Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (99 page)

Some of the Forlorn Hope peer through the window. The twenty members of the American picket are inside, protecting themselves from the cold. The officers are playing whist. When it is all over someone will claim that one of the Americans asked, “What’s trump?” and one of the Canadians replied, “Bayonets are trump!” Perhaps; it is a night for legend.

The door crashes open; the Forlorn Hope dashes in—young Allan MacNab in the forefront. The advance guard dies under the bayonets of the British and the force moves on. A mile or so later a second picket is also dispatched, silently, ruthlessly, and the company marches on along the frozen river road.

What Murray does not know is that two days before, a deserter has alerted McClure to the possibility of just such an attack. McClure has warned the fort’s commander, Captain Nathaniel Leonard, to keep his men on guard and to place grenades at strategic points to resist the enemy.

Fort Niagara is no easy target. Its bastions bristle with twenty-seven pieces of artillery. Three strong towers overlook the palisades. Four hundred and thirty men, of whom some fifty are sick, guard the ramparts. But where are these men? Sound asleep in their tents, in spite of the warning. Where is McClure? In Buffalo, attempting to justify his attack on Newark. And where is Captain Leonard? At home with his family, three miles beyond. The evidence suggests that the captain is more than a little drunk and that his officers,
after a night of gaming and tippling, are sleeping it off in the belief that the threatened attack, which has failed to materialize on two previous nights, is merely a figment of the deserter’s imagination.

The ice crackles under the tread of the soldiers’ boots, but the sound is borne away on the gusts of a northeast wind. Only one man is on horseback: Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton of the British 100th, who, having lost a leg in Holland, cannot march but refuses to remain behind. Suddenly Hamilton’s horse neighs loudly. From a stable near the fort comes an answering neigh. The force halts at once. Surely these sounds must alert the garrison!
Silence
. Relieved, the men shuffle forward.

At three o’clock they reach the main gate to find the drawbridge down. They have arrived at the very moment when the sentries on the river side are being changed. Spearman, the big sergeant, advances alone across the bridge, reaches the sentry box, is challenged, gives the countersign, and in an approximation of a Yankee accent says he has come from Youngstown. As the sentry turns, Spearman strangles him to death.

Shouting and cheering, the storming party dashes across the bridge, awakening the garrison. A cannon booms from the roof of one of the towers. Lieutenant Maurice Nolan of the 100th rushes through the lower door and vanishes into the gloom. His comrades hear the clash of steel on steel, the hoarse roar of musketry. Nolan is dead, his chest pierced by a bayonet, a musket ball, and three buckshot. Three American corpses lie beside him, one killed by a pistol shot, the others with their skulls cleft by sword blows. In a fury, Nolan’s men proceed to massacre the survivors until other officers stop them.

Meanwhile, Major Davis Byron Davies of the 100th is attacking a second blockhouse. Random fire has already killed one of his men, wounded two others. Davies seizes an American prisoner, threatening him with instant death unless he guides him to the inner stairs, waits until he hears the Americans reloading their muskets, seizes the interval to force the door, and in the light of flaming torches carried by his men finds his way up the twisting staircase,
shouting to his followers to bayonet everybody. The Americans have no stomach for the fight; one man is killed; sixty-four surrender.

Panic-stricken, a group of Americans tries to escape from the sally port, only to be driven back by the grenadiers of the Royal Scots. Colonel Murray saves most of their lives by making them lie down, receiving a painful bayonet wound in the hand for this act of mercy.

It is soon over. The Americans have lost sixty-five dead and sixteen wounded, all by the bayonet, the British six dead, five wounded. Fourteen officers, including the tardy Captain Leonard, who returns at dawn, are captured with 350 others. The considerable booty includes twenty-nine cannon, seven thousand muskets and rifles, seven thousand pairs of shoes, and a vast cache of clothing, much of it originally captured from the British, the whole being valued at one million dollars. To William Hamilton Merritt’s delight, Murray allows him and his troops a share of the prize money as a reward for their services. Every private soldier will receive two pounds sterling, the officers much more.

At five that morning a cannon shot from the newly captured fort signals victory to Major-General Phineas Riall, the peppery little Irishman who has replaced the ailing Vincent as officer commanding the Centre Division. Riall has been waiting on the far shore for this signal to invade Lewiston with a thousand men and five hundred Indians.

Drummond has agreed to use the natives only if they can be kept under control—a specious argument, surely. Does Drummond, of all people—the first Canadian-born general officer—actually believe the Indians can be controlled? Or that Matthew Elliott and William Caldwell, the Indian Department officers who will lead them in battle, will be able to control them? They have shown no disposition to do so on previous occasions.

Riall’s force lands without opposition at Five Mile Meadows, half way between Lewiston and the lake. There is little to stand in his way as he sets out to make a clean sweep up the river. The handful of militia at Lewiston has deserted. Their commander was told to expect a three-cannon warning from Fort Niagara if invasion came;
he ignored the single cannon shot at three o’clock—the only gun fired by the defenders—believing it a false alarm. Snug in bed, the citizens now find the British and Indians on their doorsteps. They flee from their homes, half-dressed, many without shoes or stockings, the men on horseback, the roads leading to Buffalo a tangle of wagons, farmers’ carts, and sleighs, many toppling over, passengers cursing their drivers, in the pell-mell escape.

Mrs. Solomon Gillette, waiting for her husband to return home, hears the sound of the signal cannon, wakes her ten-year-old son, Orville, and sets about milking. The task is nearly complete when blood-curdling yells split the air. Three Indians in war paint and feathers appear, loot the barn, drink the milk, head for the house. Orville dashes off, dodging between the haystacks; but his mother cannot flee, for she has left three younger children in the house. More Indians arrive, seize a demijohn of whiskey, threaten to kill the children. She holds the two youngest in her arms while Jervis, aged seven, clings to her skirts. Through the open door she spies a British officer, resplendent in scarlet, and springs into the street, pleading for rescue. The Indians fire a volley. Little Jervis falls dead at her feet. As the officer dashes up to save the surviving trio, one of the Indians tears the scalp from the dead child’s head.

At the same time, on Centre Street, her husband, Solomon, is taken prisoner. As he is led away he sees his eldest boy, Miles, aged nineteen, being brought along the opposite side by a party of tribesmen. Miles, a veteran of the Battle of Queenston Heights, struggles with his native captors, shoots one, tries to break away, and is shot and scalped in front of his father. Mrs. Gillette and her two babies make their way through the snow for 270 miles, finally reaching her father’s farm in Columbia County. It is June before she learns that ten-year-old Orville is safe and Christmas before she knows that her husband is alive and a prisoner in Canada. The shattered family is not reunited until the spring of 1815.

Joseph Willcocks’s second-in-command, Benajah Mallory, arrives post-haste with sixty turncoat Canadian Volunteers to fight a delaying action that will allow the settlers time to escape. But soon every
building in the vicinity is reduced to ashes. Within a day, the Niagara frontier from the fort to Tonawanda Creek, including the Tuscarora village, Lewiston, Youngstown, and Manchester (the future Niagara Falls), have been depopulated and reduced to smoking ruins.

For this devastation Brigadier-General McClure is blamed. In Buffalo he is the subject of universal excoriation for what one American (in the
Pittsburgh Gazette)
calls the “wanton and abominable act” of firing Newark. As he marches at the head of his men down the main street, his ears ring with cries and taunts: “Shoot him down! Shoot him!” Cyrenius Chapin’s followers lead the pack, some even firing their muskets at the embattled general. Chapin is briefly jailed for mutiny but almost immediately released by the citizens themselves.

McClure cannot stay in Buffalo. He is a pariah. Brigadier-General Timothy Hopkins finds that the militia will not serve under him. His own soldiers have lost confidence in him. His officers are convinced that he is unfit to command. Universally detested, he slinks off to Batavia and turns his militia command over to Major-General Amos Hall.

The British, meanwhile, are advancing on Fort Schlosser. Marching with the advance is the indestructible Private Shadrach Byfield of the 41st light company, back in service again after his escape on the Thames and fresh from the attack on Fort Niagara. A mile and a half from its objective, the group seizes a forward guardhouse, manages to take eight prisoners before the rest escape. Byfield and a handful of men are ordered to guard the prisoners while the main force moves on to Schlosser.

The night is dark, the countryside unknown, the trails through the woods labyrinthine. Byfield’s party takes the wrong fork and almost immediately runs into trouble. Footsteps can be heard behind them. Friend or enemy? No one wants to find out, but at last Byfield volunteers to go back alone, runs into a shadowy figure—an American—threatens to blow his brains out, and makes him a prisoner. It is the officer of the guard who made his escape during the confusion of the attack.

An affecting little scene follows. The American complains that someone has stolen his boots. Byfield rummages in his pack and generously offers him a pair of his own as well as a tot of rum to warm him, whereupon the prisoner breaks into sobs, exclaiming he had not expected to be treated so well.

There are more tears to come. As Byfield brings his prisoner to Fort Schlosser, now in British hands, he spots the body of an American officer sprawled on the floor. His captive spots it too and begins to weep bitterly, for this battered and bleeding corpse was once his dearest friend.

Byfield and the others burn the fort, destroy all the buildings, throw the provisions into the river. Then, on December 22, all of the army save for a small garrison force at Fort Niagara returns to the Canadian side, and the people of Buffalo and Black Rock, who have been expecting an imminent attack, breathe more easily. Their relief is premature. A week later, the attack is launched.

BUFFALO, NEW YORK, DECEMBER 30, 1813

Margaret St. John—the widow St. John, as she is now known—has no sense of danger, even though she can hear the booming of cannon downriver at Black Rock. She has seen General Amos Hall’s troops move out, two thousand strong, with men like Chapin and Mallory in the van, and is convinced the militia can thwart any British attempt at landing.

She is not easily rattled, for she is a child of the frontier: her father was a long-time missionary to the Indians. She has lived all her life in log communities, in the shadow of dark forests, always on the rim of civilization. She has raised eleven children under the most primitive conditions, often without a doctor’s help. Now, at forty-five, she is self-reliant, domineering, a little irritable at times, but always in total control.

She has no way of knowing that the American defence of Black Rock is a total disaster, that almost half of General Hall’s volunteers have fled at the first alarm, that the British, having launched a
successful two-pronged attack, are even now marching on Buffalo, fourteen hundred strong, with the Indians in the vanguard, their passage only slightly impeded by a few bold defenders.

Like a clap of thunder the alarm gun booms, and panic grips the village. The first of the retreating militia come dashing through town, followed by a column of refugees. The terrible word
Indians!
passes, in a scream, from house to house.

The flight from Buffalo begins at once as horses, oxen, and sleighs are commandeered; as babies are thrown into open carts along with furs, jewellery, bread, silverware, provisions. Those who cannot find transport set out on a dead run through the light snow over half-frozen ruts.

Into the St. John cottage at the corner of Main and Mohawk comes an old friend, Dr. Josiah Trowbridge. He begs the widow to leave at once, warns that the Indians will kill her if she stays, offers her his horse, promises to take care of the children.

“I can’t do it,” says Margaret St. John. “Here is all I have in the world, and I will stay and defend it.”

All she has in the world are two buildings: the big family house which, since the accidental drowning of her husband and one son the previous summer, has been leased as a hotel, and the little unfinished storey-and-a-half cottage into which she and eight of her children have been forced to squeeze.

Across Main Street, her son-in-law, Asaph Bemis, is hastily packing a wagon. He offers to take the six youngest St. John children, three boys and three girls, along with his own wife and baby to safety. He packs them in with the bedding and household goods, whips his horses and is off.

The Indians are advancing down Guideboard Road, the militia fleeing ahead. One of Mrs. St. John’s neighbours, Job Hoysington, stops; he wants one more shot at the redskins, he says. The others dash on, leaving him behind. His scalped corpse and rifle will not be found until the snow melts in the spring.

Next door to the St. Johns lives Sally Lovejoy, a tall, spirited woman of thirty-five. She, too, has no intention of leaving unless
she can take her big trunk, containing her most precious belongings, with her. When no wagon can be found to handle the trunk, she determines to stay. Her husband, Henry, is fighting with the militia. Young Henry, her thirteen-year-old son, wants to fight, too; during Bisshopp’s raid on Black Rock he carried a musket bigger than himself. Now his mother tells him to run away: