CHAPTER II.
From 3.30 a. m. 1st of June 1866 to 11 a. m. Canada invaded. Lower Ferry. Engineer of International Bridge. He is asked for “chunk” and “sugar.” Mrs. Kempson parleys. Dr. Kempson made prisoner. Village Council ordered to find breakfast for one thousand Fenians. Axes and spades in request. Telegraph posts cut down. Boat escaping on the river. The Hotels. Bar-rooms. Landlords serving liquors with revolvers at their heads. Carrying sacks of flour with bayonets in their rear. Baking, cooking for one thousand Fenians. They eat, drink, sleep. Are aroused for the line of march.
During the night of 31st May, the Fenian bands left Buffalo city, travelling by different outlets; but meeting on Niagara Street and Black Rock Road, they halted at Black Rock Ferry about five miles below, and north of Buffalo city; there they embarked in scows, which, with a steam tug, lay in readiness to receive and tow them over to the Canada shore, distance about one thousand yards. They landed at the wharf called Lower Ferry, and marched westward towards the village of Waterloo. This is a place containing about seven hundred and fifty inhabitants. By persons living at a distance it is called Fort Erie from an old fort of historical name situated two miles south-west on the shore of Lake Erie, and nearly opposite to Buffalo city, where the outflowing volume of Niagara is three miles wide. But to the inhabitants of the surrounding country the village is only known by name of “The Ferry.” The river at this point has contracted to a width of eight hundred yards, and the traffic across is conveyed by a steamer which plies every half hour. On the American side there is first an embankment separating Buffalo mill race from the main river. On this embankment are several flour mills, lofty and wide, the most southerly of the group now marked with Fenian bullets which, on the afternoon of June 2nd, were directed against the steam tug Robb, a vessel from Dunnville, which gallantly stemmed the current with about sixty Fenian prisoners on board, below decks, on passage to Port Colborne, twenty miles westward. The mill race is spanned by a swing bridge, after which is the Erie and New York canal, which extends along the foot of the Buffalo and Black Rock heights, which there rise seventy or eighty feet. On the Canada shore is a corresponding range of heights, but more rounded and covered with verdure, and with a level margin between them and Niagara river, the level varying from three hundred to fifty yards wide. On this plain lies scattered on three quarters of a mile of river front the village of Waterloo. It has three small churches, a school house, which was, for a short while on June 2nd, a prison for Fenians, before these were taken on board the steamer Robb; and some hotels, stores, and a few goodly dwelling houses embowered in orchards, in maple and poplar groves, one of which, occupying a prominent position, became the prison of certain officers and men of the Welland Artillery, who, with a portion of the Dunnville Naval Brigade, had become captives to the Fenians, after placing Fenian prisoners on board their vessel. This, as will hereafter appear, was not the result of their own mistakes, but of a turn in the fortunes of war, which with many other adverse complexities characterized the different parts of the military drama of the 2nd of June.
A Buffalo journal related how the Fenians obtained transports, thus: “On Wednesday or Thursday previous to the raid, some persons waited on Capt. Kingman, of this city, and engaged two tugs and four canal boats to carry the employees of Pratt’s Iron Works, at the lower Black Rock, on a pleasure trip to Falconwood. The price of the trip was arranged for, the money paid and the boats dropped down to their position on Thursday afternoon. The Fenians seized upon these transports to invade the ‘sacred soil’ of Canada. The boats, after use, were quietly returned to the American shore; the owners being nothing out of pocket thereby.”
On the night of invasion there was a brilliant moon three days past full. Sunrise was twenty-five minutes past four. The first gleams of daybreak appeared in the north-east as the invaders landed in Canada at Lower Ferry, township of Bertie, county of Welland. At this place there is a shingle factory, a boat-house, a tavern, the residence of a customs officer, and one or two frame dwellings. It is about two miles below and north of Waterloo village. The invaders took possession and left an armed guard on those houses. The main body then moved hurriedly up the Niagara shore road towards the village.
Near to a bend in the Canada shore, named Bertie Point, half a mile south of Lower Ferry is the residence of Mr. Molesworth engineer of the International railway bridge, which was to have been built this year, but is not yet begun, the delay being caused partly through financial difficulties, in Britain, and partly through Fenian disturbances on this frontier. The river between Bertie Point and Squaw Island on New York shore, where it will terminate in conjunction with the Atlantic and Great Western Railway is eighteen hundred feet wide, greatest depth forty-one feet. There will be a carriage and foot-way as well as railroad track, and it is expected when the bridge is completed, citizens of Buffalo will erect dwelling houses on the Canada side. The hotels and boarding houses of Waterloo were frequented by persons from Buffalo before the Fenian alarm.
A detachment of invaders broke off from the main body in passing Mr. Molesworth’s house, a brick villa with white columns supporting a verandah and standing among a thicket of trees, twenty or thirty yards from the road. They knocked loudly with the butt end of their rifles. Mr. Molesworth, his wife and family of young children were asleep. He looked upon the intruders from an upper window and asked what was wanted. They ordered him down to open the door, else they would break it in. He again asked who they were and what was wanted? The reply was that they were the Fenian army landed to liberate Canada; they wanted chunk; they wanted sugar. Mr. Molesworth not being acquainted with slang did not know that chunk and sugar meant money. He asked if they wanted bread. Their reply was “yes; bread, chunk, sugar.” He went down stairs, collected all the bread and cheese the house contained, carried it up, and lowered it out of the window. Still they cried for chunk and sugar. Presently officers with drawn swords and revolvers in hand drove that portion of the mob away ordering them to fall into their places on the road. Mr. Molesworth felt relieved by their absence, but was much puzzled to think what such a crew could want with sugar. Either these returned or others came and once more there was the cry, “chunk! sugar!” “I have given all the bread, everything eatable in the house,” responded the engineer. “We want money,” rejoined one of the marauders. But fortunately for that defenceless household, Fenian officers again called away, or forced off these men.
As they approached Waterloo village, the shore road on which they marched, crossed the railway track of the Erie and Niagara line, a track not yet regularly working. A single telegraph wire was on the posts skirting this line; but on the river side road by which they had come, were the International telegraph wires. Near to Lower Ferry, these are bound around a post and carried under water from shore to shore. When the invaders had reached the Erie and Niagara track, they passed a church on their right hand, standing within its small cemetery among trees, on a descending section of the heights before mentioned which here approach the river. At fifty yards further south they passed the mouth of a ravine which separates the church bluff from one on which, within an orchard and a grove of tall poplars, stands prominently out the residence of Dr. Kempson, reeve of the village. That house was the first point to which the Fenian commander O’Neil conducted his force. He ascended a steep carriage way at a right angle from the river road and railway track, about two hundred yards, entered the enclosure, placed sentries around the house, stable and barn, and along the garden and orchard, his main body being halted outside the garden fence and in an enclosed pasture field adjoining. At a short distance north from this residence on the same bluff and within the same orchard, was another house which was also surrounded by Fenian pickets.
It was now daylight. The range of rounded green knolls, extending three quarters of a mile southerly and west from this section, on which the second skirmish of next day was fought, and on which Royal Artillery, Infantry regulars, and Volunteers were subsequently encamped, reflected back the first beams of the sun; that sun of the 1st of June, which brought the light of offended Heaven to bear witness against an army of strangers whose presence there was a crime against international law, against innocent Canada, which had done them no offence, against civilization, against the liberty and safety of a free people, which America should be ever foremost to vindicate; against the declared authority of the bishops and priests of the Roman Catholic Church, to which nearly all the Fenian brotherhood professed to be attached. By the scheme of invasion of Sweeny and Roberts attacks had been designed for this or the preceding morning, at eight or more places along a frontier line of fifteen hundred miles. By confusion in the councils of the Fenian brotherhood, by want of confidence in one another, by failure of transport to men and munitions of war; by a sense of justice or of discreet policy newly manifested in the executive government of the United States, the hand of Omnipotence was on that occasion discernible on the side of right, and of comparative innocence, against crime and unqualified wrong.