A PORT OF THE LAST CENTURY
When white frosts and keen, starry nights have turned the foliage of the Niagara gorge into a riotous color scheme is the best time to visit Queenston Heights, and walk the grass-grown thoroughfares of the forgotten hamlet at their base.
It is the best time, because the picnic and tourist season is over, and one’s contemplation of the beautiful view which every point affords is not disturbed; and as for the cluster of roof-trees lying below, it is more picturesque in its autumnal nakedness.
Three-score years ago this village was the second town of importance in the province of Upper Canada. Named for Queen Charlotte, Queenston began life auspiciously in 1787 with a dock, a distillery, and a tavern; and so rapidly did it grow that the opening century found the dock transformed into a wharf flanked with store-houses, the population doubled, and those infallible signs of prosperity in a new country—a grist- and a saw-mill—running on full time.
Situated at the head of the St. Lawrence route, and at the foot of the Chippewa portage, Queenston had every advantage at the start. It was the natural dépôt and point of departure for the western trade, now growing rapidly with the opening of new territory. Across its narrow wharf, and up the Chippewa road, flowed for over a quarter of a century, a continuous tide of traffic, which eddying here, débouched on the near shore of the upper lakes, or spent itself in the wilderness of the far west.
Hither swarmed the motley crowd that follows the hunter’s trail and the pioneer’s axe—fur-traders, settlers, speculators, Indians, emigrants, and adventurers.
Government land in Canada was very cheap as compared with the price of land in the “States,” and this fact alone accounts for the great influx into Canada of Americans, immediately after the close of the War.
This land boom, so wisely fostered, was too soon paralyzed by the War of 1812, and nowhere did the hardships of that war fall more heavily than upon the new port of the lower Niagara. When the hastily-planned and ill-executed assault upon Queenston Heights was made, it was only defended by a small battery upon which a solitary field-piece was mounted. Those extensive earthworks west of the monument were an afterthought. They were not built until 1814.
General Brock was killed below this redan; and the heaviest fighting must have been along the foot of the ledge. A small cenotaph marks the spot where Brock fell. This little monument is more interesting from the fact that King Edward himself, as Prince of Wales, placed the block in position in 1860.
But for situation, no monument in the country can compare with that which marks the place of General Brock’s sepulchre. Standing on the very crown of the Heights, this shaft dominates a wonderful picture. The monument itself is of the usual British type, and the figure surmounting it might be Nelson, so very like is it to that hero’s attitude in stone.
The house into which General Brock was carried dying stands, a grey-stone ruin by the untraveled way. Other wounded soldiers besides Brock were carried into that low-roofed house to die. Diagonally across from this place is the house in which Laura Secord was living when she saved the British stores at De Cew’s.
It is not generally known that this famous Canadian heroine was born and lived in Massachusetts, until her twentieth year. In 1795 her father, Thomas Ingersoll, a Revolutionary soldier, came to Canada to buy land; and shortly after the family arrived at Niagara, Laura married James Secord of Queenston.
During the second year of the War of 1812, the Niagara frontier of Canada was in possession of the American forces, and American soldiers were billeted upon every family on the border.
Hearing some officers, whom she was thus forced to entertain, discussing a plan for seizing the stores at the De Cew house, some eighteen miles away, she determined to inform the officer in command at that place. It meant a long, dangerous journey on foot, over hill and bog land and through a densely wooded country swarming with hideous savages from the Grand River, the allies of the British. But Laura Secord was equal to the occasion. Though she had started from home before daylight, night overtook her on the journey. Her courage and promptness saved the stores, and the officer in command sent her home under the protection of a guard.
When the Prince of Wales visited Canada he sent her one hundred dollars, the first recognition made of her services to her adopted country.
As we stroll farther along the King’s highway we come to the Wadsworth cottage, a rough-cast dwelling with sills much below the level of the street. This was a tavern at the time of the battle, and in the front room to the left, General Scott was detained as a prisoner. It was here, while waiting for his captors to complete arrangements for his removal to Fort George, that an Indian in the barroom deliberately took aim at the General through the open door, and would have shot him but for the presence of mind of Captain Thaddeus Davis, a British officer, who promptly knocked the gun from the Indian’s hands.
Screened by a clump of maples and rank shrubbery that speaks of an old-time garden, is a ruined stone house, rather more pretentious than those that date back to the period of the War. It is spoken of by the townspeople as the “blue-stone house.” In this house in 1824 William Lyon Mackenzie printed the first numbers of the Colonial Advocate, the first paper printed in Upper Canada.
“We are not in want, neither are we rich,” he says candidly in his prospectus. O, golden age! Our strenuous present admits of no such happy medium! Mackenzie is remembered no more as an agitator. The measures of justice for which he contended in the bitterness of poverty and exile, have long since been granted and enjoyed.
If plenty of relics of historic Queenston abound, no trace of its one-time prosperity remains. Gone the shipping and trade along with the store-houses bursting with pelts, and rum, and merchandise. Gone that horse railway to Chippewa, built to relieve congested traffic. Gone the bank, with its funds, and the unlucky thirteen taverns that tradition says lined the principal street. Gone, too, that first bridge that spanned the river, built in 1851, just too late to divert from newer channels the ebbing current of commerce.
The great cataract being more accessible by the Queenston route, all the distinguished visitors to our shores in former years came to this port. Chateaubriand was here as early as 1790. Lafayette, Thomas Moore, the Bourbon princes, and Louis Napoleon saw the town enjoying the top-most wave of prosperity. It is said that Moore’s poem beginning, “I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled,” was inspired by the breakfast fire of one of Queenston’s houselets.
But if these later annals are more brilliant, they seem to belong less to the Queenston of to-day than that earlier history which gives the delightful old place a notable part in the making of a Great Dominion.
N. R. Benedict.
Buffalo, N. Y.