Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North

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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.

[Illustration: DE SALABERRY]

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 {369} 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 {370} 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.

[Illustration: SIR GORDON DRUMMOND]

Of course the United States did not purpose leaving the frontier of
Niagara because Drummond had burnt the forts. By {371} 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 {372} 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 {373} 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, {374} 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 {375} 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!"

[Illustration: MONUMENT AT LUNDY'S LANE]

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, {376} 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 {377} 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.

{378} While Drummond is fighting for the very life of Canada along the
Niagara frontier, the war continues in desultory fashion elsewhere.
Kentucky riflemen raid western Ontario from Detroit to Port Dover. Up
on the lakes is a story of the war that reads like a page from border
raiders. American fur traders destroy Sault Ste. Marie. Canadian fur
traders retaliate by swooping on Mississippi fur posts. Out on the
Pacific Coast an English gunboat has captured John Jacob Astor's fur
post on the Columbia; and now in the fall of 1814 the Northwest Fur
Company of Montreal are conveying from Astor's fort the furs, worth
millions of dollars, in canoes across the Upper Lakes to Ottawa River.
Two armed American schooners, hiding on the north shore of Lake Huron,
lie in wait for the gay raiders of the Northwest Company; but at the
Sault the Nor'west voyageurs get wind of the danger. They, in turn,
hide their canoes in some of the blue coves of the north shore. Then,
stealing out at night, in canoes with muffled paddles, the Nor'westers
come on one schooner while the watch is asleep. They board her,
bayonet the crew, "pinion some of the wounded to the decks," and with
the captured vessel sidle up to the other vessel, and, before she is
aware of the new masters on board, have captured her too. Then, scalps
flaunting at the prows of their canoes, the Nor'west fur traders gayly
go their way. Down at Lake Champlain occurs the great fiasco of the
war,--the blot on Canada's escutcheon. Prevost with ten thousand
reenforcements has been ordered by the English Governor to proceed from
Montreal against the Americans by both water and land. While an
English fleet attacks the Americans, Prevost is to lead the troops
against Plattsburg. But the Canadian fleet meets terrible disaster.
The commander is killed by a rebounding cannon ball just as the action
begins; and twelve of the gunboats manned by the hired foreigners
desert _en masse_. The rest of the fleet is literally destroyed.
Instead of seconding attack by a battle on land, Prevost sits behind
his trenches waiting for the little fleet to win the battle for him;
and when the fleet is defeated, Prevost's courage sinks with the {379}
sinking ships. He gathers up his troops and retreats in a scare of
haste,--such a fright of unseemly, unsoldierly haste that nearly one
thousand of his soldiers desert in sheer disgust. Down at Nova Scotia
are raid and counter-raid too. The British and American fleets wage
fierce war that is not part of Canada's story; but in the contest the
public buildings of Washington are burned in retaliation for the
burning of Newark; and down at New Orleans the English suffer a
crushing defeat.

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.

{380}

CHAPTER XV

FROM 1812 TO 1846

Selkirk's colony--Troubles on passage--Winter on the bay--First winter on
Red River--First conflict--Nor'westers rally to defense--The storm
gathers--The Nor'westers victorious--Selkirk to the rescue--Banditti
warfare in Athabasca--In Athabasca--Robertson escapes--Frobisher's
death--The Pacific empire--Secede from Oregon

When Sir Alexander MacKenzie, the discoverer, went home to retire on an
estate in Scotland, he found the young nobleman and philanthropist, Lord
Selkirk, keenly interested in accounts of vast, new, unpeopled lands,
which lay beyond the Great Lakes. A change in the system of farming,
which dispossessed small farmers to turn the tenantries into sheep runs,
had caused terrible poverty in Scotland at this period. Here in Scotland
were people starving for want of land. There in America were lands idle
for lack of people. Selkirk had already sent out some colonists to the
Lake St. Clair region of Ontario and to Prince Edward Island, but what he
heard from MacKenzie turned his attention to the new empire of the
prairie. Then in Montreal, where he had been dined and wined by the
Northwest Company's "Beaver Club," he had heard still more of this vast
new land, of its wealth of furs, of its untimbered fields, where man had
but to put in the plowshare to sow his crop. The one great obstruction
to settlement there would be the claims of the Hudson's Bay Company to
exclusive monopoly of the country; but as Selkirk listened to the
descriptions of the Red River Valley given by Colin Robertson, who had
been dismissed by the Nor'westers, he thought he saw a way of overcoming
all difficulties which the fur traders could put in the way of settlement.

Owing to competition Hudson's Bay stock had fallen from two hundred and
fifty to fifty pounds sterling a share. On returning to Scotland Lord
Selkirk had begun buying up Hudson's Bay stock in the market, along with
Sir Alexander MacKenzie; but when MacKenzie learned that Selkirk's object
was colonization first, profits second, he broke in violent anger from
the partnership in speculation, and besought William MacGillivray to go
on {381} the open market and buy against Selkirk to defeat the plans for
settlement. What with shares owned by his wife's family of
Colville-Wedderburns, and those he had himself purchased, Selkirk now
owned a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company.

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