The Welland Canal and the Grand Trunk and Great Western Railway systems diverted the great part of the carrying trade, and with it that growth and activity which have signalised the neighbouring cities of Canada. "Refuse the Welland Canal entrance to your town," said the Commissioners, "and the grass will grow in your streets." Here General Simcoe opened the first Upper Canadian Legislature; and later, from here the noble Brock planned the defence of Upper Canada. While the cities of western New York, which have now far eclipsed it, were rude log settlements, at "Newark" some little attempt was made at decorum and society.

Here landed in 1783-'84 ten thousand United Empire Loyalists, who, to keep inviolate their oaths of allegiance to the King, quitted their freeholds and positions of trust and honour in the States to begin life anew in the unbroken wilds of Upper Canada. History has made us somewhat familiar with the settlement of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by the expatriated Loyalists. Little has been written of the sufferings and privations endured by the "makers" of Upper Canada. Students and specialists who have investigated the story of a flight equalled only by that of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes have been led to admire the spirit of unselfish patriotism which led these one hundred thousand fugitives to self-exile. While the Pilgrims came to America leisurely, bringing their household goods and their charters with them, the United Empire Loyalists, it has well been said, "bleeding with the wounds of seven years of war, left ungathered the crops of their rich farms on the Mohawk and in New Jersey, and, stripped of every earthly possession, braved the terrors of the unbroken wilderness from the Mohawk to Lake Ontario." Inhabited to-day by the descendants of these pioneers, the old-fashioned loyalty and conservatism of the Niagara district is the more conspicuous by contrasting it with neighbouring republicanism over the river.

Here, over a century ago, near Fort George, stood the first Parliament House of Upper Canada. Here, seventy years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the first United Empire Loyalist Parliament, like the embattled farmers at Concord, "fired a shot heard round the world." For one of the first measures of the exiled patricians was to pass an act forbidding slavery. Few readers know that at Newark, now Niagara, was enacted that law by which Canada became not only the first country in the world to abolish slavery, but, as such, a safe refuge for the fugitive slaves from the Southern States.

General Simcoe, the first governor, was born in 1752 and died in 1806. A landed gentleman of England and likewise a member of the British House of Commons he voluntarily relinquished all the luxuries of his beautiful English home and estates to bury himself in the wilderness of Canada and the Niagara region. As governor-general he exemplified the extremest simplicity. His guard consisted of four soldiers who came from Fort George, close by, to Newark, every morning and returned thither in the evening. Mrs. Simcoe not only performed the duties of wife and mother, but also acted as her husband's secretary. The name of Simcoe is indelibly entered in the history of the development of the Niagara, and it is doubly appropriate that her interesting drawings should illustrate a volume dealing with this region she loved.

Here Cooper is said to have written his admirable novels of border and Indian life, novels which have been devoured by me and millions of readers; it is fair to predict that the stories will be read for another century to come.[29] Many other interesting characters have at different periods made Fort George their abode. In 1780, a handsome house within its enclosure was occupied by General Guy Johnson.

Chapter X

[The Hero of Upper Canada]

General Isaac Brock, the Hero of Upper Canada, was the kind of man men delight to honour—honest, capable, ambitious, faithful, kind. Nothing less than a tremendous gorge, such as separates Queenston from Lewiston Heights, could keep the people of one nation from knowing and loving this hero of another; since Brock's day this gorge has been spanned by beautiful bridges, and it is full time now, as the centennial of the second war with England approaches, that the appreciation of the characters of the worthy, patriotic heroes of that olden day o'erleap the chasm of bitter rivalry and hostility and become common and genuine to the northward and the southward of the Niagara.

Isaac Brock was the eighth son of John Brock, Esq., born on the sixth day of October, 1769, in the parish of St. Peter-Port, Guernsey—the famous birth-year of Wellington and Napoleon. Tall, robust, and mentally conspicuous as a lad, Isaac followed his elder brother into the British Army, purchasing the ensigncy in the 8th, or King's Regiment, in 1785. His promotion was the result of merit in addition to possessing the means to purchase higher office; in 1790 we find him a lieutenant in the 49th Regiment, advancing to his majority in 1795 and two years later becoming senior lieutenant-colonel. Supplanting now an officer accused of peculation who had brought the whole regiment into public notice, Brock exerted an influence that seemed to transform the regiment, making it "from one of the worst," said the Duke of York himself, "one of the best regiments in the service."