offer, white handkerchief fluttering as a flag of truce. Evans could not mistake the signs as he landed on the American shore. Sentries dashed down to stop his advance at bayonet point. He was denied speech with Van Rensselaer and refused admittance to the American camp; and the reason was plain. A score of boats, capable of holding thirty men each, lay moored at the Lewiston shore. Along the rain-soaked road behind the shore floundered and marched troops, fresh troops joining Van Rensselaer’s camp. It was dark before Evans returned to Queenston Heights and close on midnight when he reached Major General Brock at Fort George. Brock thought Evans over anxious, and both went to bed, or at least threw themselves down on a mattress to sleep. At two o’clock they were awakened by a sound which could not be mistaken, the thunderous booming of a furious cannonade from Queenston Heights. Brock realized that the two hundred Canadians on the cliff must be repelling an invasion, but he was suspicious that the attack from Lewiston was a feint to draw off attention from Fort Niagara opposite Fort George, and he did not at once order troops to the aid of Queenston Heights.

Evans’ predictions of invasion were only too true. After one attempt to cross the gorge, which was balked by storm, Van Rensselaer finally got his troops down to the water’s edge about midnight of October 12-13. The night was dark, moonless, rainy, a wind which mingled with the roar of the river drowning all sound of marching troops. Three hundred men embarked on the first passage of the boats across the swift river, the poor old pilot literally groaning aloud in terror. Three of the boats were carried beyond the landing on the Canadian side, and had to come back through the dark to get their bearings; but the rest, led by Van Rensselaer, had safely landed on the Canadian side, when the batteries of Queenston Heights flashed to life in sheets of fire, lighting up the dark tide of the river gorge and sinking half a dozen boat loads of men now coming on a second traverse. Instantly Lewiston’s cannon pealed furious answer to the Canadian fire, and in the sheet-lightning flame of the flaring batteries thousands could be seen on the American shore watching the conflict. As the Americans landed they hugged the rock cliff for shelter, but the mortality on the crossing boats was terrible; and each passage carried back quota of wounded. Van Rensselaer was shot in the thigh almost as he landed, but still he held his men in hand. A second shot pierced the same side. A third struck his knee. Six wounds he received in as many seconds; and he was carried back in the boats to the Lewiston side. Then began a mad scramble through the darkness up a fisherman’s path steep as trail of mountain goat, sheer against the face of the cliff. When day dawned misty and gray over the black tide of the rolling river, the Canadian batterymen of Queenston Heights were astounded to see American sharp-shooters mustered on the cliff behind and above them. A quick rush, and the Canadian batterymen were driven from their ground, the Canadian cannon silenced, and while wild shoutings of triumph rose from the spectators at Lewiston, the American boats continued to pour soldiers across the river.

It was at this stage Brock came riding from Fort George so spattered with mud from head to heel he was not recognized by the soldiers. One glance was enough. The Canadians had lost the day. Sending messengers to bid General Sheaffe hurry the troops from Fort George, and other runners to bring up the troops from Chippewa behind the Americans on Queenston Heights, Brock charged up the hill amid shriek of bombs and clatter of sharpshooters. He had dismounted and was scrambling over a stone wall. “Follow me, boys!” he shouted to the British grenadiers; then at the foot of the hill, waving his sword: “Now take a breath; you will need it! Come on! come on!” and he led the rush of two hundred men in scarlet coats to dislodge the Americans. A shot pierced his wrist. “Push on, York volunteers,” he shouted. His portly figure in scarlet uniform was easy mark for the sharpshooters hidden in the brush of Queenston Heights. One stepped deliberately out and took aim. Though a dozen Canadian muskets flashed answer, Brock fell, shot through the breast, dying with the words on his lips, “My fall must not be noticed to stop the victory.” Major Macdonnell led in the charge up the hill, but the next moment his horse plunged frantically, and he reeled from the saddle fatally wounded. For a second time the British were repulsed, and the Americans had won the Heights, if not the day.

The invaders were resting on their arms, snatching a breakfast of biscuit and cheese about midday, when General Sheaffe arrived from Fort George with troops breathless from running. A heart-shattering huzza from the village warned the Americans that help had come, and they were to arms in a second; but Sheaffe had swept round the Heights, Indians on one side of the hill, soldiers on the other, and came on the surprised Americans as from the rear. There was a wild whoop, a dash up the hill, a pause to fire, when the air was splinted by nine hundred instantaneous shots. Then through the smoke the British rushed the Heights at bayonet point. For three hours the contest raged in full sight of Lewiston, a hand-to-hand butchery between Sheaffe’s fresh fighters and the Americans, who had been on their feet since midnight. Indian tomahawk played its part, but it is a question if the scalping knife did as deadly work as the grenadier’s long bayonets. Cooped up between the enemy and the precipice, the American sharpshooters waited for the help that never came. In vain Van Rensselaer’s officers prayed and swore and pleaded with the volunteer troops on the Lewiston side. The men flatly refused to cross; for boat loads of mangled bodies were brought back at each passage. Discipline fell to pieces. It was the old story of volunteers, brave enough at a spurt, going to pieces in panic under hard and continued strain. Driven from Queenston Heights, the invaders fought their way down the cliff path by inches to the water side, and there . . . there were no boats! Pulling off his white necktie, an officer held it up on the point of his sword as signal of surrender. It was one of the most gallant fights on both sides in Canadian history, though officers over on the Lewiston shore were crying like boys at the sight of nine hundred Americans surrendering.

Truce was then arranged for the burial of the dead. The bodies of Brock and Macdonnell were laid on a gun wagon and conveyed between lines of sorrowing soldiers, with arms reversed, to the burial place outside Fort George. As the regimental music rang out the last march of the two dead officers, minute guns were fired in sympathy all along the American shore. “He would have done as much for us,” said the American officers of the gallant Brock.

Van Rensselaer at once resigns. “Proclamation” Smyth, whose addresses resemble Fourth of July backwoods orations, succeeds as commander of the American army; but “Proclamation” Smyth makes such a mess of a raid on Fort Erie, retreating with a haste suggestive of Hull at Detroit, that he is mobbed when he returns to the United States shore. But what the United States lose by land, they retrieve by sea. England’s best ships are engaged in the great European war. From June to December, United States vessels sweep the sea; but this is more a story of the English navy than of Canada. The year of 1812 closes with the cruisers of Lake Ontario chasing each other through many a wild snowstorm.

As the year 1812 proved one of jubilant victory for Canada, so 1813 was to be one of black despair. With the exception of four brilliant victories wrested in the very teeth of defeat, the year passes down to history as one of the darkest in the annals of the country. The population of the United States at this time was something over seven millions, and it was not to be thought for one moment that a nation of this strength would remain beaten off the field by the little province of Ontario (Upper Canada), whose population numbered barely ninety thousand. General Harrison hurries north from the Wabash with from six to eight thousand men to retrieve the defeat of Detroit. At Presqu’ Isle, on Lake Erie, hammer and mallet and forging iron are heard all winter preparing the fleet for Commodore Perry that is to command Lake Erie and the Upper Lakes for the Americans. At Sackett’s Harbor similar preparations are under way on a fleet for Chauncey to sweep the English from Lake Ontario; and all along both sides of the St. Lawrence, as winter hedged the waters with ice, lurk scouts, the Americans, for the most part, uniformed in blue, the Canadians in Lincoln green with gold braid, watching chance for raid and counter raid during the winter nights. The story of these thrilling raids will probably pass into the shadowy realm of legend handed down from father to son, for few of them have been embodied in the official reports.

From being hard pressed on the defensive, Canada has suddenly sprung into the position of jubilant victor, and if Brock had lived, she would probably have followed up her victories by aggressive invasion of the enemy’s territory; but all effort was literally paralyzed by the timidity and vacillation of the governor general, Sir George Prevost. Prevost’s one idea seems to have been that as soon as the obnoxious embargo laws were revoked by England, the war would stop. When the embargo was revoked and the armistice of midsummer simply terminated in a resumption of war, this idea seems to have been succeeded by the single aim to hold off conclusions with the United States till England could beat Napoleon and come to the rescue. All winter long scouts and bold spirits among the volunteers craved the chance to raid the anchored fleets of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, but Prevost not only forbade the invasion of the enemy’s territory, but before the year was out actually advocated the abandonment of Ontario. If his advice had been followed, it is no idle supposition to infer that the fate of Ontario would have been the same as the destiny of the Ohio and Michigan.

One night in February the sentry at the village of Brockville, named after the dead hero, was surprised by two hundred American raiders dashing up from the frozen river bed. Before bugles could sound to arms, jails had been opened, stores looted, houses plundered, and the raiders were off and well away with fifty-two prisoners and a dozen sleigh loads of provisions. Gathering some five hundred men together from the Kingston region, M’Donnell and Jenkins of the Glengarrys prepared to be revenged. Cannon were hauled out on the river from the little village of Prescott to cross the ice to Ogdensburg. The river here is almost two miles wide, and as it was the 23d of February, the ice had become rotten from the sun glare of the coming spring. As the cannon were drawn to mid-river, though it was seven in the morning, the ice began to heave and crack with dire warning. To hesitate was death; to go back as dangerous as to go forward. With a whoop the men broke from quick march to a run, unsheathing musket and fixing bayonet blades as they dashed ahead to be met with a withering cross fire as they came within range of the American batteries. In places, the suck of the water told where the ice had given behind. Then bullets were peppering the river bed in a rain of fire, Jenkins and M’Donnell to the fore, waving their swords. Then bombs began to ricochet over the ice. If the range of the Ogdensburg cannon had been longer, the whole Canadian force might have been sunk in mid-river; but the men were already dashing up the American shore whooping like fiends incarnate. First a grapeshot caught Jenkins’ left arm, and it hung in bloody splinters. Then a second shot took off his right arm. Still he dashed forward, cheering his men, till he dropped in his tracks, faint from loss of blood. No answer came back to the summons to surrender, and, taking possession of an outer battery, the Canadians turned its cannon full on the village. Under cover of the battery fire, and their own cannon now in position, the whole force of Canadians immediately rushed the town at bayonet point. Now the bayonet in a solid phalanx of five hundred men is not a pleasant weapon to stand up against. As the drill sergeants order, you not only stick the bayonet into your enemy, but you turn it round “to let the air in” so he will die; and before the furious onslaught of bayonets, the defenders of Ogdensburg broke, and fled for the woods. Within an hour the Canadians had burnt the barracks, set fire to two schooners iced up, and come off with loot of a dozen cannon, stores of all sorts, and with prisoners to the number of seventy-four.

The ice had left Lake Ontario early this year, and by mid-April Commander Chauncey slipped out of Sackett’s Harbor with sixteen vessels, having on board seventeen hundred troops, besides the crews. It will be remembered that the capital of Ontario had been moved from Niagara (Newark) to York (Toronto) on the north side of Lake Ontario, then a thriving village of one thousand souls on the inner shore of Humber Bay. On the sand reef known as the Island, in front of the harbor, had been constructed a battery with cannon. The main village lay east of the present city hall. Westward less than a mile was Government House, on the site of the present residence. Between Government House and the village was not a house of any sort, only a wood road flanking the lake, and badly cut up by ravines. Just west of Government House, and close to the water, was a blockhouse or tower used as powder magazine, mounted with cannon to command the landing from the lake. Some accounts speak of yet another little outer battery or earthwork farther westward. North of the Government House road, or what is now King Street, were dense woods. General Sheaffe, who had succeeded Brock at Queenston Heights, chanced to be in Toronto in April with some six hundred men. Just where the snug quarters of the Toronto Hunt Club now stand you may look out through the green foliage of the woods fringing the high cliffs of Lake Ontario, and there lies before your view the pure sky-blue surface of an inland sea washing in waves like a tide to the watery edge of the far sky line. Early in the morning of April 27 a forest ranger, dressed in the customary Lincoln green, was patrolling the forested edge of Scarborough Heights above the lake. The trees had not yet leafed out, but were in that vernal state when the branches between earth and sky take on the appearance of an aerial network just budding to light and color; and in the ravines still lay patches of the winter snow. The morning was hazy, warm, odoriferous of coming summer, with not a breath of wind stirring the water. As the sun came up over the lake long lines of fire shot through the water haze. Suddenly the scout paused on his parade. Something was advancing shoreward through the mist, advancing in a circling line like the ranks of wild birds flying north, with a lap lap lap of water drip and a rap rap rap of rowlocks from a multitude of sweeps. The next instant the forest rang to a musket shot, for the scout had discovered Commodore Chauncey’s fleet of sixteen vessels being towed forward by rowers through a dead calm. The musket shot was heard by another scout nearer the fort. The signal was repeated by another shot, and another for the whole twelve miles, till General Sheaffe, sitting smoking a cigar in Government House, sprang to his feet and rushed out, followed by his officers, to scan the harbor of Humber Bay from the tops of the fort bastions. Sure enough! there was the fleet, led by Chauncey’s frigate with twenty-four cannon poking from its sides, a string of rowboats in tow behind to land the army, coming straight across the harbor over water calm as silk. It has been told how the fleet made the mistake of passing beyond the landing, but the chances are the mistake was intentional for the purpose of avoiding the cannon of the fort bastions. At all events the report may be believed that the most of Toronto people forgot to go back to breakfast that morning. A moment later officers were on top of the bastion towers, directing battery-men to take range for their cannon. A battalion variously given as from fifty to one hundred, along with some Indians, was at once dispatched westward to ambush the Americans landing. Another division was posted at the battery beyond Government House. Sheaffe saw plainly from the number of men on deck that he was outnumbered four to one, and the flag on the commodore’s boat probably told him that General Dearborn, the commander in chief, was himself on board to direct the land forces. Sheaffe has been bitterly blamed for two things, for not invading Niagara after the victory on Queenston Heights, and for his conduct at Toronto. He now withdrew the main forces to a ravine east of the fort, plainly preparatory for retreat. Not thus would Brock have acted.

Meanwhile time has worn on to nine o’clock. The American ships have anchored. The Canadian cannon are sending the bombs skipping across the water. The rowboats are transferring the army from the schooners, and the ambushed sharpshooters are picking the bluecoats off as they step from ships to boats.

“By the powers!” yells Forsyth, an American officer, “I can’t stand seeing this any longer. Come on, boys! jump into our boats!” and he bids the bugles blow till the echoes are dancing over Humber waters. Dearborn and Chauncey stay on board. Pike leads the landing, and Chauncey’s cannon set such grape and canister flying through the woods as clear out those ambushed shooters, the Indians flying like scared partridges, and the advance is made along Government House road at quick march. Just west of the Government House battery the marchers halt to send forward demand for surrender. Firing on both sides ceases. The smoke clears from the churned-up waters of the bay, and Commander Pike has seated himself on an old cannon, when, before answer can come back to the demand, a frightful accident occurs that upsets all plans. Waiting for the signal to begin firing again, a batteryman in the near bastion was holding the lighted fuse in his right hand, ready for the cannon, when something distracted his attention, and he wheeled with the lighted match behind him. It touched a box of explosives. If any proof were needed that the tragedy was not designed, it is to be found in the fact that English officers were still on the roof of the blockhouse, and the apartment below crowded with Canadians. A roar shook the earth. A cloud of black flame shot into mid-air, and the next minute the ground for half a mile about was strewn with the remains, mangled to a pulp, of more than three hundred men, ninety of whom were Canadians, two hundred and sixty Americans, including Brigadier Pike fatally wounded by a rock striking his head. In the horror of the next few moments, defense was forgotten. Wheelbarrows, trucks, gun wagons, were hurried forward to carry wounded and dead to the hospital. Leaving his officers to arrange the terms of surrender, at 2 P.M. Sheaffe retreated at quick march for Kingston, pausing only to set fire to a half-built ship and some naval stores. Lying on a stretcher on Chauncey’s ship, Pike is roused from unconsciousness by loud huzzas.

“What is it?” he asks.

“They are running up the stars and stripes, sir.”

A smile passed over Pike’s face. When the surgeon looked again, the commander was dead. For twenty-four hours the haggle went on as to terms of capitulation. Within that time, two or three things occurred to inflame the invading troops. They learned that Sheaffe had slipped away; as the American general’s report put it, “They got the shell, but the kernel of the nut got away.” They learned that stores had been destroyed after the surrender had been granted. Without more restraint, and in defiance of orders, the American troops gave themselves up to plunder all that night. In their rummaging through the Parliament buildings they found hanging above the Speaker’s chair what Canadian records declare was a wig, what American reports say was a human scalp sent in by some ranger from the west. From what I have read in the private papers of fur traders in that period regarding international scalping, I am inclined to think that wig may have been an American scalp. Certainly, the fur traders of Michilimackinac wrapped no excuses round their savagery when the canoes all over the coasts of Lake Superior, in lieu of flags, had American scalps flaunting from their prows. At all events, word went out that an American scalp had been found above the Speaker’s chair. It was night. The troops were drunk with success and perhaps with the plunder of the wine shops. All that night and all the next day and night the skies were alight with the flames of Toronto’s public buildings on fire. Also, the army chest with ten thousand dollars in gold, which Sheaffe had forgotten, was dug up on pain of the whole town being fired unless the money were delivered. Private houses were untouched. Looted provisions which the fleet cannot carry away, Chauncey orders distributed among the poor. Then, leaving some four hundred prisoners on parole not to serve again during the war, Chauncey sails away for Niagara.

It is a month later. Down at Fort George on the Canadian side General Vincent knows well what has happened at Toronto and is on the lookout for the enemy’s fleet. On the American side of the Niagara River, from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, are seven thousand troops eager to wipe out the stain of last year’s defeat. On the Canadian side, from Fort George to Chippewa and Erie, are twenty-three hundred men, mostly volunteers from surrounding farms, and powder is scarce and provisions are scarce, for Chauncey’s fleet has cut off help from St. Lawrence and Kingston way. All the last two weeks of May, heavy hot fog lay on the lake and on the river between the hostile lines, but there was no mistaking what Chauncey’s fleet was about. Red-hot shot showers on Fort George in a perfect rain. Standing on the other side of the river are thousands of spectators, among them one grand old swashbuckler fellow in a cocked hat, whose fighting days are past, taking snuff after the fashion of a former generation and wearing an air of grand patronage to the American troops because he has seen service in Europe.

Then at night time, when the lurid glare of flame lights up the foggy darkness, the old gentleman is put to his trumps. “See!” they say; “Fort George is on fire”; and over at Fort George the bucket brigade works hard as the cannoneers. But the fog is too good a chance to be missed by Chauncey; rowing out with muffled oars all the nights of May 24 and 25, he has his men sounding . . . sounding . . . sounding in silence the channel, right within pistol shot of Fort George. The night of the 26th troops and marines are bidden breakfast at two in the morning, and be ready for action with a single blanket and rations for one day. That is all they are told. They embark at four. The waters are dead calm, the morning of the 27th gray as wool with fog. Sweeps out Chauncey’s fleet, circles up to Fort George with one hundred scows in tow, carrying fifty soldiers each. Vincent takes his courage in his teeth and gathers his one thousand men inside the walls. Then the cannon of the frigates split fog and air and earth, and, under cover of the fire, the scows gain the land by 9 A.M. First, Vincent’s sharpshooters sally from the fort and fire; then they fire from the walls; then they overturn guns, retreat from the walls, throw what powder they cannot carry into the water, and retreat, fighting, behind stone walls and ditches. The contest of one thousand against six thousand is hopeless. Vincent sends coureurs riding like the wind to Chippewa and Queenston and Erie, ordering the Canadians to retire to the Back Country. By four o’clock in the afternoon Americans are in possession of the Canadian side from Fort George to Erie. Vincent retreats at quick march along the lake shore towards what is now Hamilton. June 1 General Dearborn sends his officers, Chandler and Winder, in hot pursuit with thirty-five hundred men.

Vincent’s soldiers have less than ninety rounds of powder to a man. He has only one thousand men, for the garrisons of Chippewa and Queenston Heights and Erie have fallen back in a circle to the region of St. David’s. June 5, Vincent’s Canadians are in camp at Burlington Bay. Only seven miles away, at Stony Creek, lies the American army, out sentries posted at a church, artillery on a height commanding a field, officers and men asleep in the long grass. Humanly speaking, nothing could prevent a decisive battle the next day. The two American officers, Chandler and Winder, sit late into the night, candles alight over camp stools, mapping out what they think should be the campaign. It is a hot night, muggy, with June showers lighted up by an occasional flash of sheet lightning. Then all candles out, and pitch darkness, and silence as of a desert! The American army is asleep, in the dead sleep of men exhausted from long, hard, swift marching. The artillerymen on the hillocks, the sentries, the outposts at the church, they, too, are sound asleep!

But the Canadians, too, know that, humanly speaking, nothing can prevent a decisive battle on the morrow. The stories run I do not vouch for their truth, though facts seem to point to some such explanation that Harvey, a Canadian officer, had come back to the American army that night disguised as a Quaker peddling potatoes, and noted the unguarded condition of the exhausted troops; also that Fitzgibbons, the famous scout, came through the American lines dressed as a rustic selling butter. Whether these stories are true or not, or whether, indeed, the Canadians knew anything about the American camp, they plucked resolution from desperation. If they waited for the morrow’s battle, they would be beaten. Harvey proposed to Vincent that seven hundred picked men go back through the dark and raid the American camp. Vincent left the entire matter to Harvey. Setting out at 11.30 along what is now Main Street, Hamilton, the Canadians marched in perfect silence. Harvey had given orders that not a shot should be fired, not a word spoken, the bayonet alone to be used. By two in the morning of June 6 the marchers came to the church where the sentries were posted. Two were stabbed to death before they awakened. The third was compelled to give the password, then bayoneted in turn. The Canadian raiders might have come to the very midst of the American army if it had not been for the jubilant hilarity of some young officers, who, capturing a cannon, uttered a wild huzza. On the instant, bugles sounded alarm; drums beat a crazy tattoo, and every man leaped from his place in the grass, hand on pistol. The next second the blackness of the night was ablaze with musketry; the soldiers were firing blindly; officers were shouting orders that nobody heard; troops were dashing here, there, everywhere, lost in the darkness, the heavy artillery horses breaking tether ropes and stampeding over the field. Major Plenderleath with a company of young Canadians suddenly found himself in the midst of the American camp. One of the young raiders stabbed seven Americans to death; a brother bayoneted four, and before daylight betrayed the smallness of their forces the raiders came safely off with three guns and one hundred prisoners, including the two American officers, Winder and Chandler. The loss to the British was one hundred and fifteen killed and wounded; but there would be no battle the next day. The battle of Stony Creek sent the Americans retreating back down the lake front to Fort George, harried by the English fleet under Sir James Yeo from Kingston. A hundred episodes might be related of the Stony Creek raid. For years it was to be the theme of camp-fire yarns. For instance, in the flare of musketry fire a Canadian found himself gazing straight along the blade of an American’s bayonet. “Sir, the password,” demanded the American sentry. Luckily the scout, instead of wearing an English red coat, had on a blue jacket resembling that of the American marines, and he instantly took his cue. “Rascal,” he thundered back, “what do you mean, off your line? Go back to your post!” The sentry’s bayonet dropped; there was momentary darkness, and the Canadian literally bolted. Then ludicrous ill luck befell all the generals. Vincent had accompanied the raiders on horseback. When the bugles sounded “retire,” he gave his horse the bit, and in the pitch darkness the brute carried him pellmell along the wrong road, over fences and hayfields, some fifteen miles into the Back Country. Next day, when Vincent was missing, under flag of truce messengers went to the retreating American army to find if he were among the dead. At four in the afternoon his horse came limping into the Canadian camp. Chandler, the American officer, on awakening had sprung on horseback and spurred over the field shouting commands. In the darkness his horse fell and threw him. When Chandler came to himself he was prisoner among the Canadians. Winder’s ill luck was equally bad. By the flare of the firing he saw what he thought was a group of artillerymen deserting a gun. Dashing up, he laid about him with his pistol, shouting, “Come on! come on!” Another flare of fire, and he found himself surrounded by a circle of Canadian bayonets. “Drop your pistol, sir, or you are a dead man,” ordered a young Canadian, and Winder surrendered.

It will be recalled that the garrisons of Queenston below the Falls, and Chippewa above, and Erie at the head of the river, had retreated from the invading Americans to the Back Country now traversed by Welland Canal. From different posts beyond what was known as the Black Swamp, these bands of the dispersed Canadian army swooped down on the American outposts, harrying the whole American line from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. Of all the raiders none was more daring than Lieutenant Fitzgibbons, posted beyond the Beaver Dams, at a stone house near De Ceu’s Falls. Space forbids more than one episode of his raids. Once, while riding along Lundy’s Lane alone, he was recognized by the wife of a Canadian captain, who dashed from the cottage, warning him to retreat, as a hundred and fifty Americans had just passed that way. Standing in front of the roadside inn was the cavalry horse of an American. Fitzgibbons could n’t resist the temptation for a bout with the foe, and dismounting, was entering the door when a soldier in blue dashed at him with leveled musket. Naturally not keen to create alarm, Fitzgibbons knocked the weapon from the man’s hand, and without a sound had thrown him on the ground, when another American rifleman dashed from behind. Strong as a lion, Fitzgibbons threw the first man violently against the second, and was holding both at bay beneath his leveled rifle when one of the downed men snatched the Irishman’s sword from the scabbard. He was in the very act of thrusting the sword point into Fitzgibbons, when the innkeeper’s wife, with a dexterous kick, sent the weapon whirling out of his hand. Fitzgibbons disarmed the men, tied them, threw them across his horse, and himself mounting, galloped to the woods with a laugh, though one hundred and fifty Americans were within a quarter of a mile.

The American commanders at Niagara determined to clean out this nest of raiders from the Back Country, and Lieutenant Boerstler was ordered to march from Fort George with some six hundred men. Leaving Fort George secretly at night, Boerstler came to Queenston at eleven on the night of June 23. Here all Canadian soldiers free on parole were seized, to prevent word of the attack reaching the Back Country. The troops were not even permitted to light camp fire or candles. The great secrecy of the American marchers at once roused suspicion among the Canadians between Queenston and the village of St. David’s that the expedition was directed against Fitzgibbons’ scouts. At his home, between Queenston and St. David’s, dwelt a United Empire Loyalist, James Secord, recovering from dangerous wounds received in the battle of Queenston Heights. He was too weak himself to go by night and forewarn Fitzgibbons, but his wife, Laura Ingersoll, a woman of some thirty years, was also of the old United Empire Loyalist stock. She immediately set out alone for the Back Country to warn Fitzgibbons. Many and contradictory stories are told of her march. Whether she tramped two nights and two days, or only one night and one day, whether her march led her twenty or only twelve miles, matters little. She succeeded in passing the first sentry on the excuse she was going out to milk a cow, and she eluded a second by telling him she wished to visit a wounded brother, which was true. Then she struck away from the beaten path through what was known as the Black Swamp. It had rained heavily. The cedar woods were soggy with moisture, the swamp swollen, and the streams running a mill race. Through the summer heat, through the windfall, over the quaking forest bog, tramped Laura Secord. It may be supposed that the most of wild animals had been frightened from the woods by the heavy cannonading for almost a year; but the hoot of screech owl, the eldritch scream of wild cat, the far howl of the wolf pack hanging on the trail of the armies for carrion, were not sounds quieting to the nerves of a frightened woman flitting through the forest by moonlight. It was clear moonlight when she came within range of Beaver Dam and De Ceu’s house. She had just emerged in an open field when she was assailed with unearthly yells, and a thousand ambushed Indians rose from the grass.

“Woman! A woman! What does a white woman here?” demanded the chief, seizing her arm. She answered that she was a friend and it was matter of life and death for her to see Fitzgibbons at once. So Laura Secord delivered her warning and saved the Canadian army. The episode has gone down to history one of the national legends, like the story of Madeline Vercheres on the St. Lawrence. Fitzgibbons posts his forty men in place, and Ducharme, commander of the Indians, scatters his one thousand redskins in ambush along the trail. Also, word is sent for two other detachments to come with all speed.

June 24, at seven in the morning, Boerstler is moving along a narrow forest trail through the beech woods of Beaver Dams. The men are advancing single file, mounted infantrymen first with muskets slouched across saddle pommels, then the heavy wagons, then cavalry to rear. The timber is heavy, the trail winding. Here the long line deploys out from the trail to avoid jumping windfall; there halt is made to cut a way for the wagons; then the long line moves sleepily forward, yellow sunlight shafted through the green foliage across the riders’ blue uniforms. Suddenly a shot rings out, and another, and another! The forest is full of unseen foes, before, behind, on all sides, the cavalry forces breaking rank and dashing forward among the wagons. Boerstler sees it will be as unsafe to retreat as to go on. Sending messengers back to Fort George for aid, he pushes forward into an open wheat field. Fifty-six men have fallen, and the bullets are still raining from an invisible foe. Looking back he sees mounted men in green coats passing and repassing across his trail, filing and refiling. It is a trick of Fitzgibbons to give an impression he has ten times forty men, but the Americans do not know. There is no retreat, and Indians are to the fore. In the midst of confusion Fitzgibbons comes forward with a white handkerchief on his sword point and begs Boerstler to prevent bloodshed by instant surrender. Boerstler demands to see the number of his enemies. Fitzgibbons says he will repeat the request to his commanding officer. Luck is with Fitzgibbons, for just as he goes back a small party of reenforcements arrives, and one of its captains acts the part of commanding officer, telling Boerstler’s messenger haughtily that the demand to see the enemy is an insult, and answer must be given in five minutes or the Canadians will not be responsible for the Indians. The fight has lasted three hours. Boerstler surrenders with his entire force. Such was the battle of Beaver Dams.

Ever since Brock had captured Detroit in 1812, General Procter, with twenty-five hundred Canadians, had been holding the western part of Ontario; and the defeat of the English at Fort George had placed him in a desperate position. His men had been without pay for months; their clothes were in tatters, and now, with the Americans in possession of Niagara region, there was danger of Procter’s food supply being cut off. Procter himself had not been idle these six months. In fact, he had been too active for the good of his supplies. Space forbids a detailed account of the raids directed by him and carried out with the aid of Tecumseh, the great Shawnee chief. January of 1813 saw a detachment of Procter’s men up Raisin River, west of Detroit, where they defeated General Winchester and captured nearly five hundred prisoners, to be set free on parole. Harrison, the American general, is on his way to Lake Erie to rescue Detroit. Procter hastens in May to meet him with one thousand Canadians and fifteen hundred Indians. The clash takes place at a barricade known as Fort Meigs on Maumee River, south of Lake Erie, when again, by the aid of Tecumseh, Procter captures four hundred and fifty prisoners. It was on this occasion that the Indians broke from control and tomahawked forty defenseless American prisoners. August sees Procter raiding Sandusky; but the Americans refuse to come out and battle, and the axes of the Canadians are too dull to cut down the ironwood pickets, and when at night Procter’s bugles sound retreat, he has lost nearly one hundred men. At last, in September, the fleets being built for the Canadians at Amherstburg and for the Americans at Presqu’ Isle are completed. Whichever side commands Lake Erie will control supplies; and though Captain Barclay, the Canadian, is short of men, Procter cannot afford to delay the contest for supremacy any longer. He orders Barclay to sail out and seek Commodore Perry, the American, for decisive battle.

Procter’s position was now doubly desperate. He was cut off from supplies. At a council with the Indians, though Tecumseh, the chief, was for fighting to the bitter death, it was decided to retreat up the Thames to Vincent’s army near modern Hamilton. All the world knows the bitter end of that retreat. Procter seems to have been so sure that General Harrison would not follow, that the Canadian forces did not even pause to destroy bridges behind them; and behind came Harrison, hot foot, with four thousand fighters from the Kentucky backwoods. October first the Canadians had retreated far as Chatham, provisions and baggage coming in boats or sent ahead on wagons. Procter’s first intimation of the foe’s nearness was a breathless messenger with word the Americans just a few miles behind had captured the provision boats. Sending on his family and the women with a convoy of two hundred and fifty soldiers, Procter faced about on the morning of October the 5th, to give battle. On the left was the river Thames, on the right a cedar swamp, to rear on the east the Indian mission of Moraviantown. The troops formed in line across a forest road. Procter seems to have lost both his heart and his head, for he permitted his fatigued troops to go into the fight without breakfast. Not a barricade, not a hurdle, not a log was placed to break the advance of Harrison’s cavalry. The American riders came on like a whirlwind. Crack went the line of Procter’s men in a musketry volley! The horses plunged, checked up, reared, and were spurred forward. Another volley from the Canadians! But it was too late. Harrison’s fifteen hundred riders had galloped clean through the Canadian lines, slashing swords as they dashed past. Now they wheeled and came on the Canadians’ rear. Indians and Canadians scattered to the woods before such fury, like harried rabbits, poor Tecumseh in the very act of tomahawking an American colonel when a pistol shot brought him down. The brave Indian chief was scalped by the white backwoodsmen and skinned and the body thrown into the woods a prey to wolves. Flushed with victory and without Harrison’s permission, the Kentucky men dashed in and set fire to Moraviantown, the Indian mission. As for Procter, he had mounted the fleetest horse to be found, and was riding in mad flight for Burlington Heights. It is almost a pity he had not fallen in some of his former heroic raids, for he now became a sorry figure in history, reprimanded and suspended from the ranks of the army. The only explanation of Procter’s conduct at Moraviantown is that he was anxious for the safety of his wife and daughters, perhaps needlessly fearing that the rough backwoodsmen would retaliate on them for the treachery of the Indians tomahawking American prisoners of war.

And it had fared almost as badly with the Canadian fleet on Lake Ontario. The boats under Sir James Yeo, the young English commander, were good only for close-range fighting, the boats under Commodore Chauncey best for long-range firing. All July and August the fleets maneuvered to catch each other off guard. Between times each raided the coast of the other for provisions, Chauncey paying a second visit to Toronto, Yeo swooping down on Sodus Bay. All September the game of hide and seek went on between the two Ontario squadrons. Sunday night, the 8th of September, in a gale, two of Chauncey’s ships sank, with all hands but sixteen. Two nights later in a squally wind, by the light of the moon, two more of his slow sailers, unable to keep up with the rest of the fleet, were snapped up by the English off Niagara with one hundred captives. Again, on September 27, at eight in the evening, six miles off Toronto harbor, Chauncey came up with the English, and the two fleets poured broadsides into each other. Then Yeo’s crippled brigs limped into Toronto harbor, while Chauncey sailed gayly off to block all connection with Montreal and help to convoy troops from Niagara down the St. Lawrence for the master stroke of the year. The way was now clear for the twofold aim of the American staff, to starve out Ontario and concentrate all strength in a signal attack on Montreal.

The autumn campaign was without doubt marked by the most comical and heroic episodes of the war. Wilkinson was to go down the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario with eight thousand men to join General Hampton coming by the way of Lake Champlain with another five thousand men in united attack against Montreal. November 5 Wilkinson’s troops descended in three hundred flat-boats through the Thousand Islands, now bleak and leafless and somber in the gray autumn light. It seemed hardly possible that the few Canadian troops cooped up in Kingston would dare to pursue such a strong American force, but history is made up of impossibles. Feeling perfectly secure, Wilkinson’s troops scattered on the river. By November 10, at nine in the morning, half the Americans had run down the rapids of the Long Sault, and were in the region of Cornwall, pressing forward to unite with Hampton, where Chateauguay River came into Lake St. Louis, just above Montreal. The other half of Wilkinson’s army was above the Long Sault, near Chrysler’s Farm. From the outset the rear guard of the advancing invaders had been harried by Canadian sharpshooters. November 11, about midday, it was learned that a Canadian battalion of eight hundred was pressing eagerly on the rear. Chance shots became a rattling fusillade. Quick as flash the Americans land and wheel face about to fight, posted behind a stone wall and along a dried gully with sheltering cliffs at Chrysler’s Farm. By 2.30 the foes are shooting at almost hand-to-hand range. Then, through the powder smoke, the Canadians break from a march to a run, and charge with all the dauntless fury of men fighting for hearth and home. Before the line of flashing bayonets the invaders break and run. Two hundred have fallen on each side in an action of less than two hours. Then the boats go on down to the other half of the army at Cornwall, and here is worse news, news that sends Wilkinson’s army back to the American side of the St. Lawrence without attempting attack on Montreal. General Hampton on his way from Lake Champlain has been totally discomfited.

Finding the way to the St. Lawrence barred by the old raiders’ trail of Richelieu River, Hampton had struck across westward from Lake Champlain to join Wilkinson on the St. Lawrence, west of Montreal, somewhere near the road of Chateauguay River. With five thousand infantry and one hundred and eighty cavalry he has advanced to a ford beyond the fork of Chateauguay. Uncertain where the blow would be struck, Canada’s governor had necessarily scattered his meager forces.

To oppose advance by the Chateauguay he has sent a young Canadian officer, De Salaberry, with one hundred and fifty French Canadian sharp-shooters and one hundred Indians. De Salaberry does not court defeat by neglecting precautions because he is weak. Windfall is hurriedly thrown up as barricade along the trail. Where the path narrows between the river and the bleak forest, De Salaberry has tree trunks laid spike end towards the foe. At the last moment comes McDonnell of Brockville with six hundred men, but De Salaberry’s three hundred occupy the front line facing the ford. McDonnell is farther along the river. By the night of October 25 the American army is close on the dauntless little band hidden in the forest. On the morning of the 26th three thousand Americans cross the south bank of the river, with the design of crossing north again farther down and swinging round on De Salaberry’s rear. At the first shot of the bluecoats poor De Salaberry’s forlorn little band broke in panic fright and fled, but De Salaberry on the river bank had grabbed his bugle boy by the scruff of the neck with a grip of iron, and in terms more forcible than polite bade him “sound sound sound the advance,” till the forest was filled with flying echoes of bugle calls. McDonnell behind hears the challenge, and mistaking the cheering call for note of victory, bids his buglers blow, blow advance, blow and cheer like devils! The Americans pour shot into the forest. The bugle calls multiply till the woods seem filled with an advancing army and the yells split the sky. Also McDonnell has ordered his men to fire kneeling, so that few of the American shots take effect. The advancing host became demoralized. At 2.30 they sounded retreat, and it may truly be said that the battle of Chateauguay was won by De Salaberry’s bugle boy, held to the sticking point, not because he was brave, but because he could not run away. It is said that Hampton simply would not believe the truth when told of the numbers by whom he had been defeated. It is also said that immediately after the victory De Salaberry fell ill from a bad attack of nerves, brought on by lack of sleep. However that may be, the Canadian governor, Prevost, did not suffer from an attack of conscience, for in his report to the English government he ascribed the victory to his own management and presence on the field.

The year of 1813 closes darkly for both sides. Before withdrawing from Niagara region the invaders ravage the country and set fire to the village of Newark, driving four hundred women and children roofless to December snows. Sir Gordon Drummond, who has just come to command in Ontario, retaliates swiftly and without mercy. He crosses the Niagara by night; the fort is carried at bayonet point, three hundred men captured and three thousand arms taken. Next, Lewiston is burned, then Black Rock, and on the last day of the year, Buffalo. Down on the Atlantic Coast both fleets win victories, but the English work the greater hurt, for they blockade the entire coast south of New York. On the English squadron are European mercenaries who have been given the name of Canadian battalions, because their work is to harry the American coast in order to draw off the American army from Canada. European mercenaries have been the same the world over, riffraff blackguards, guilty of infamous outrages the moment they are out from under the officers’ eye. These were the troops misnamed “Canadians,” whose infamous conduct left a heritage of hate long after the war; but this is a story of the navy rather than of Canada.

The contest has now lasted for almost two years, and both sides are as far from decisive victory as when war was declared in June of 1812. Long since the embargo laws of France and England against neutral nations have been rescinded, and the American coast has suffered more from the blockade of this war than it ever did from the wars between France and England. The year 1814 opens with Napoleon defeated and England pouring aid across the Atlantic into Canada. Wilkinson’s big army hovers inactive round Lake Champlain, and Prevost is afraid to weaken Montreal by forwarding aid to Drummond at Niagara. The British fleet blockades Sackett’s Harbor, and the American fleet blockades Kingston. The Canadians raid Oswego on Lake Ontario for provisions. The Americans raid Port Dover on Lake Erie, leaving the country a blackened waste and Tom Talbot’s Castle Malahide of logs a smoking ruin, with the determined aim of cutting off all supplies in Ontario. Drummond sends his troops scouring the country inland from Niagara for provisions. Military law is established for the seizure of cattle and grain, but for the latter as high a price is paid as $2.50 a bushel, and many a pioneer farmer back from York (Toronto) and Burlington (Hamilton) dates the foundation of his fortune from the famine prices paid for bread during the War of 1812.

Of course the United States did not purpose leaving the frontier of Niagara because Drummond had burnt the forts. By May, Major General Brown had taken command of the United States troops at Buffalo. The next two months pass, drilling and training, and bringing forward provisions. July 3, at day dawn, during fog thick as wool on the lake, five thousand American troops cross to the Canadian side. Fort Erie’s English garrison capitulates on the spot, and the English retreat down Niagara River towards Chippewa by the Falls. At Chippewa, at Queenston, at Fort George, in all to guard the Canadian frontier are only some twenty-eight hundred men. Three fourths of these are kept doing garrison duty, leaving only seven hundred men free afield. Just beside Chippewa, a creek some twenty feet wide comes into Niagara River. The Canadians have destroyed the bridge as they retreat, but the Americans pursue, and at midnight of the 4th the two armies are facing each other across the brook, ominous dreadful silence through the darkness but for the sentry’s arms or the lumbering advance of artillery wagons dragged cautiously near the Canadians. The bridge is repaired under peppering shot from the British. By four on the afternoon of the 5th, the Americans have crossed the stream. Their artillery is in place, and another battalion has forded higher up and swept round to take the Canadians on the flank. The Canadians must either flee in such blind panic as Procter displayed at Moraviantown, or turn and fight. Indians in ambush, reenforcements from Fort George and Queenston formed in three solid columns, the English wheel to face the foe. First there is the rattling clatter of musketry fire from shooters behind in the grass. Then the solid columns break from a march to a run, and charge with their bayonets. The artillery fire of the Americans meets the runners in a terrible death blast; but as the front lines drop, the men behind step in their places till the armies are not one hundred yards apart. Then another blast from the heavy guns of the Americans literally tears the Canadian columns to tatters. As the smoke lifts there are no columns left, only scattered groups of men retreating across a field strewn thick with the mangled dead. Out of twelve hundred men, the Canadians have lost five hundred. The charge of the forlorn twelve hundred at Chippewa against the artillery of four thousand Americans has been likened to the charge of the Light Brigade in the Russian War. Though the Canadians were defeated, their heroic defense had for a few days at least checked the advance of the invaders. And now the position of the beleaguered became desperate. At Fort George, at Queenston, and at Burlington Heights, the men were put on half rations.

Why did the Americans not advance at once against Queenston and Fort George? For three weeks they awaited Chauncey’s fleet to attack from the water side, so the army could rush the fort from the land side; but Chauncey was ill and could not come, and the interval gave the hard-pressed Canadians their chance. Drummond comes from Kingston with four hundred fresh men; also he calls on the people to leave their farms and rally as volunteers to the last desperate fight. This increased his troops by another thousand, though many of the volunteers were mere boys, who scarcely knew how to hold a gun. Then, from a dozen signs, Drummond’s practiced eye foresaw that a forward movement was being planned by the enemy without Chauncey’s cooeperation. All the American baggage was being ordered to rear. False attacks to draw off observation are made on Fort George outposts. American scouts are seen reconnoitering the Back Country. Drummond rightly guessed that the attack was being planned in one of two directions, by rounding through the Back Country, either to fall in great numbers on Fort George, or to cut between the Canadian army of Hamilton region and of Niagara region, taking both battalions in the rear. From Fort George to Queenston Canadian troops are posted by Drummond, and where the road called Lundy’s Lane runs from the Falls at right angles to the Back Country more battalions are ordered on guard against the advance of the invaders. Fitzgibbons, the famous scout, climbing to a tree on top of a high hill, sees the Americans, five thousand of them, gray coats, blue coats, white trousers, moving up from Chippewa towards Lundy’s Lane. Quickly sixteen hundred Canadian troops under General Riall take possession of a hill fronting Lundy’s Lane and the Falls. On the hill is a little brown church and an old-fashioned graveyard. In the midst of the graves the Canadian cannon are posted. Round the cemetery runs a stone wall screened by shrubbery, and on both sides of Lundy’s Lane are endless orchards of cherry and peach and apples, the fruit just beginning to redden in the summer sun. Whether the enemy aim at Fort George or Hamilton, the Canadian position on Lundy’s Lane must be passed and captured. As soon as Drummond had Fitzgibbons’ report, he sent messengers galloping for Hercules Scott, who had been ordered to retreat to the lake, to come back to Lundy’s Lane with his twelve hundred men. It may be imagined that the Americans guessed what message the horseman, in the slather of foam was bearing back to Hercules Scott; for they at once attacked the Canadians in Lundy’s Lane with fury, to capture the guns on the hill before Hercules Scott’s reenforcements could come.

It was now six o’clock in the evening of July 25, a sweltering hot night, and the troops on both sides were parched for water, though the roar of whole inland oceans of water could be heard pouring over the Falls of Niagara. As the Canadians had charged against the American guns at Chippewa, so now the Americans charged uphill against the guns of the Canadians, hurling their full strength against the enemy’s center. Creeping under shelter of the cemetery stone walls, the bluecoats would fire a volley of musketry, jump over the fence, dash through the smoke, bayonet in hand, to capture the Canadian guns. Time, time again, the rush was dauntlessly made, and time, time again met by the withering blast. Before nine o’clock the attacking lines had lost more than five hundred men, and as many Canadians had fallen on the hill. The dead and mangled lay literally in heaps. As darkness deepened, lit only by the wan light of a fitful moon and the awesome flare of volley after volley, the fearful screams of the dying could be heard above the roar of the Falls and the whistle of cannon ball. Riall, the commander of the Canadians, had been wounded and captured. Of his sixteen hundred Canadians, Drummond had now left only one thousand, and he was himself bleeding from a deep wound in the neck. Half the American officers had been carried from the field injured, and still the command was repeated to rush the hill before Scott’s reenforcements came, and each time the advancing line was driven back shattered and thinned, Canadians dashing in pursuit, cheering and whooping, till both armies were so inextricably mixed it was impossible to hear or heed commands. It was in one of these melees that Riall, the Canadian, found himself among the American lines and was captured to the wild and jubilant shouting of the boys in blue and gray. Pause fell at nine o’clock. The Americans were mustering for the final terrible rush. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and the darkness was inky. Then a shout from the Canadian side split the very welkin. Hercules Scott had arrived with his twelve hundred men on a run, breathless and tired from a march and countermarch of twenty miles. The Americans took up the yell; for fresh reserves had joined them, too, and Lundy’s Lane became a bedlam of ear-shattering sounds, heavy artillery wagons forcing up the hill at a gallop over dead and dying, bombs from the Canadian guns exploding in the darkness, horses taking fright and bolting from their riders, carrying American guns clear across the lines among the Canadians. A wild yell of triumph told that the Americans had captured the hill. For the next two hours it was a hand-to-hand fight in pitchy darkness. Drummond, the Englishman, could be heard right in the midst of the American lines, shouting, “Stick to them, men! stick to them! Don’t give up! Don’t turn! Stick to them! You ’ll have it!” And American officers were found amidst Canadian battalions, shouting stentorian command: “Level low! Fire at their flashes! Watch the flash, and fire at their flashes!”

The Americans have captured the Canadian guns, but in the darkness they cannot carry them off. Each side thinks the other beaten, and neither will retreat. In the confusion it is impossible to rally the battalions, and men are attacking their own side by mistake. Both sides claim victory, and each is afraid to await what daylight may reveal; for it is no exaggeration to say that at the battle of Lundy’s Lane the blood of one third of each side dyed the field. The Canadians as defenders of their own homes, fighting in the last ditch, dare not retire. The Americans, having more to risk in numbers, withdraw their troops at two in the morning. Of her twenty-eight hundred men Canada had lost nine hundred; and the American loss is as great. Too exhausted to retire, Drummond’s men flung themselves on the ground and slept lying among the dead, heedless alike of the drenching rain that follows artillery fire, of the roaring cataract, of the groans from the wounded. Men awakened in the gray dawn to find themselves unrecognizable from blood and powder smoke, to find, in some cases, that the comrade whose coat they had shared as pillow lay cold in death by morning. While Drummond’s men bury the dead in heaps and carry the wounded to Toronto, the invaders have retreated with their wounded to Fort Erie.

It now became the dauntless Drummond’s aim to expel the enemy from Fort Erie. Five days after the battle of Lundy’s Lane he had moved his camp halfway between Chippewa and Fort Erie; but in addition to its garrison of two thousand, Fort Erie is guarded by three armed schooners lying at anchor on the lake front. Captain Dobbs of Drummond’s forces makes the first move. At the head of seventy-five men, he deploys far to the rear of the fort through the woods, carrying five flatboats over the forest trail eight miles, and on the night of the 12th of August slips out through the water mist towards the American schooners.

“Who goes?” challenges the ships’ watchman.

“Provision boats from Buffalo,” calls back the Canadian oarsman; and the rowboats pass round within the shadow of the schooner. A moment later the American ships are boarded. A trampling on deck calls the sailors aloft; but Dobbs has mastered two vessels before the fort wakes to life with a rush to the rescue.

Delay means almost inevitable loss to Drummond; for Prevost will send no more reenforcements, and the Americans are daily strengthening Fort Erie. Bastions of stone have been built. Outer batteries command approach to the walls, and along the narrow margin between the fort and the lake earthworks have been thrown up, mounted with cannon elbowing to the water’s edge. Taking advantage of the elation over Dobbs’ raid on the schooners, Drummond plans a night assault on the 15th of August. Rain had been falling in splashes all day. The fort trenches were swimming like rivers, and it may be mentioned that Drummond’s camp was swimming too, boding ill for his men’s health. One of the foreign regiments was to lead the assault round by the lake side, while Drummond and his nephew rushed the bastions. It will be remembered these foreign regiments of Napoleonic wars were composed of the offscourings of Europe. The fighters were to depend “on bayonet alone, giving no quarter.” Splashing along the rain-soaked road in silence and darkness, scaling ladders over shoulders, bayonets in hand, the foreign troops came to the earthwork elbowing out into the lake. This was passed by the men wading out in the lake to their chins; but the noise was overheard by the fort sentry, and a perfect blaze of musketry shattered the darkness and drove the mercenaries back pellmell, bellowing with terror. A few of the English and Canadian troops pressed forward, only to find that they could not reach within ladder distance of the walls at all, for spiked trees had been placed above the trenches in a perfect crisscross hurdle of sharpened ends. In old letters of the period one reads how the trenches were literally heaped with a jumbled mass of the dead. The other attacking columns fared almost as badly. One of the bastions had been entered by the cannon embrasures, Drummond, Junior, shouting to “give no quarter give no quarter,” when, from the cross firing in the courtyards, the powder magazine below this bastion was set on fire, and exploded with a terrific crash, killing the assailants almost to a man. In all, killed, wounded, missing, the assault cost Drummond’s army nine hundred men. September proved a rainy month. Drummond’s camp became almost a marsh, and the health of the troops compelled a move to higher ground. It was then the Americans sallied out in assault. Neither side could claim victory, but the skirmish cost each army more than five hundred men. Sir James Yeo now comes sailing up Lake Ontario with some of the sixteen thousand troops sent from England. The weather became unfavorable to movement on either side, rain and sleet continuously. Drummond foresaw that the season would compel the abandonment of Fort Erie, and on November 5, a scout came in with word that the invaders had crossed to the American side and Fort Erie had been blown up.

Meanwhile the peace commissioners have been at work; and the war that ought never to have taken place, that settled not one jot of the dispute which caused it, was closed by the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve of 1814. All captured forts, all plunder, all prisoners, are to be restored. Michilimackinac and Fort Niagara and Astoria on the Columbia go back to the United States; but of “impressment” and “right of search” and “embargo of neutrals” not a word. The waste of life and happiness accomplished not a feather’s weight unless it were the lesson of the criminal folly of a war between nations akin in aim and speech and blood.