Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1812 to 1820, part 4

[Illustration: BROCK MONUMENT, QUEENSTON HEIGHTS] 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 {347} 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 {348} 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 {349} 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 {350} 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 {351} 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.

[Illustration: YORK (TORONTO) HARBOR] 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 {352} 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 {353} 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 {354} 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 {355} 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.