Canada

by Beckles Willson

In due time they came; the battle began, and the first ranks of the foe were mowed down like grass. De Salaberry had taken the precaution to scatter a dozen buglers through the woods, who sounded the advance at intervals through the fray. The invaders, hearing the repeated trumpet blasts, thought a vast Canadian army opposed them. Nevertheless they pressed forward, the defenders purposely giving way a little. The hidden buglers blew harder than ever, panic seized the enemy at last, and they fled back into the bushes, dropping their knapsacks, drums, and muskets as they ran. Their comrades behind took them for victorious Canadians advancing to a charge, and fired upon them. Discovering their mistake too late, they in turn fled, and soon the victory of 380 Canadians over ten times that number of the enemy was complete. Miraculous to relate, the Canadian loss was only two killed and sixteen wounded; that of the Americans will never be known. But on the day following the battle nearly 100 graves were dug on their bank of the river.

Chateauguay was a blow to American pride which required many battles and more than one victory on the sea and the Great Lakes to atone for.

Meanwhile what of Wilkinson and his army which was to join Hampton at Montreal? Of the defeat and retreat of Hampton they knew nothing. They supposed him to be advancing triumphantly from the south to join them. Wilkinson and his Americans could not understand why the Canadians took such trouble to oppose him. For did he not tell them he was come to release them from their fetters? that they would no longer be slaves under the monarchy of King George, but henceforward as free as the air under a splendid republic? He could not understand it. He complained bitterly of the "active, universal hostility" of the male inhabitants of the country; he had come, he said plainly, to "subdue the forces of His Britannic Majesty, not to war against his unoffending subjects."

The answer to this kind of talk was supplied by the Canadians at the battle of Chrysler's Farm. It happened in this wise. While the American general descended the St. Lawrence by water, some 3000 of his troops marched abreast by land on the way to Montreal. In their rear a force of 800 Canadians from Kingston followed them day and night, attacking whenever they had the chance. At last the invaders received their General's command to set upon these Canadian skirmishers and "brush away the annoyance."

On a November afternoon a little force under Colonel Morrison drew up at a spot called Chrysler's Farm to receive the foe, three or four times outnumbering them. They fought fiercely, and when the struggle was over the Americans had received signal defeat; their general had fallen mortally wounded, they had lost several hundred men, and the British took more than a hundred prisoners. Thus, completely routed, Wilkinson's sole hope lay in joining Hampton at Lachine. But, alas, the news of the defeat at Chateauguay caused him to change his plans; the attack on Montreal was given up, and the army of the invaders retired for the winter.

One of the most hotly-fought contests of this war occurred in the following year at Lundy's Lane. Here 3000 British faced 4600 Americans, and this again was a British victory of which Canada has reason to be proud. In the following year the war was over, and an American statesman, Quincey, could say in Congress: "Since the invasion of the Buccaneers, there is nothing in history more disgraceful than this war."

As far as Canada was concerned the enemy had gained nothing. They had been repeatedly defeated by people fighting against many odds, whose territory they had wantonly invaded. To retaliate for their destruction of York, the capital of Upper Canada, the American capitol and other public buildings at Washington had been burned, 3000 of their ships had been captured by Britain, and two-thirds of their merchants were bankrupt at the close of the war. But Canada, baptized by fire, came out of the ordeal with a new spirit, a new self-reliance and pride in her achievements and destiny.

While the forces of America and Canada were eyeing each other angrily across the border, in the far west a new colony which would some day form a great and vigorous portion of the Dominion was born. You may remember that all these lands between the Red River in the north and Hudson's Bay were claimed by the Hudson's Bay Company. But it seemed to many an unfair thing that this large and fertile district should be given up as haunts for the fox and the beaver, the moose and the buffalo.

Accordingly a benevolent Scottish nobleman, the Earl of Selkirk, struck by the poverty of his peasant countrymen, obtained a grant of land from the Company and resolved to begin a settlement on a large scale at Red River. Now, at this time the Hudson's Bay Company, as a fur-trading enterprise, had a rival in Canada. This rival was known as the North-West Company of Montreal. The "Nor'-Westers," as they were called, objected to having the solitudes of the north-west invaded by farmers and shepherds, and no pains and misrepresentations were spared to prejudice the public against Lord Selkirk's scheme. They went up and down telling everybody that the country was cold and barren, half waste, half forest, unfit to be the abode of white men. "If you plant a colony out there," they told Lord Selkirk, "your colonists will either freeze to death or be massacred by the savages." Nevertheless Selkirk sent out his emigrants in ships across Hudson's Bay, and they made their way from thence slowly southward to Red River.

There was, besides the Hudson's Bay traders and their rivals the Nor'-Westers, another class which bitterly resented this invasion into their hunting haunts. These were the half-breed bushrangers, who were commonly called the Métis or Bois-Brulés. These men, rough and untractable, were chiefly the descendants of the French fur-hunters and trappers who had married Indian women and settled down on the shore of some distant lake or stream. In the midst of these French half-breeds there grew up also a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen hardly less fond of the wild life of the wilderness than themselves. These also took Indian wives, and when they or their children were asked whether they were English, Scotch, or Indian, they declared they were not one or the other: "We belong to the New Nation."