Narrative of the Fenian invasion of Canada

by Alexander Somerville

CHAPTER III.

Dinner ordered for a “thousand,” and provisions run out. Fenian army asleep; what, when it should awake? Pickets, sentries and passes. Reverend Fenian, Lumsden from “Auld Reekie.” Dimensions of Welland Canal. Rideau Canal. St. Lawrence Canals. American vessels with-held from Welland Canal. They re-appear after two weeks. Horses captured. How bridles were made. New use of telegraph wires. Milking the cows at Frenchman’s Creek. O’Neil’s pass. Fenian sentry. Sergeant of the picket.

The village corporation of three at Waterloo, and the less timid of seven hundred and fifty inhabitants, breathed more freely at nine a. m. than they had done any minute since daybreak. The “breakfast for one thousand men” had been amply furnished, and heartily eaten. The armed multitude, fierce and hungry before, were now filled, and lay stretched in sleep on the green slopes, or under the trees, or kept watch by the river side, or as railway pickets. But noon was fast approaching. The thousand men would be hungry again. The corporation were ordered to prepare dinner. Where was it to come from? Then supper would be required, and lodgings for the ensuing night. The food of the village was already eaten up. It was a fearful prospect, the awakening of that multitude, now lying drowsily in the fields, in the orchards, in the woods, in the barns, on the door steps in the passages, on the sofas, or carpeted floors of private dwellings. But it was no part of O’Neil’s policy to remain inactive in that village, risking an attack, without having accomplished something more than levying breakfast for his forces.

They were roused from sleep, collected and admonished that the time had arrived to march into the interior. O’Neil’s object was, first, to gain possession of the Welland canal and two railways at Port Colborne, situated seventeen miles west from where he then was, and besides, to strike at the aqueduct which feeds the canal, and the swing bridge which carries the Welland railway over it at Port Robinson. He left guards upon the Fort Erie terminus of the Grand Trunk auxiliary, the Buffalo and Lake Huron railway, a mile south of the village, besides cutting the telegraph wires on that line, as he had done on Erie and Niagara track, to prevent intelligence of his movements going west by way of Port Colborne. He also left pickets in the woods and at the junction of different roads, and at the ferries on the Niagara river. The inhabitants were only permitted to move from their houses to any given point by obtaining written passes from Fenian officers. One who wrote passes during that day signed his name L. F. Lumsden. On being recognized by a farmer as a Scotchman and asked where he came from in Scotland, Lumsden replied, “Auld Reekie,” a familiar term for Edinburgh; and added that he was an Episcopal clergyman, as his dress in some measure indicated. This person was one of the prisoners captured next day, taken by the steamer Robb to Port Colborne, then to Brantford jail, subsequently to Toronto. After being prisoner he dropped the name Lumsden, written on the passes which he was pleased to grant, and called himself Farfarden.

The importance of the Welland canal and the railway running near its side, in the scheme of Fenian strategy lay in this: that the canal connects the navigation of Erie and Ontario lakes. Erie is united by Detroit river, Lake St. Clair and River St. Clair, in the west, with Lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior, besides several smaller aggregations of navigable water and tributary streams equal to one-half the fresh water on the globe. Ontario, after interchange of commerce with Erie by way of the Welland canal, which obviates the torrents and falls of Niagara, gives birth to the River St. Lawrence, the rapids on which, occurring occasionally over a space of ninety miles, are overcome by a series of magnificent works, known as St. Lawrence canals. Near to Montreal this river of the life of Canada receives a tributary hardly inferior to itself, the romantic floods of northern forests, brown-tinged Ottawa.

The Welland Canal is 30 miles long. It has 27 locks, surmounting a rise of 350 feet; is 564 feet above sea level at Lake Erie, and about one thousand miles from the sea, by way of Montreal, Quebec and Gulf of St. Lawrence. The locks admit vessels 142 feet long by 26 feet beam and 10 feet draught. On the several sections of rapids between Prescott and Montreal the St. Lawrence Canals admit vessels 184 feet long, 44½ feet beam, and nine feet draught. But all craft passing from Montreal, the head of ocean navigation, nearly 600 miles from the sea, are limited to the size of the Welland locks.

The Rideau canal, to connect the eastern outflow of Lake Ontario, at Kingston, at the head of the St. Lawrence, with the River Ottawa, and the navigation from Montreal, at a point where stands the city of Ottawa, overcomes 293 feet of rise, and is 126½ miles long. The locks are 134 by 33 feet, and 60 inches deep, on the sill. This with some minor sections of canal on the River Ottawa, was intended to serve a strategical purpose in the defences of Canada. It was begun in 1826, and finished so far as for a steamer to pass through, in 1832. Its cost, $3,860,000, was defrayed by the Imperial Government. It is frequently out of repair, and is not now available for the main object of its construction. The St. Lawrence Canals and the Grand Trunk Railway running parallel with them, are available for defensive purposes, yet so openly exposed to hostile incursions, if such should ever threaten them, as to be elements of strategical weakness as well as lines of transport for conveyance of troops and munitions of war. But in the interests of peace they are works of unspeakable benefit to Canada, as also to the western United States.

For eight or ten days previous to the day of the Fenian invasion, June 1st, 1866, American vessels had nearly all disappeared from the Welland canal, the ship-owners, merchants, forwarders and insurers of Chicago and Milwaukee, the great commercial ports on Lake Michigan; and of Detroit. Cleveland and other places in the west, declined to charter vessels or risk freights on passage through the Welland canal. They knew that its capture and obstruction formed one of the earliest acts intended against Canada in the scheme of Fenian invasion. Except an occasional empty vessel, bound up, none bearing a United States flag passed through the Welland locks, until two weeks after O’Neil returned to the American side of the Niagara river. The steamers of the Northern Transportation Company, plying between Cleveland on Lake Erie, and Rochester, and Oswego on Lake Ontario, continued to run.

It was not without delay and difficulty that O’Neil and his officers collected their forces, extended as these were from old Fort Erie on the lake shore, and from that north by the station of Buffalo and Lake Huron branch of the Grand Trunk Railway through Waterloo Village to the Lower Ferry where they had first landed at daybreak, in all five miles; and from farm-houses several miles inland, where already desultory bands had penetrated in search of horses and other plunder. The other plunder consisted of sheep, turkeys, fowls and such provisions as hams, crocks of butter, cheeses, sacks of flour and pigs. The live animals intended for food were shot, and slung over the backs of horses. Frequently two men, and occasionally three bestrode one horse. These animals having been in most instances captured in pasture fields, and such bridles and saddles as the owners possessed having been removed in their hurried flight to escape the perils of Fenian imprisonment, the marauding horsemen contrived a new kind of bridles from a material not before used for that purpose. They had cut telegraph poles to prevent transmission of intelligence, they now made bridles for the horses, and strung their plunder together with the wires. As they assembled at the camping grounds on Frenchman’s creek, three miles north of the village, half a mile north of Lower Ferry where they had first landed, the duplicate and triplicate riders went in with their plunder, the mouths of the horses bleeding; and some animals which, a few hours before had been proudly defiant, and too bold in spirit to submit tamely to such loads as oppressed them, were reduced to obedience by bayonet wounds which crippled one or both of the hind quarters. A trotting mare of beautiful form and high reputation, was ridden into the field of bivouac at the creek, hobbling painfully on three legs, two Fenians shouting and cursing in wild hilarity seated on her back, one with his feet to the left, the other with his feet to the right side, bundles of fowls, turkeys and other plunder on their shoulders, and a wild warrior on foot, who, a few minutes before had been a third rider, but had fallen off, inflicting bayonet wounds on the bleeding flanks of the groaning beast, one of whose hind quarters was pierced by a bayonet through and through. Farmers who had been compelled to surrender their horses and who were then prisoners stood witnesses to these scenes of spoliation and of cruelty.