Niagara Falls History: wars, pioneers, aboriginal people

From his quarters at Fort George, General Block heard the boom of guns in the early morning hours of October 13, 1812. During June of that year the first news of the Declaration of War by the Congress had reached the Frontier not by government dispatch but from the fur trader, John Jacob Astor, whose pelts were often piled high on the wharves of the portage terminal at Lewingston, New York, across the River from Queenston. Now in October, General Stephen Van Rensselaer, Federalist, amature militarist, and political protege of Governor Daniel D. Tompkins of Net York State, was encamped at Lewingston, with four thousand regulars and militia, yelling to avenge Brock's singular capture of Detroit that finally brought its old defender, General William Hull, to face the martial court, Hard and bitter was the talk of the privates looking over the River at the rich prize waiting for successful arms. Later this tragic day these boisterous laddies were to refuse to cross this River to bring aid to their braver comrades in arms, a refusal that was to change the course of the war.
Brock, about to retire after a conference with his officers, called for his charger Alfred, and, with his aide-de-camp and orderly, galloped off to death and to an honored place in the history of his country, the cold rain of the melancholy dawn beating in his face.
At Queenston, the British batteries barked, muskets cracked, and men swore and prayed. A few of Van Rens-selaer's men, under the command of his nephew, Soloman Van Rensselaer, had gained a beachhead but, more important still, Captain John E. Wool, later to become a famed officer in the service, had gained the hilltop by a devious route and driven the defenders from their position.
When Brock finally slid from the saddle of his lathered mount, dispirited men of his favoreci 49th Regiment mere swarming through the village, Quickly he rallied them and turned to the attack at their head, reaching the battery midway to the top of the hill where Wool, unnoticed by the General, had already raised his colors.
Brock instructed the gunners in improving their fire, their twelve-pounder already having swamped a number of the crossing boats. Soon the lead from Wool's muskets made the General's position extremely dangerous, and he retired to the village below where he again rallied his beloved 49th and once more led his men up the hillside. Before he had advanced far, an Ohio militiaman stepped from the protection of a tree and brought the great soldier down, mortally wounded with a ball close to his heart. His whispered requests were that his death pass unnoticed and that his sister receive certain of his personal effects. His limp body was carried to a house in the village where his blood-soaked clothing was removed and replaced with that of a private, in order that his identity would not be revealed, if the enemy should come upon his remains.

Before his death Brock, fearful of the outcome of the battle, had sent a dispatch to Boston-born Leiutenant General Roger Sheaffe at Fort George, instructing this hard-bitten soldier, whose galling discipline had so nearly brought mutiny to the 49th some years previously, to bring reinforcements. This was a desperate gamble for it left the Fort with but a handful of protectors, although the American command muffed the inviting opportunity.
Before many hours had passed, Sheaffe, cutting across land and coming down through the little town of St. David, was at the hilltop with three hundred regulars and one hundred Indians anxious for a bloody field day. On they came, the red men rushing in to scalp those brought down by Sheaffe's hardy regulars, the last cream skimmed from the top of the British command.
Seeing that this tiny force could no longer hold the coveted heights it had so bravely won under Wadsworth, Wool, Scott, and Porter, Van Rensselaer, who (no matter what else might have been said about him j was no coward, recrossed the River to Lewiston, there to find several thousands of his soldiers sitting on the banks, front-row observers of the fine show their comrades were providing. Old Judge Peck rode with the General along the River, pleading with these fellows to join the good fight, but they received only profane answers. Some even hid behind the Constitution, maintaining that the rights it provided forbade the General's ordering them to fight on foreign sail. In this they concurred with the governors of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Machachusetts, who had refused to muster their militia to serve in a war that found so little enthusiasm in their various states. This was to be one of the most shameful hours of American history.
Now the brave fellows overstream had been pushed to the water's edge where the gallant Winfield Scott, without so much as a boat in which to place those who had escaped to this point alive, took his pocket handkerchief and tied it to his sword. That was the end, the British oficers mercifully keeping the Indians in hand.

This man Winfield Scott, once a Virginia lawyer, was made of pretty stern stuff. After his capture at the Heights, he, along with several officers, was installed in a tavern at Newark, there to await the pleasure of General Sheaffe. Two Indian chiefs, one called Captain Jacobs and the other a son of Joseph Brant, slipped by the British guard and entered the place to find Scott in the hall. They had fired upon him repeatedly before the surrender and were so sure they had hit him that only a personal examination would convince them of their poor marksmanship. Scott resented this intimate examination and knocked the son of the famous warrior to the floor, after telling both that they shot like old squaws. Infuriated, the red men vowed they would finish him off then and there, whereupon Scott took one of the swords of his captured brother officers and stood waiting for the charge. The prompt arrival of a British officer and the guard probably saved two Indian servants of the crown. This testy young man had only contempt for enraged red men.
An offcial truce was declared, and Brock's funeral was unmarred by a single hostile shot, so greatly was he held in esteem by his own officers and those across the River. The flag at Fort Niagara was at half mast when the muffled drums led the way to his grave, dug in the north-east bastion of Fort George, which he had so carefully prepared for the evil days he knew he had to face.
Not long afterwards Commodore Isaac Chauncey, the U. S. naval commander on Lake Ontario, snared a lonely sloop and found on its deck an old man seated on a pile of baggage. When asked by Chauncey what it was that he guarded so affectionately, the old fellow, Brock's former manservant, said it was the General's personal effects on their way to the family at Guernsey. Chauncey saw to it that the baggage reached Kingston safely.

A few miles farther up river lies the tiny village of Chippawa, all but forgotten as the terminus of the Canadian portage. During General Jacob B. Brown's soldierly attempt to drive the British forces from Upper Canada, Colonel Scott brought his brigade to this hamlet on July 4, 1814, where Brown joined him later the same day with a sizable army. Scott's men, owing to a lack of blue cloth, were clothed in gray and to this very day we are reminded of this fact by the gray-clad cadets of West Point. To commemorate Scott's victory in the skirmish at Chippawa, an order was issued in 1815 at West Point that the cadets should thereafter be uniformed in fabric of this color.
Major General Phineas Riall, in effort to stem Brown's advance, took up a position near by. Between the armies lay cleared land, land that was to become on July 5 historic battleground, for it was on this day that Riall advanced to challenge the invaders, and Brown quickly accepted the invitation. After a preliminary skirmish during which militia and Indians under American General of the Militia Peter B. Porter, were too smartly stung by British fire, Scott, drilling his brigade near by, unwittingly brought it into contact with Riall's men. General Brown, dashing by on his mount, shouted a warning to Scott, but it had come too late. Before many minutes had passed, the doughty Colonel was up to his ears in an engagement that was to retrieve some needed honor for American arms. Major Thomas S. Jesup had come to Scott's aid but found himself in trouble when his left wing collapsed. It was then that Scott and his gray-clad regulars, tough soldiers all, drove Riall back into the shelter of prepared British positions. During this invasion lead by General Brown, it was planned to capture Fort George, but a few days later General Gordon Drummond, the British Commander so strongly opposed his foe that the effort was abandoned.

William Lundy, stout old pioneer, had come early to this wilderness. For years the thud of his ax rang through the deep forests until there stood, in place of the monarchs he had felled, long rows of peach, apple, and plum trees, running almost to the edge of the cataract. Here, too, at the end of a long lane lined with birch and oaks, Lundy built a fine house and a barn.
On the day of July 25, 1814, death rode high over this peaceful patch for here was fought one of the bloodiest battles in the history of military engagements, a battle still in the textbooks and studied by those who would master the art (if such it may be called) of mass killing. Of the five thousand-odd British and Americans engaged, no less than 1,738 were carried from the field dead or mortally wounded. It was long after midnight when the last musket cracked and the last of the Americans marched away. Old Lundy's barn was filled with dead, and the homes of Chippawa, then held by American arms, were filled with miserable men and American Army surgeons probing for British lead.

Among those sufferers lay Colonel Winfield Scott, who had already distinguished himself at Queenston Heights and at the capture of Fort George and who lived to become the hero of Chepultepec and Vera Cruz during the Mexican War and to bring further renown to his name as Presidential candidate (1852) and as Lincoln's chief-of-staff until his retirement in 1861.

At battles' end, Major General Riall, was badly wounded and a prisoner. Historians are agreed that the soldiers on both sides during this battle showed uncommon valor and courage to which fact the heavy casualities add testimony.

Many of those who fell at Lundy's Lane are buried in the cemetery on the hilltop a short distance from the cataract. Visitors with a lively interest in American and Canadian history may wish to wander among the old markers over the heads of the stout men who fell here fighting for the kind of freedom in which they believed.

Sooner or later we will come upon the grave of Laura Secord, pioneer Loyalist who carried military intelligence to a British outpost, walking seventeen miles through the wilderness during the night of June 23, 1813, and who as a result became the heroine of a nation. Her father-in-law had fought with Brant and Butler when the names of these soldiers of the crown struck terror to those farmers of New York State during the War of the Revolution. Laura Secord is today among the most honored heroines of Canada with two monuments standing in her memory, one at Brock's monument and another in the Lundy's Lane Cemetery where she rests.