Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier

Frank H. Severance

THE VISION OF BRÉBEUF.

Drawn by H. H. Green. See Page 15.

Old Trails
on the
Niagara Frontier

By Frank H. Severance

BUFFALO N Y

MDCCCXCIX

Copyright 1899
By Frank H. Severance

THE MATTHEWS-NORTHRUP CO.,
COMPLETE ART-PRINTING WORKS,
BUFFALO, N. Y.

TO THE

Young People of the Schools

OF BUFFALO,

Many of whom, on sundry pleasant occasions, have accompanied me, in school-room talks, over some of the Old Trails which run in and out of our home region, these studies of Niagara Frontier History are cordially inscribed.

F. H. S.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

The essays herein contained have been written at "odd moments," and for divers purposes. Their chief value lies in the fact that they illustrate, several of them by means of individual experiences, certain typical and well-defined periods in the history of the Niagara region. By "Niagara region," a phrase which no doubt occurs pretty often in the following pages, I mean to designate in a historic, not a scenic, sense the frontier territory of the Niagara from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. It is a region which has a concrete but as yet for the most part unwritten history of its own. The value of its past to the student, as is ever the case with "local history" in its worthy aspect, depends upon the importance of its relation to the general history of our country. That the Niagara region has played an important part in that history, is an assurance wholly superfluous for even the most casual student of American development. All that the following studies undertake is to give a glimpse, with such fidelity as may be, of events and conditions hereabouts existing, at periods which may fairly be termed typical.

"The Cross Bearers," a paper originally prepared as a lecture for a class that was studying the history of the Catholic Church in America, is, so far as I am aware, the first attempt to review in a single narrative all of the French missions in this immediate vicinity, and the work of the English-speaking missionary priests who said mass in the Niagara region prior to its full organization under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The data are drawn from the original sources—the Jesuit Relations, Champlain, Le Clercq, Hennepin, Charlevoix, Crespel and other early writers whose works, in any edition, are often inaccessible to the student. For data relating to Bishop Burke, and for other valuable assistance, I am indebted to my friend the Very Rev. Wm. R. Harris, Dean of St. Catharines.

"The Paschal of the Great Pinch" is an attempt to picture, in narrative form, conditions conceived to exist at Fort Niagara in 1687-'8, when the Marquis de Denonville made his abortive attempt to occupy that point. Lest any reader shall be in doubt as to the genuineness of the memoirs of the Chevalier De Tregay, I beg to assure him that Lieut. De Tregay is no myth. His name, and practically all the facts on which my sketch is based, will be found in the Paris Documents (IV.), "Documentary History of the State of New York," Vol. I. This paper stands for the French period on the Niagara; the two next following, for the British period.

"With Bolton at Fort Niagara" is almost wholly drawn from unpublished records, chiefly the Haldimand Papers, the originals of which are in the British Museum, but certified copies of which are readily accessible to the student in the Archives at Ottawa. I have made but a slight study of the great mass of material from which practically the history of the Niagara region during the Revolution is to be written; yet it is probable that this slight study makes known for the first time, to students of our home history, such facts as the employment of Hessians on the Niagara during the Revolution, the first bringing hither of the American flag, possibly even the work and fate of Lieut. Col. Bolton himself.

The next paper, "What Befel David Ogden," is drawn from a widely different, though scarcely less known source. The personal narrative is based on an obscure pamphlet by Josiah Priest, published at Lansingburgh, N. Y., in 1840. I am aware that Priest is not altogether trustworthy as a historian. Dr. Thos. W. Field calls him a "prolific, needy and unscrupulous author" [See "An Essay Toward an Indian Bibliography">[; yet he concedes to his works "a large amount of historic material obtained at some pains from sources more or less authentic." My judgment is, that Priest is least trustworthy in his more ambitious work; whereas his unpretentious pamphlets, wretchedly printed at a country press sixty years ago, contain true narratives of individual undertakings in the Revolution, Indian captivities and other pioneer experiences, gathered by the writer direct from the hero whose adventures he wrote down, without literary skill it is true, but also without apparent perversion or exaggeration. The very circumstantiality with which David Ogden's experiences are narrated is evidence of their genuineness. Corroborative evidence is also furnished by the lately-published muster-rolls of New York regiments during the Revolution. In the Third Regiment of Tryon County militia, among the enlisted men, appears the name of David Ogden ["New York in the Revolution," 2d ed., p. 181], and there was but one David Ogden, not merely in the Tryon County militia, but so far as these records show, in the entire soldiery of New York State. In the same regiment there was also a "Daniel" Ogden, Sr., possibly David's father. The name Daniel Ogden also occurs in the list of Tryon County Rangers ["New York in the Revolution," 2d ed., p. 186], a service in which we would naturally expect to find one whom the Indian Brant called "the beaver hunter, that old scouter." In short, I think we may accept David as altogether genuine, and in his adventures—never told before, I believe, as a part of Niagara history—may find an example of patriotic suffering and endurance wholly typical of what many another underwent at that time and in this region.

The "Fort Niagara Centennial Address" is here included because its most important part relates to that period in our history immediately following the Revolution, the "hold-over period," during which, for thirteen years after the Treaty of 1783, the British continued to occupy Fort Niagara and other lake posts. What I say on the negotiations leading to the final relinquishment of Fort Niagara is based on information gleaned from the manuscript records in London and Ottawa.

"The Journals and Journeys of an Early Buffalo Merchant" is also a contribution to local annals from an unpublished source, being drawn from the MS. journals of John Lay, very kindly placed in my hands by members of his family. They afford a picture of conditions hereabouts and elsewhere, during the years 1810-'23, which I have thought worthy of preservation.

In the "Misadventures of Robert Marsh" I have endeavored by means of a personal narrative to illustrate another period in our history. The misguided Marsh fairly stands for many of the so-called Patriots whose uprising on this border is known as Mackenzie's Rebellion of 1837-'8. The considerable literature on this subject includes a number of personal narratives, for the most part published in small editions and now hard to find; but the scarcest of all, so far as my experience has discovered, is that from which I have drawn the story of Robert Marsh: "Seven Years of My Life, or Narrative of a Patriot Exile, who together with eighty-two American Citizens were illegally tried for rebellion in Upper Canada and transported to Van Dieman's Land," etc., etc. It is an exceedingly prolix and pretentious title, after the fashion of the time, prefacing a badly-written, poorly-printed volume of 207 pages, turned out by the press of Faxon & Stevens, Buffalo, 1848. In view of the fact that neither in Sabin nor any other bibliography have I found any mention of this book, and the further fact that in fifteen years of somewhat diligent book-hunting I have discovered but one copy, it is no exaggeration to call Marsh's "Narrative" "scarce," if not "rare."

The incidents related in "Underground Trails" are illustrative of many an episode at the eastern end of Lake Erie in the days preceding the Civil War. I had the facts of the principal adventures some years ago from the late Mr. Frank Henry of Erie, Pa., who had himself been a participant in more than one worthy enterprise of the Underground Railroad. Sketches based on information supplied by Mr. Henry, and originally written out for the Erie Gazette, are the latter part of the paper as it now stands.

The last essay, "Niagara and the Poets," is a following of "Old Trails" chiefly in a literary sense, but it is thought its inclusion here will not be found inappropriate to the general character of the collection.

I must add a word of grateful acknowledgment for help received from Douglas Brymner, Dominion Archivist, at Ottawa; from the Hon. Peter A. Porter of Niagara Falls, N. Y., Charles W. Dobbins of New York City, and John Miller, Erie, Pa. F. H. S.

The Cross Bearers.

THE CROSS BEARERS.

I invite you to consider briefly with me the beginnings of known history in our home region. Of the general character of that history, as a part of the exploration and settlement of the lake region, you are already familiar. What I undertake is to direct special attention to a few of the individuals who made that history—for history, in the ultimate analysis, is merely the record of the result of personal character and influence; and it is striking to note how relatively few and individual are the dominating minds.

Remembering this, when we turn to trace the story of the Niagara, we find the initial impulses strikingly different from those which lie at the base of history in many places. Often the first chapter in the story is a record of war for war's sake—the aim being conquest, acquisition of territory, or the search for gold. Not so here. The first invasion of white men in this mid-lake region was a mission of peace and good will. Our history begins in a sweet and heroic obedience to commands passed down direct from the Founder of Christianity Himself. Into these wilds, long before the banner of any earthly kingdom was planted here, was borne the cross of Christ. Here the crucifix preceded the sword; the altar was built before the hearth.

Now, I care not what the faith of the student be, he cannot escape the facts. The cross is stamped upon the first page of our home history—of this Buffalo and the banks of the Niagara; and whoever would know something of that history must follow the footsteps of those who first brought the cross to these shores. It is, therefore, a brief following of the personal experiences of these early cross bearers that we undertake; but first, a word may be permitted by way of reminder as to the conditions here existing when our recorded history begins.

From remote days unrecorded, the territory bordering the Niagara, between Lakes Erie and Ontario, was occupied by a nation of Indians called the Neuters. A few of their villages were on the east side of the river, the easternmost being supposed to have stood near the present site of Lockport. The greater part of the Niagara peninsula of Ontario and the north shore of Lake Erie was their territory. To the east of them, in the Genesee valley and beyond, dwelt the Senecas, the westernmost of the Iroquois tribes. To the north of them, on Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay, dwelt the Hurons. About 1650 the Iroquois overran the Neuter territory, destroyed the nation and made the region east of the Niagara a part of their own territory; though more than a century elapsed, after their conquest of the Neuters, before the Senecas made permanent villages on Buffalo Creek and near the Niagara. It is necessary to bear this fact in mind, in considering the visits of white men to this region during that period; it had become territory of the Senecas, but they only occupied it at intervals, on hunting or fishing expeditions.

During the latter years of Neuter possession of our region, missionaries began to approach the Niagara from two directions; but long before any brave soul had neared it through what is now New York State,—then the heart of the fierce Iroquois country,—others, more successful, had come down from the early-established missions among the Hurons, had sojourned among the Neuters and had offered Christian prayers among the savages east of the Niagara.

Note, therefore, that the first white man known to have visited the Niagara region was a Catholic priest. Moreover, so far as is ascertained, he was the first man, coming from what is now Canada, to bring the Christian faith into the present territory of the United States. This man was Joseph de la Roche Dallion.[1] The date of his visit is 1626.

Father Dallion was a Franciscan of the Recollect reform, who had been for a time at the mission among the Hurons, then carried on jointly by priests and lay brothers of the Recollects and also by Fathers of the Society of Jesus. On October 18th of this year (1626), he left his companions, resolved to carry the cross among the people of the Neuter nation. An interpreter, Bruslé, had "told wonders" of these people. Bruslé, it would seem, therefore, had been among them; and although, as I have said, Father Dallion was the first white man known to have reached the Niagara, yet it is just to consider the probabilities in the case of this all but unknown interpreter. There are plausible grounds for belief, but no proof, that Étienne Bruslé was the first white man who ever saw Niagara Falls. No adventurer in our region had a more remarkable career than his, yet but little of it is known to us. He was with Champlain on his journey to the Huron country. He left that explorer in September, 1615, at the outlet of Lake Simcoe, and went on a most perilous mission into the country of the Andastes, allies of the Hurons, to enlist them against the Iroquois. The Andastes lived on the head-waters of the Susquehanna, and along the south shore of Lake Erie, the present site of Buffalo being generally included within the bounds of their territory. Champlain saw nothing more of Bruslé for three years, but in the summer of 1618 met him at Saut St. Louis. Bruslé had had wonderful adventures, had even been bound to the stake and burned so severely that he must have been frightfully scarred. The name by which we know him may have been given him on this account. He was saved from death by what the Indians regarded as an exhibition of wrath on the part of the Great Spirit. I find no trace of him between 1618 and 1626, when Father Dallion appears to have taken counsel of him regarding the Neuters. Bruslé was murdered by the Hurons near Penetanguishene in 1632. What is known of him is learned from Champlain's narrative of the voyage of 1618 (edition of 1627). Sagard also speaks of him, and says he made an exploration of the upper lakes—a claim not generally credited. Parkman, drawing from these sources and the "Relations," tells his story in "The Pioneers of France in the New World," admiringly calls him "That Pioneer of Pioneers," and says that he seems to have visited the Eries in 1615.

The interesting thing about him in connection with our present study is the fact that he appears to have been the forerunner of Dallion among the savages of the Niagara. There is no white man named in history who may be even conjectured, with any plausibility, to have visited the Niagara earlier than Bruslé.[2]

Stimulated by this interpreter's reports, by the encouragement of his companions and the promptings of his own zeal, Father Dallion set out for the unknown regions. Two Frenchmen, Grenole and Lavallée, accompanied him. They tramped the trail for six days through the woods, apparently rounding the western end of Lake Ontario, and coming eastward through the Niagara Peninsula. They were well received at the villages, given venison, squashes and parched corn to eat, and were shown no sign of hostility. "All were astonished to see me dressed as I was," writes the father, "and to see that I desired nothing of theirs, except that I invited them by signs to lift their eyes to heaven, make the sign of the cross and receive the faith of Jesus Christ." The good priest, however, had another object, somewhat unusual to the men of his calling. At the sixth village, where he had been advised to remain, a council was held. "There I told them, as well as I could, that I came on behalf of the French to contract alliance and friendship with them, and to invite them to come to trade. I also begged them to allow me to remain in their country, to be able to instruct them in the law of our God, which is the only means of going to paradise." The Neuters accepted the priest's offers, and the first recorded trade in the Niagara region was made when he presented them "little knives and other trifles." They adopted him into the tribe, and gave him a father, the chief Souharissen.

After this cordial welcome, Grenole and Lavallée returned to the Hurons, leaving Father Joseph "the happiest man in the world, hoping to do something there to advance God's glory, or at least to discover the means, which would be no small thing, and to endeavor to discover the mouth of the river of Hiroquois, in order to bring them to trade." After speaking of the people and his efforts to teach them, he continues: "I have always seen them constant in their resolution to go with at least four canoes to the trade, if I would guide them, the whole difficulty being that we did not know the way. Yroquet, an Indian known in those countries, who had come there with twenty of his men hunting for beaver, and who took fully 500, would never give us any mark to know the mouth of the river. He and several Hurons assured us that it was only ten days' journey to the trading place; but we were afraid of taking one river for another, and losing our way or dying of hunger on the land." So excellent an authority as Dr. John Gilmary Shea says: "This was evidently the Niagara River, and the route through Lake Ontario. He (Dallion) apparently crossed the river, as he was on the Iroquois frontier." The great conquest of the Neuters by the Iroquois was not until 1648 or 1650. Just what the "Iroquois frontier" was in 1627 is uncertain. It appears to have been about midway between the Niagara and the Genesee, the easternmost Neuter village being some thirty miles east of the Niagara. The Recollect appears therefore as the first man to write of the Niagara, from personal knowledge, and of its mouth as a place of trade. The above quotations are from the letter Father Dallion wrote to one of his friends in France July 18, 1627, he having then returned to Toanchain, a Huron village. I have followed the text as given by Sagard. It is significant that Le Clercq, in his "Premier Établissement de la Foy," etc., gives a portion of Dallion's account of his visit to the Neuters, but omits nearly everything he says about trade.

Father Dallion sojourned three winter months with the Neuters, but the latter part of the stay was far from agreeable. The Hurons, he says, having discovered that he talked of leading the Neuters to trade, at once spread false and evil reports of him. They said he was a great magician; that he was a poisoner, that he tainted the air of the country where he tarried, and that if the Neuters did not kill him, he would burn their villages and kill their children. The priest was at a disadvantage in not having much command of the Neuter dialect, and it is not strange, after the evil report had once been started, that he should have seemed to engage in some devilish incantation whenever he held the cross before them or sought to baptize the children. When one reflects upon the dense wall of ignorance and superstition against which his every effort at moral or spiritual teaching was impotent, the admiration for the martyr spirit which animated the effort is tempered by amazement that an acute and sagacious man should have thought it well to "labor" in such an obviously ineffective way. But history is full of instances of ardent devotion to aims which the "practical" man would denounce at once as unattainable. That Father Dallion was animated by the spirit of the martyrs is attested in his own account of what befel him. A treacherous band of ten came to him and tried to pick a quarrel. "One knocked me down with a blow of his fist, another took an ax and tried to split my head. God averted his hand; the blow fell on a post near me. I also received much other ill-treatment; but that is what we came to seek in this country." His assailants robbed him of many of his possessions, including his breviary and compass. These precious things, which were no doubt "big medicine" in the eyes of his ungracious hosts, were afterwards returned. The news of his maltreatment reached the ears of Fathers Brébeuf and De la Nouë at the Huron mission. They sent the messenger, Grenole, to bring him back, if found alive. Father Dallion returned with Grenole early in the year 1627; and so ended the first recorded visit of white man to the Niagara region.

For fourteen years succeeding, I find no allusion to our district. Then comes an episode which is so adventurous and so heroic, so endowed with beauty and devotion, that it should be familiar to all who give any heed to what has happened in the vicinity of the Niagara.

Jean de Brébeuf was a missionary priest of the Jesuits. That implies much; but in his case even such a general imputation of exalted qualities falls short of justice. His is a superb figure, a splendid acquisition to the line of heroic figures that pass in shadowy procession along the horizon of our home history. Trace the narrative of his life as sedulously as we may, examine his character and conduct in whatever critical light we may choose to study them, and still the noble figure of Father Brébeuf is seen without a flaw. There were those of his order whose acts were at times open to two constructions. Some of them were charged, by men of other faith and hostile allegiance, with using their priestly privileges as a cloak for worldly objects. No such charge was ever brought against Father Brébeuf. The guilelessness and heroism of his life are unassailable.

He was of a noble Normandy family, and when he comes upon the scene, on the banks of the Niagara, he was forty-seven years old. He had come out to Quebec fifteen years before and had been assigned to the Huron mission. In 1628 he was called back to Quebec, but five years later he was allowed to return to his charge in the remote wilderness. The record of his work and sufferings there is not a part of our present story. Those who seek a marvelous exemplification of human endurance and devotion, may find it in the ancient Relations of the order. He lived amid threats and plots against his life, he endured what seems unendurable, and his zeal throve on the experience. In November, 1640, he and a companion, the priest Joseph Chaumonot, resolved to carry the cross to the Neuter nation. They no doubt knew of Father Dallion's dismal experience; and were spurred on thereby. Like him, they sought martyrdom. Their route from the Huron country to the Niagara has been traced with skill and probable accuracy by the Very Rev. Wm. R. Harris, Dean of St. Catharines. At this time the Neuter nation lived to the north of Lake Erie throughout what we know as the Niagara Peninsula, and on both sides of the Niagara, their most eastern village being near the present site of Lockport. From an uncertain boundary, thereabouts, they confronted the possessions of the Senecas, who a few years later were to wipe them off the face of the earth and occupy all their territory east of the lake and river.

Fathers Brébeuf and Chaumonot set out on their hazardous mission November 2d, in the year named, from a Huron town in the present township of Medonte, Ontario. (Near Penetanguishene, on Georgian Bay.) Their probable path was through the present towns of Beeton, Orangeville, Georgetown, Hamilton and St. Catharines. They came out upon the Niagara just north of the Queenston escarpment. The journey thus far had been a succession of hardships. The interpreters whom they had engaged to act as guides deserted them at the outset. Ahead of them went the reputation which the Hurons spread abroad, that they were magicians and carried all manner of evils with them. Father Brébeuf was a man of extraordinary physical strength. Many a time, in years gone by, he had astonished the Indians by his endurance at the paddle, and in carrying great loads over the portages. His companion, Chaumonot, was smaller and weaker, but was equally sustained by faith in Divine guidance. On their way through the forests, Father Brébeuf was cheered by a vision of angels, beckoning him on; but when he and his companion finally stood on the banks of the Niagara, under the leaden sky of late November, there was little of the beatific in the prospect. They crossed the swirling stream—by what means must be left to conjecture, the probability being in favor of a light bark canoe—and on the eastern bank found themselves in the hostile village of Onguiara—the first-mentioned settlement on the banks of our river.

Here the half-famished priests were charged with having come to ruin the people. They were refused shelter and food, but finally found opportunity to step into a wigwam, where Indian custom, augmented by fear, permitted them to remain. The braves gathered around, and proposed to put them to death. "I am tired," cried one, "eating the dark flesh of our enemies, and I want to taste the white flesh of the Frenchman." So at least is the record in the Relation. Another drew bow to pierce the heart of Chaumonot; but all fell back in awe when the stalwart Brébeuf stepped forth into their midst, without weapon and without fear, and raising his hand exclaimed: "We have not come here for any other purpose than to do you a friendly service. We wish to teach you to worship the Master of Life, so that you may be happy in this world and in the other."

Whether or not any of the spiritual import of his speech was comprehended cannot be said; but the temper of the crowd changed, so that, instead of threatening immediate death, they began to take a curious, childish interest in the two "black-gowns"; examining the priests' clothes, and appropriating their hats and other loose articles. The travelers completely mystified them by reading a written message, and thus getting at another's thoughts without a spoken word. The Relation is rich in details of this sort, and of the wretchedness of the life which the missionaries led. They visited other "towns," as the collections of bark wigwams are called; but everywhere they were looked upon as necromancers, and their lives were spared only through fear.

Far into the winter the priests endured all manner of hardship. Food was sometimes thrown to them as to a worthless dog, sometimes denied altogether, and then they had to make shift with such roots and barks or chance game as their poor woodcraft enabled them to procure, or the meager winter woods afforded. On one occasion, when a chief frankly told them that his people would have killed them long before, but for fear that the spirits of the priests would in vengeance destroy them, Brébeuf began to assure him that his mission was only to do good; whereupon the savage replied by spitting in the priest's face; and the priest thanked God that he was worthy of the same indignity which had been put upon Jesus Christ. When one faces his foes in such a spirit, there is absolutely nothing to fear. And yet, after four months of these experiences, there seems not to have been the slightest sign of any good result. The savages were as invulnerable to any moral or spiritual teachings as the chill earth itself. Dumb brutes would have shown more return for kindness than they. The saying of Chateaubriand, that man without religion is the most dangerous animal that walks the earth, found full justification in these savages. Finally, Brébeuf and his associate determined to withdraw from the absolutely fruitless field, and began to retrace their steps towards Huronia.

It was near the middle of February, 1641, when they began their retreat from the land of the Neuters. The story of that retreat, as indeed of the whole mission, has been most beautifully told, with a sympathetic fervency impossible for one not richly endowed with faith to simulate, by Dean Harris. Let his account of what happened stand here:

"The snow was falling when they left the village Onguiara, crossed the Niagara River near Queenston, ascended its banks and disappeared in the shadowy forest. The path, which led through an unbroken wilderness, lay buried in snow. The cold pierced them through and through. The cords on Fr. Chaumonot's snow-shoe broke, and his stiffened fingers could scarcely tie the knot. Innumerable flakes of snow were falling from innumerable branches. Their only food was a pittance of Indian corn mixed with melted snow; their only guide, a compass. Worn and spent with hardships, these saintly men, carrying in sacks their portable altar, were returning to announce to their priestly companions on the Wye the dismal news of their melancholy failure and defeat. There was not a hungry wolf that passed them but looked back and half forgave their being human. There was not a tree but looked down upon them with pity and commiseration. Night was closing in when, spent with fatigue, they saw smoke rising at a distance. Soon they reached a clearing and descried before them a cluster of bark lodges. Here these Christian soldiers of the cross bivouacked for the night.

"Early that evening while Chaumonot, worn with traveling and overcome with sleep, threw himself to rest on a bed that was not made up since the creation of the world, Father Brébeuf, to escape for a time the acrid and pungent smoke that filled the cabin, went out to commune with God alone in prayer.... He moved toward the margin of the woods, when presently he stopped as if transfixed. Far away to the southeast, high in the air and boldly outlined, a huge cross floated suspended in mid-heaven. Was it stationary? No, it moved toward him from the land of the Iroquois. The saintly face lighted with unwonted splendor, for he saw in the vision the presage of the martyr's crown. Tree and hillside, lodge and village, faded away, and while the cross was still slowly approaching, the soul of the great priest went out in ecstasy, in loving adoration to his Lord and his God.... Overcome with emotion, he exclaimed, 'Who will separate me from the love of my Lord? Shall tribulation, nakedness, peril, distress, or famine, or the sword?' Emparadised in ecstatic vision, he again cries out with enthusiastic loyalty, 'Sentio me vehementer impelli ad moriendum pro Christo'—'I feel within me a mighty impulse to die for Christ'—and flinging himself upon his knees as a victim for the sacrifice or a holocaust for sin, he registered his wondrous vow to meet martyrdom, when it came to him, with the joy and resignation befitting a disciple of his Lord.

"When he returned to himself the cross had faded away, innumerable stars were brightly shining, the cold was wrapping him in icy mantle, and he retraced his footsteps to the smoky cabin. He flung himself beside his weary brother and laid him down to rest. When morning broke they began anew their toilsome journey, holding friendly converse.

"'Was the cross large?' asked Father Chaumonot.

"'Large,' spoke back the other, 'yes, large enough to crucify us all.'"

It is idle to insist on judgments by the ordinary standards in a case like this. As Parkman says, it belongs not to history, but to psychology. Brébeuf saw the luminous cross in the heavens above the Niagara; not the material, out-reaching arms of Niagara's spray, rising columnar from the chasm, then resting, with crosslike extensions on the quiet air, white and pallid under the winter moon. Such phenomena are not unusual above the cataract, but may not be offered in explanation of the priest's vision. He was in the neighborhood of Grimsby, full twenty miles from the falls, when he saw the cross; much too far away to catch the gleam of frosted spray. Nor is it a gracious spirit which seeks a material explanation for his vision. The cross truly presaged his martyrdom; and although the feet of Father Brébeuf never again sought the ungrateful land of the Neuters, yet his visit and his vision were not wholly without fruit. They endow local history with an example of pure devotion to the betterment of others, unsurpassed in all the annals of the holy orders. To Brébeuf the miraculous cross foretold martyrdom, and thereby was it a sign of conquest and of victory to this heroic Constantine of the Niagara.

After Brébeuf and Chaumonot had turned their backs on the Neuters, the Niagara region was apparently unvisited by white men for more than a quarter of a century. These were not, however, years of peaceful hunting and still more placid corn and pumpkin-growing, such as some romantic writers have been fond of ascribing to the red men when they were unmolested by the whites. As a matter of fact, and as Fathers Dallion, Brébeuf and Chaumonot had discovered, the people who claimed the banks of the lower reaches of the Niagara as within their territory, were the embodiment of all that was vile and barbarous. There is no record that they had a village at the angle of lake and river, where now stands old Fort Niagara. It would have been strange, however, if they did not occasionally occupy that sightly plateau with their wigwams or huts, while they were laying in a supply of fish. If trees ever covered the spot they were killed by early camp-fires, probably long before the coming of the whites. Among the earliest allusions to the point is one which speaks of the difficulty of getting wood there; and such a treeless tract, in this part of the country, could usually be attributed to the denudation consequent on Indian occupancy.

A decade or so after the retreat of the missionaries came that fierce Indian strife which annihilated the Neuters and gave Niagara's banks into the keeping of the fiercer but somewhat nobler Iroquois. The story of this Indian war has been told with all possible illumination from the few meager records that are known; and it only concerns the present chronicle to note that about 1650 the site of Fort Niagara passed under Seneca domination. The Senecas had no permanent town in the vicinity, but undoubtedly made it a rendezvous for war parties, and for hunting and fishing expeditions.

Meanwhile, the Jesuits in their Relations, and after them the cartographers in Europe, were making hearsay allusions to the Niagara or locating it, with much inaccuracy, on their now grotesque maps. In 1648 the Jesuit Ragueneau, writing to the Superior at Paris, mentions Niagara, which he had never seen or approached, as "a cataract of frightful height." L'Allemant in the Relation published in 1642, had alluded to the river, but not to the fall. Sanson, in 1656, put "Ongiara" on his famous map; and four years later the map of Creuxius, published with his great "Historiæ Canadensis," gave our river and fall the Latin dignity of "Ongiara Catarractes." One map-maker copied from another, so that even by the middle of the seventeenth century, the reading and student world—small and ecclesiastical as it mostly was—began to have some inkling of the main features and continental position of the mid-lake region for the possession of which, a little later, several Forts Niagara were to be projected. It is not, however, until 1669 that we come to another definite episode in the history of the region.

In that year came hither the Sulpitian missionaries, François Dollier de Casson and René de Bréhant[3] de Galinée. They were bent on carrying the cross to nations hitherto unreached, on Western rivers. With them was the young Robert Cavelier, known as La Salle, who was less interested in carrying the cross than in exploring the country. Their expedition left Montreal July 6th, nine canoes in all. They made their way up the St. Lawrence, skirted the south shore of Lake Ontario, and on Aug. 10th were at Irondequoit Bay. They made a most eventful visit to the Seneca villages south of the bay. Thence they continued westward, apparently by Indian trails overland, and not by canoe. De Galinée, who was the historian of the expedition, says that they came to a river "one eighth of a league broad and extremely rapid, forming the outlet or communication from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario," and he continues with a somewhat detailed account of Niagara Falls, which, although he passed near them, he did not turn aside to see. The Sulpitians and La Salle crossed the river, apparently below Lewiston. They may indeed have come to the river at its mouth, skirting the lake shore. One may infer either course from the narrative of de Galinée, which goes on to say that five days after passing the river they "arrived at the extremity of Lake Ontario, where there is a fine, large sandy bay ... and where we unloaded our canoes."

Pushing on westward, late in September, on the trail between Burlington Bay and the Grand River, they met Joliet, returning from his expedition in search of copper mines on Lake Superior. This meeting in the wilderness is a suggestive and picturesque subject, but we may not dwell on it here. Joliet, though he had thus preceded LaSalle and the Sulpitians in the exploration of the lakes, had gone west by the old northern route along the Ottawa, Lake Nipissing and the French River. He was never on the Niagara, for after his meeting with LaSalle, he continued eastward by way of the Grand River valley and Lake Ontario. Fear of the savages deterred him from coming by way of the Niagara, and thereby, it is not unlikely, becoming the white discoverer of Niagara Falls.[4] He was the first white man, so far as records relate, to come eastward through the Detroit River and Lake Erie. Our lake was therefore "discovered" from the west—a fact perhaps without parallel in the history of American exploration.

After the meeting with Joliet, La Salle left the missionaries, who, taking advantage of information had from Joliet, followed the Grand River down to Lake Erie. Subsequently they passed through Lake Erie to the westward, the first of white men to explore the lake in that direction. De Galinée's map (1669) is the first that gives us the north shore of Lake Erie with approximate accuracy. On October 15th this devout man and his companion reached Lake Erie, which they described as "a vast sea, tossed by tempestuous winds." Deterred by the lateness of the season from attempting further travel by this course, they determined to winter where they were, and built a cabin for their shelter.

Occasionally they were visited in their hut by Iroquois beaver hunters. For five months and eleven days they remained in their winter quarters and on the 23d of March, 1670, being Passion Sunday, they erected a cross as a memorial of their long sojourn. The official record of the act is as follows:

"We the undersigned certify that we have seen affixed on the lands of the lake called Erié the arms of the King of France with this inscription: 'The year of salvation 1669, Clement IX. being seated in St. Peter's chair, Louis XIV. reigning in France, M. de Courcelle being Governor of New France, and M. Talon being intendant therein for the King, there arrived in this place two missionaries from Montreal accompanied by seven other Frenchmen, who, the first of all European peoples, have wintered on this lake, of which, as of a territory not occupied, they have taken possession in the name of their King by the apposition of his arms, which they have attached to the foot of this cross. In witness whereof we have signed the present certificate.'

"FRANCOIS DOLLIER,
"Priest of the Diocese of Nantes in Brittany.
"DE GALINÉE,
"Deacon of the Diocese of Rennes in Brittany."

The winter was exceedingly mild, but the stream[5] was still frozen on the 26th of March, when they portaged their canoes and goods to the lake to resume their westward journey. Unfortunately losing one of their canoes in a gale they were obliged to divide their party, four men with the luggage going in the two remaining canoes; while the rest, including the missionaries, undertook the wearisome journey on foot all the way from Long Point to the mouth of the Kettle Creek. De Galinée grows enthusiastic in his admiration for the immense quantities of game and fruits opposite Long Point and calls the country the terrestrial Paradise of Canada. "The grapes were as large and as sweet as the finest in France. The wine made from them was as good as vin de Grave." He admires the profusion of walnuts, chestnuts, wild apples and plums. Bears were fatter and better to the palate than the most "savory" pigs in France. Deer wandered in herds of fifty to an hundred. Sometimes even two hundred would be seen feeding together. Before arriving at the sand beach which then connected Long Point with the mainland they had to cross two streams. To cross the first stream they were forced to walk four leagues inland before they found a satisfactory place to cross. One whole day was spent in constructing a raft to cross Big Creek, and after another delay caused by a severe snow-storm, they successfully effected a crossing and found on the west side a marshy meadow two hundred paces wide into which they sank to their girdles in mud and slush. Beset by dangers and retarded by inclement weather, they at last arrived at Kettle Creek, where they expected to find the canoe in which Joliet had come down Lake Huron and the Detroit and which he had told them was hidden there. Great was their disappointment to find that the Indians had taken it. However, later in the day, while gathering some wood for a fire, they found the canoe between two logs and joyfully bore it to the lake. In the vicinity of their encampment the hunters failed to secure any game, and for four or five days the party subsisted on boiled maize. The whole party then paddled up the lake to a place where game was plentiful and the hunters saw more than two hundred deer in one herd, but missed their aim. Disheartened at their failure and craving meat, they shot and skinned a miserable wolf and had it ready for the kettle when one of the men saw some thirty deer on the other side of the small lake they were on. The party succeeded in surrounding the deer and, forcing them into the water, killed ten of them. Now well supplied with both fresh and smoked meat, they continued their journey, traveled nearly fifty miles in one day and came to a beautiful sand beach (Point Pelée), where they drew up their canoes and camped for the night. During the night a terrific gale came up from the northeast. Awakened by the storm they made all shift to save their canoes and cargoes. Dollier's and de Galinée's canoes were saved, but the other one was swept away with its contents of provisions, goods for barter, ammunition, and, worst of all, the altar service, with which they intended establishing their mission among the Pottawatamies.

The loss of their altar service caused them to abandon the mission and they set out to return to Montreal, but strangely enough chose the long, roundabout journey by way of the Detroit, Lake Huron and the French River, in preference to the route by which they had come, or by the outlet of Lake Erie, which they had crossed the autumn before. Thus de Galinée and Dollier de Casson, like Joliet,—not to revert to Champlain half a century earlier,—missed the opportunity, which seemed to wait for them, of exploring the eastern end of Lake Erie, of correctly mapping the Niagara and observing and describing its incomparable cataract. Obviously the Niagara region was shunned less on account of its real difficulties, which were not then known, than through terror of the Iroquois. Our two Sulpitians reached Montreal June 18, 1670, which date marks the close of the third missionary visitation in the history of the Niagara.

And now I approach the point at which many writers of our local history have chosen to begin their story—the famous expedition of La Salle and his companions in 1678-'79. For the purpose of the present study we may omit the more familiar aspects of that adventure, and limit our regard to the acts of the holy men who continue the interrupted chain of missionary work on the Niagara. On December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, 1678, with an advance party under La Motte de Lussiére, came the Flemish Recollect, Louis Hennepin. As the bark in which they had crossed stormy Lake Ontario at length entered the Niagara, they chanted the Ambrosian hymn, "Te Deum Laudamus," and there is no gainsaying the sincerity of that thank-offering for perils escaped. Five days later, being encamped on the present site of Niagara, Ont., Father Hennepin celebrated the first mass ever said in the vicinity. A few days later, on the site of Lewiston, he had completed a bark chapel, in which was held the first Christian service which had been held on the eastern side of the Niagara since the visit of Brébeuf thirty-eight years before. Father Hennepin has left abundant chronicles of his activities on the Niagara. As soon as the construction of the Griffon was begun above the falls a chapel was established there, near the mouth of Cayuga Creek. Having blessed this pioneer vessel of the upper lakes, when she was launched, he set out for Fort Frontenac in the interests of the enterprise, and was accompanied to the Niagara, on his return, by the Superior of the mission, Father Gabriel de la Ribourde, and Fathers Zénobius Membré and Melithon Watteaux. All through that summer these devoted priests shared the varied labors of the camp. Hennepin tells us how he and his companions toiled back and forth over the portage around the falls, sometimes with their portable altar, sometimes with provisions, rigging or other equipment for the ship. "Father Gabriel," he says, "though of sixty-five years of age, bore with great vigor the fatigue of that journey, and went thrice up and down those three mountains, which are pretty high and steep." This glimpse of the saintly old priest is a reminiscence to cherish in our local annals. He was the last of a noble family in Burgundy who gave up worldly wealth and station to enter the Order of St. Francis. He came to Canada in 1670, and was the first Superior of the restored Recollect mission in that country. There is a discrepancy between Hennepin and Le Clercq as to his age; the former says he was sixty-five years old in 1679, when he was on the Niagara; the later speaks of him as being in his seventieth year in 1680. Of the three missionaries who with La Salle sailed up the Niagara in August, 1679, and with prayers and hymns boldly faced the dangers of the unknown lake, the venerable Father Gabriel was first of all to receive the martyr's crown. A year later, September 9, 1680, while engaged at his devotions, he was basely murdered by three Indians. To Father Membré there were allotted five years of missionary labor before he, too, was to fall a victim to the savage. Father Hennepin lived many years, and his chronicles stand to-day as in some respects the foundation of our local history. But cherish as we may the memory of this trio of missionaries, the imagination turns with a yet fonder regard back to the devoted priest who was not permitted to voyage westward from the Niagara with the gallant La Salle. When the Griffon sailed, Father Melithon Watteaux was left behind in the little palisaded house at Niagara as chaplain. He takes his place in our history as the first Catholic priest appointed to minister to whites in New York State. On May 27, 1679, La Salle had made a grant of land at Niagara to these Recollect Fathers, for a residence and cemetery, and this was the first property in the present State of New York to which the Catholic Church held title. Who can say what were the experiences of the priest during the succeeding winter in the loneliness and dangers of the savage-infested wilderness? Nowhere have I as yet found any detailed account of his sojourn. We know, however, that it was not long. During the succeeding years there was some passing to and fro. In 1680 La Salle, returning east, passed the site of his ruined and abandoned fort. He was again on the Niagara in 1681 with a considerable party bound for the Miami. Father Membré, who was with him, returned east in October, 1682, by the Niagara route; and La Salle himself passed down the river again in 1683—his last visit to the Niagara. His blockhouse, within which was Father Melithon's chapel, had been burned by the Senecas.

From this time on for over half a century the missionary work in our region centered at Fort Niagara, which still stands, a manifold reminder of the romantic past, at the mouth of the river. Four years after La Salle's last passage through the Niagara—in 1687—the Marquis de Denonville led his famous expedition against the Senecas. With him in this campaign was a band of Western Indians, who were attended by the Jesuit Father Enjalran. He was wounded in the battle with the Senecas near Boughton Hill, but appears to have accompanied de Denonville to his rendezvous on the site of Fort Niagara. Here he undoubtedly exercised his sacred office; and since the construction of Fort Niagara began at this time his name may head the list of priests officiating at that stronghold. He was soon after dispatched on a peace mission to the West, which was the special scene of his labors. His part, for some years to come, was to be an important one as Superior of the Jesuit Mission at Michillimackinac.

As soon as Fort Niagara was garrisoned, Father Jean de Lamberville was sent thither as chaplain. For the student, it would be profitable to dwell at length upon the ministrations of this devoted priest. He was of the Society of Jesus, had come out to Canada in 1668, and labored in the Onondaga mission from 1671 to 1687. His work is indelibly written on the history of missions in our State. He was the innocent cause of a party of Iroquois falling into the hands of the French, who sent them to France, where they toiled in the king's galleys. When de Denonville, in 1687, left at Fort Niagara a garrison of one hundred men under the Chevalier de la Mothe, Father Lamberville came to minister to them. The hostile Iroquois had been dealt a heavy blow, but a more insidious and dreadful enemy soon appeared within the gates. The provisions which had been left for the men proved utterly unfit for food, so that disease, with astounding swiftness, swept away most of the garrison, including the commander. Father Lamberville, himself, was soon stricken down with the scurvy. Every man in the fort would no doubt have perished but for the timely arrival of a party of friendly Miami Indians, through whose good offices the few survivors, Father Lamberville among them, were enabled to make their way to Catarouquoi—now Kingston, Ont. There he recovered; and he continued in the Canadian missions until 1698, when he returned to France.

Not willing to see his ambitious fort on the Niagara so soon abandoned, de Denonville sent out a new garrison and with them came Father Pierre Milet. He had labored, with rich results, among the Onondagas and Oneidas. No sooner was he among his countrymen, in this remote and forlorn corner of the earth, than he took up his spiritual work with characteristic zeal. On Good Friday of that year, 1688, in the center of the square within the palisades, he caused to be erected a great cross. It was of wood, eighteen feet high, hewn from the forest trees and neatly framed. On the arms of it was carved in abbreviated words the sacred legend, "Regnat, Vincit, Imperat Christus," and in the midst of it was engraven the Sacred Heart. Surrounded by the officers of the garrison,—gallant men of France, with shining records, some of them were,—by the soldiers, laborers and friendly Indians, Father Milet solemnly blessed it. Can you not see the little band, kneeling about that symbol of conquest? Around them were the humble cabins and quarters of the soldiers. One of them, holding the altar, was consecrated to worship. Beyond ran the palisades and earthworks—feeble fortifications between the feeble garrison and the limitless, foe-infested wilderness. On one hand smiled the blue Ontario, and at their feet ran the gleaming Niagara, already a synonym of hardship and suffering in the annals of three of the religious orders. What wonder that the sense of isolation and feebleness was borne in upon the little band, or that they devoutly bowed before the cross which was the visible emblem of their strength and consolation in the wilderness. Where is the artist who shall paint us this scene, unique in the annals of any people?

And yet, but a few months later—September 15th of that year—the garrison was recalled, the post abandoned, the palisades broken down, the cabins left rifled and empty; and when priest and soldiers had sailed away, and only the prowling wolf or the stealthy Indian ventured near the spot, Father Milet's great cross still loomed amid the solitude, a silent witness of the faith which knows no vanquishing.

There followed an interim in the occupancy of the Niagara when neither sword nor altar held sway here; nor was the altar reëstablished in our region until the permanent rebuilding of Fort Niagara in 1726. True, Father Charlevoix passed up the river in 1721, and has left an interesting account of his journey, his view of the falls, and his brief tarrying at the carrying-place—now Lewiston. This spot was the principal rendezvous of the region for many years; and here, at the cabin of the interpreter Joncaire, where Father Charlevoix was received, we may be sure that spiritual ministrations were not omitted. A somewhat similar incident, twenty-eight years later, was the coming to these shores of the Jesuit Father Bonnecamps. He was not only the spiritual leader but appears to have acted as pilot and guide to De Céloron's expedition—an abortive attempt on the part of Louis XV. to reësablish the claims of France to the inland regions of America. The expedition came up the St. Lawrence and through Lake Ontario, reaching Fort Niagara on July 6, 1749. It passed up the river, across to the south shore of Lake Erie and by way of Chautauqua Lake and the Allegheny down the Ohio. Returning from its utterly futile adventure, we find the party resting at Fort Niagara for three days, October 19-21. Who the resident chaplain was at the post at that date I have not been able to ascertain; but we may be sure that he had a glad greeting for Father Bonnecamps. From 1726, when, as already mentioned, the fort was rebuilt, until its surrender to Sir Wm. Johnson in 1759, a garrison was continually maintained, and without doubt was constantly attended by a chaplain. The register of the post during these years has never been found—the presumption being that it was destroyed by the English—so that the complete list of priests who ministered there is not known.

Only here and there from other sources do we glean a name by which to continue the succession. Father Crespel was stationed at Fort Niagara for about three years from 1729, interrupting his ministrations there with a journey to Detroit, where his order—the Society of Jesus—had established a mission. Of Fort Niagara at this time he says: "I found the place very agreeable; hunting and fishing were very productive; the woods in their greatest beauty, and full of walnut and chestnut trees, oaks, elms and some others, far superior to any we see in France." But not even the banks of the Niagara were to prove an earthly paradise. "The fever," he continues, "soon destroyed the pleasures we began to find, and much incommoded us, until the beginning of autumn, which season dispelled the unwholesome air. We passed the winter very quietly, and would have passed it very agreeably, if the vessel which was to have brought us refreshments had not encountered a storm on the lake, and been obliged to put back to Frontenac, which laid us under the necessity of drinking nothing but water. As the winter advanced, she dared not proceed, and we did not receive our stores till May."

Remember the utter isolation of this post and mission at the period we are considering. To be sure, it was a link in the chain of French posts, which included Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, Niagara, Detroit, Michillimackinac; but in winter the water route for transport was closed, and Niagara, like the upper posts, was thrown on its own resources for existence. There is no place in our domain to-day which fairly may be compared to it for isolation and remoteness. The upper reaches of Alaskan rivers are scarcely less known to the world than was the Niagara at the beginning of the last century. A little fringe of settlement—hostile settlement at that—stretched up the Hudson from New York. Even the Mohawk Valley was still unsettled. From the Hudson to the remotest West the wilderness stretched as a sea, and Fort Niagara was buried in its midst. Although a full century had gone by since Father Dallion first reached its shores, there was now no trace of white men on the banks of the Niagara save at the fort at its mouth, where Father Crespel ministered, and at the carrying-place, where Joncaire the interpreter lived with the Indians. Not even the first Indian villages on Buffalo Creek were to be established for half a century to come.

After Father Crespel's return from Detroit, he remained two years longer at Fort Niagara, caring for the spiritual life of the little garrison, and learning the Iroquois and Ottawah languages well enough to converse with the Indians. "This enabled me," he writes, "to enjoy their company when I took a walk in the environs of our post." The ability to converse with the Indians afterwards saved his life. When his three years of residence at Niagara expired he was relieved, according to the custom of his order, and he passed a season in the convent at Quebec. While he was undoubtedly immediately succeeded at Niagara by another chaplain, I have been unable to learn his name or aught of his ministrations. Indeed, there are but few glimpses of the post to be had from 1733 to 1759, when it fell into the hands of the English. One of the most interesting of these is of the visit of the Sulpitian missionary, the Abbé Piquet, who in 1751 came to Fort Niagara from his successful mission at La Présentation—now Ogdensburg. It is recorded of him that while here he exhorted the Senecas to beware of the white man's brandy; his name may perhaps stand as that of the first avowed temperance worker in the Niagara region.

But the end of the French régime was at hand. For more than a century our home region had been claimed by France; for the last thirty-three years the lily-strewn standard of Louis had flaunted defiance to the English from the banks of the Niagara. Now on a scorching July day the little fort found itself surrounded, with Sir Wm. Johnson's cannon roaring from the wilderness. There was a gallant defense, a baptism of fire and blood, an honorable capitulation. But in that fierce conflict at least one of the consecrated soldiers of the cross—Father Claude Virot—fell before British bullets; and when the triple cross of Britain floated over Fort Niagara, the last altar raised by the French on the east bank of the Niagara river had been overthrown.

On this eventful day in 1759, when seemingly the opportunities for the Catholic Church to continue its work on the Niagara were at an end, there was, in the poor parish of Maryborough, county Kildare, Ireland, a little lad of six whose mission it was to be to bring hither again the blessed offices of his faith. This was Edmund Burke, afterwards Bishop of Zion, and first Vicar-Apostolic of Nova Scotia, but whose name shines not less in the annals of his church because of his zeal as missionary in Upper Canada. Having come to Quebec in 1786, he was, in 1794, commissioned Vicar-General for the whole of Upper Canada—the province having then been established two years. In that year we find him at Niagara, where he was the first English-speaking priest to hold Catholic service. True, there was at the post that year a French missionary named Le Dru, who could speak English; but he had been ordered out of the province for cause. The field was ripe for a man of Father Burke's character and energy. His early mission was near Detroit; he was the first English-speaking priest in Ohio, and it is worthy of note that he was at Niagara on his way east, July 22, 1796—only three weeks before the British finally evacuated Fort Niagara and the Americans took possession. Through his efforts in that year, the Church procured a large lot at Niagara, Ont., where he proposed a missionary establishment. There had probably never been a time, since the English conquest, when there had not been Catholics among the troops quartered on the Niagara; but under a British and Protestant commandant no suitable provision for their worship had been made. In 1798—two years after the British had relinquished the fort on the east side of the river to the Americans—Father Burke, being at the British garrison on the Canadian side, wrote to Monseigneur Plessis:

Here I am at Niagara, instead of having carried out my original design of going on to Detroit, thence returning to Kingston to pass the winter. The commander of the garrison, annoyed by the continual complaints of the civic officials against the Catholic soldiers, who used to frequent the taverns during the hours of service on Sunday, gave orders that officers and men should attend the Protestant service. They had attended for three consecutive Sundays when I represented to the commander the iniquity of this order. He replied that he would send them to mass if the chaplain was there, and he thought it very extraordinary that whilst a chaplain was paid by the king for the battalion, instead of attending to his duty he should be in charge of a mission, his men were without religious services, and his sick were dying without the sacraments. You see, therefore, that I have reason for stopping short at Niagara; for we must not permit four companies, of whom three fourths both of officers and men are Catholics, to frequent the Protestant church.

The name of the priest against whom the charge of neglect appears to lie, was Duval; but it is not clear that he had ever attended the troops to the Niagara station. But after Father Burke came Father Désjardines and an unbroken succession, with the district fully organized in ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

And now, although our story of mission work in the Niagara region has been long—has reviewed the visitations of two centuries—the reader may have remarked the striking fact that every priest who came into our territory, up to the opening of the nineteenth century, came from Canada. This fact is the more remarkable when we recall the long-continued and vigorous missions of the Jesuits in what is now New York State, extending west nearly to the Genesee River. But the fact stands that no priest from those early establishments made his way westward to the present site of Buffalo. Fathers Lamberville and Milet had been stationed among the Onondagas and Oneidas before coming into our region at Fort Niagara; but they came thither from Canada, by way of Lake Ontario, and not through the wilderness of Western New York. The westernmost mission among the Iroquois was that of Fathers Carheil and Garnier at Cayuga, where they were at work ten years before La Salle built the Griffon on the Niagara. It is interesting to note that this mission, which was established nearest to our own region, was "dedicated to God under the invocation of St. Joseph," and that, two hundred years after, the first Bishop of Buffalo obtained from his Holiness, Pope Pius IX., permission that St. Joseph should be the principal patron saint of this diocese.

The earliest episcopal jurisdiction of the territory now embraced in the city of Buffalo, dating from the first visit of Dallion to the land of the Neuters, was directly vested in the diocese of Rouen—for it was the rule that regions new-visited belonged to the government of the bishop from a port in whose diocese the expedition bearing the missionary had sailed; and this stood until a local ecclesiastical government was formed; the first ecclesiastical association of our region, on the New York side, therefore, is with that grand old city, Rouen, the home of La Salle, scene of the martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans, and the center, through many centuries, of mighty impulses affecting the New World. From 1657 to 1670 our region was embraced in the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of New France; and from 1670 to the Conquest in the diocese of Quebec. There are involved here, of course, all the questions which grew out of the strife for possession of the Niagara region by the French, English and Dutch. Into these questions we may not enter now further than to note that from 1684 the English claimed jurisdiction of all the region on the east bank of the Niagara and the present site of Buffalo. This claim was in part based on the Treaty of Albany at which the Senecas had signified their allegiance to King Charles; and by that acquiescence nominally put the east side of the Niagara under British rule. The next year, when the Duke of York came to the throne, he decreed that the Archbishop of Canterbury should hold ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the whole Colony of New York. It is very doubtful, however, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had ever heard of the Niagara—the first English translation of Hennepin did not appear for fourteen years after this date; and nothing is more unlikely than that the Senecas who visited the Niagara at this period, or even the Dutch and English traders who gave them rum for beaver-skins, had ever heard of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or cared a copper for his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, either on the Niagara or even in the settlements on the Hudson. In the New York Colony, and afterward State, the legal discrimination against Catholics continued down to 1784, when the law which condemned Catholic priests to imprisonment or even death was repealed. At the date of its repeal there was not a Catholic congregation in the State. Those Catholics who were among the pioneer settlers of Western New York had to go as far east as Albany to perform their religious duties or get their children baptized. Four years later—in 1788—our region was included in the newly-formed diocese of Baltimore. In 1808 we came into the new diocese of New York. Not until 1821 do we find record of the visit of a priest to Buffalo. In 1829 the Church acquired its first property here—through its benefactor whose name and memory are preserved by one of our noblest institutions—Louis Le Couteulx—and the first Buffalo parish was established under the Rev. Nicholas Mertz.

We are coming very close to the present; and yet still later, in 1847, when the diocese of Buffalo was formed, there were but sixteen priests in the sixteen great counties which constituted it. It is superfluous to contrast that time with the present. There is nothing more striking, to the student of the history and development of our region during the last half century, than the increase of the Catholic Church—in parishes and schools, in means of propaganda, in material wealth with its vast resources and power for good, and especially in that personal zeal and unflagging devotion which know no limit and no exhaustion, and are drawn from the same source of strength that inspired and sustained Brébeuf and Chaumonot and their fellow-heroes of the cross on the banks of the Niagara.

The Paschal of the Great Pinch.

THE PASCHAL OF THE GREAT PINCH.

An Episode in the History of Fort Niagara; being an Extract from the hitherto unknown Memoirs of the Chevalier De Tregay, Lieutenant under the Sieur de Troyes, commanding at Fort Denonville (now called Niagara), in the Year of Starvation 1687; with Captain Désbergeres at that remote fortress from the joyfull Easter of 1688 till its abandonment; Soldier of His Excellency the Sr. de Brissay, Marquis de Denonville, Governor and Lieutenant General in New France; and humble Servitor of His Serene Majesty Louis XIV.

It has been my lot to suffer in many far parts of the earth; to bleed a little and go hungry for the King; to lie freezing for fame and France—and gain nothing thereby but a distemper; but so it is to be a soldier.

And I have seen trouble in my day. I have fought in Flanders on an empty stomach, and have burned my brain among the Spaniards so that I could neither fight nor run away; but of all the heavy employment I ever knew, naught can compare with what befel in the remote parts of New France, where I was with the troops that the Marquis de Denonville took through the wilderness into the cantons of the Iroquois, and afterwards employed to build a stockade and cabins at the mouth of the Strait of Niagara, on the east side, in the way where they go a beaver-hunting. "Fort Denonville," the Sieur de Brissay decreed it should be called, for he held great hopes of the service which it should do him against both the Iroquois and the English; but now that he has fallen into the disfavor that has ever been the reward of faithful service in this accursed land, his name is no more given even to that unhappy spot, but rather it is called Fort Niagara.

There were some hundreds of us all told that reached that fair plateau, after we left the river of the Senecas. It was mid-summer of the year of grace 1687, and we made at first a pleasant camp, somewhat overlooking the great lake, while to the west side of the point the great river made good haven for our batteaux and canoes. There was fine stir of air at night, so that we slept wholesomely, and the wounded began to mend at a great rate. And of a truth, tho' I have adventured in many lands, I have seen no spot which in all its demesne offered a fairer prospect to a man of taste. On the north of us, like the great sea itself, lay the Lake Ontario, which on a summer morning, when touched by a little wind, with the sun aslant, was like the lapis lazuli I have seen in the King's palace—very blue, yet all bright with white and gold. The river behind the camp ran mightily strong, yet for the most part glassy and green like the precious green-stone the lapidaries call verd-antique. Behind us to the south lay the forest, and four leagues away rose the triple mountains wherein is the great fall; but these are not such mountains as we have in Italy and Spain, being more of the nature of a great table-land, making an exceeding hard portage to reach the Strait of Erie above the great fall.

It was truly a most fit place for a fort, and the Marquis de Denonville let none in his command rest day or night until we had made a fortification, in part of earth, surmounted by palisades which the soldiers cut in the woods. There was much of hazard and fatigue in this work, for the whole plain about the fort had no trees; so that some of us went into the forest along the shore to the eastward and some cut their sticks on the west side of the river. It was hard work, getting them up the high bank; but so pressed were we, somewhat by fear of an attack, and even more by the zeal of our commander, that in three days we had built there a pretty good fort with four bastions, where we put two great guns and some pattareras; and we had begun to build some cabins on the four sides of the square in the middle of it. And as we worked, our number was constantly diminished; for the Sieurs Du Luth and Durantaye, with that one-handed Chevalier de Tonty of whom they tell so much, and our allies the savages who had come from the Illinois to join the Governor in his assault upon the Iroquois, as soon as their wounded were able to be moved, took themselves off up the Niagara and over the mountain portage I have spoken of; for they kept a post and place of trade at the Detroit, and at Michillimackinac. And then presently the Marquis himself and all whom he would let go sailed away around the great lake for Montreal. But he ordered that an hundred, officers and men, stay behind to hold this new Fort Denonville. He had placed in command over us the Sieur de Troyes, of whom it would not become me to speak in any wise ill.

There were sour looks and sad, as the main force marched to the batteaux. But the Marquis did not choose to heed anything of that. We were put on parade for the embarkation—though we made a sorry show of it, for there were even then more rags than lace or good leather—and His Excellency spoke a farewell word in the hearing of us all.

"You are to complete your quarters with all convenient expediency," he said to De Troyes, who stood attentive, before us. "There will be no lack of provision sent. You have here in these waters the finest fish in the world. There is naught to fear from these Iroquois wasps—have we not just torn to pieces their nests?"

He said this with a fine bravado, though methought he lacked somewhat of sincerity; for surely scattered wasps might prove troublesome enough to those of us who stayed behind. But De Troyes made no reply, and saluted gravely. And so, with a jaunty word about the pleasant spot where we were to abide, and a light promise to send fresh troops in the spring, the General took himself off, and we were left behind to look out for the wasps. As the boats passed the sandbar and turned to skirt the lake shore to the westward, we gave them a salvo of musketry; but De Troyes raised his hand—although the great Marquis was yet in sight and almost in hailing distance—and forbade another discharge.

"Save your powder," was all he said; and the very brevity of it seemed to mean more than many words, and put us into a low mood for that whole day.

Now for a time that followed there was work enough to keep each man busy, which is best for all who are in this trade of war, especially in the wilderness. It was on the third of August that M. de Brissay left us, he having sent off some of the militia ahead of him; and he bade M. de Vaudreuil stay behind for a space, to help the Sieur de Troyes complete the fort and cabins, and this he did right ably, for as all Canada and the King himself know, M. de Vaudreuil was a man of exceeding great energy and resources in these matters. There was a vast deal of fetching and carrying, of hewing and sawing and framing. And notwithstanding that the sun of that climate was desperately hot the men worked with good hearts, so that there was soon finished an excellent lodgment for the commandant; with a chimney of sticks and clay, and boards arranged into a sort of bedstead; and this M. de Troyes shared with M. de Vaudreuil, until such time as the latter gentleman quit us. There were three other cabins built, with chimneys, doors and little windows. We also constructed a baking-house with a large oven and chimney, partly covered with boards and the remainder with hurdles and clay. We also built an extensive framed building without chimney, and a large store-house with pillars eight feet high, and made from time to time yet other constructions for the men and goods—though, Dieu défend! we had spare room for both, soon enough. In the square in the midst of the buildings we digged a well; and although the water was sweet enough, yet from the first, for lack of proper curbing and protection, it was ever much roiled and impure when we drew it, a detriment alike to health and cookery.

M. de Vaudreuil seeing us at last well roofed, and having directed for a little the getting of a store of firewood, made his adieux. Even then, in those fine August days, a spirit of discontent was among us, and more than one spark of a soldier, who at the first camp had been hot upon staying on the Niagara, sought now to be taken in M. de Vaudreuil's escort. But that gentleman replied, that he wished to make a good report of us all to the Governor, and that, for his part, he hoped he might come to us early in the spring, with the promised detachment of troops. And so we parted.

Now the spring before, when we had all followed the Marquis de Denonville across Lake Ontario to harass the cantons of the Iroquois, this establishment of a post on the Niagara was assuredly a part of that gentleman's plan. It is not for me, who am but a mere lieutenant of marines, to show how a great commander should conduct his expeditions; yet I do declare that while there was no lack of provision made for killing such of the savages as would permit it, there was next to none for maintaining troops who were to be left penned up in the savages' country. We who were left at Fort Denonville had but few mattocks or even axes. Of ammunition there was none too much. In the Senecas' country we had destroyed thousands of minots[6] of corn, but had brought along scarce a week's rations of it to this corner. We had none of us gone a-soldiering with our pockets full of seed, and even if we had brought ample store of corn and pumpkin seed, of lentils and salad plants, the season was too late to have done much in gardening. We made some feeble attempts at it; but no rain fell, the earth baked under the sun so hard that great cracks came in it; and what few shoots of corn and pumpkin thrust upward through this parched soil, withered away before any strengthening juices came in them. To hunt far from the fort we durst not, save in considerable parties; so that if we made ourselves safe from the savages, we also made every other living thing safe against us. To fish was well nigh our only recourse; but although many of our men labored diligently at it, they met with but indifferent return.

Thus it was that our most ardent hopes, our very life itself, hung upon the coming of the promised supplies. There was joy at the fort when at length the sail of the little bark was seen; even De Troyes, who had grown exceeding grave and melancholy, took on again something of his wonted spirit. But we were not quite yet to be succored, for it was the season of the most light and trifling airs, so that the bark for two days hung idly on the shining lake, some leagues away from the mouth of the river, while we idled and fretted like children, impatient for her coming. When once we had her within the bar, there was no time lost in unlading. It was a poor soldier indeed who could not work to secure the comfort of his own belly; and the store was so ample that we felt secure for the winter, come what might. The bark that fetched these things had been so delayed by the calms, that she weighed and sailed with the first favoring breeze; and it was not until her sail had fall'n below the horizon that we fairly had sight or smell of what she had brought.

From the first the stores proved bad; still, we made shift to use the best, eked out with what the near-by forest and river afforded. For many weeks we saw no foes. There was little work to do, and the men idled through the days, with no word on their lips but to complain of the food and wish for spring. When the frosts began to fall we had a more vigorous spell of it; but now for the first time appeared the Iroquois wasps. One of our parties, which had gone toward the great fall of the Niagara, lost two men; those who returned reported that their comrades were taken all unawares by the savages. Another party, seeking game to the eastward where a stream cuts through the high bank on its way to the lake,[7] never came back at all. Here we found their bodies and buried them; but their scalps, after the manner of these people, had been taken.

Christmas drew on, but never was a sorrier season kept by soldiers of France. De Troyes had fallen ill. Naught ailed him that we could see save low spirits and a thinning of the blood, which made him too weak to walk. The Father Jean de Lamberville, who had stayed with us, and who would have been our hope and consolation in those days, very early fell desperate ill of a distemper, so that the men had not the help of his ministrations and holy example. Others there were who either from feebleness or lack of discipline openly refused their daily duty and went unpunished. We had fair store of brandy; and on Christmas eve those of us who still held some soul for sport essayed to lighten the hour. We brewed a comfortable draught, built the blaze high, for the frosts were getting exceeding sharp, gathered as many as could be had of officers and worthy men into our cabin, and made brave to sing the songs of France. And now here was a strange thing: that while the hardiest and soundest amongst us had made good show of cheer, had eaten the vile food and tried to speak lightly of our ills, no sooner did we hear our own voices in the songs that carried us back to the pleasantries of our native land, than we fell a-sobbing and weeping like children; which weakness I attribute to the distemper that was already in our blood.

For the days that followed I have no heart to set down much. We never went without the palisades except well guarded to fetch firewood. This duty indeed made the burden of every day. A prodigious store of wood was needed, for the cold surpassed anything I had ever known. The snow fell heavily, and there were storms when for days the gale drave straight across our bleak plateau. There was no blood in us to withstand the icy blasts. Do what we would the chill of the tomb was in the cabins where the men lay. The wood-choppers one day, facing such a storm, fell in the deep drifts just outside the gate. None durst go out to them. The second day the wolves found them—and we saw it all!

There was not a charge of powder left in the fort. There was not a mouthful of fit food. The biscuits had from the first been full of worms and weevils. The salted meat, either from the admixture of sea-water through leaky casks, or from other cause, was rotten beyond the power even of a starving man to hold.

Le scorbut broke out. I had seen it on shipboard, and knew the signs. De Troyes now seldom left his cabin; and when, in the way of duty, I made my devoirs, and he asked after the men, I made shift to hide the truth. But it could not be for long.

"My poor fellows," he sighed one day, as he turned feebly on his couch of planks, "it must be with all as it is with me—see, look here, De Tregay, do you know the sign?" and he bared his shrunken arm and side.

Indeed I knew the signs—the dry, pallid skin, with the purple blotches and indurations. He saw I was at a loss for words.

"Sang de Dieu!" he cried, "Is this what soldiers of France must come to, for the glory of"——. He stopped short, as if lacking spirit to go on. "Now I bethink me," he added, in a melancholy voice, "it is what soldiers must come to." Then, after a while he asked:

"How many dead today, De Tregay?"

How many dead! From a garrison of gallant men-at-arms we had become a charnel-house. In six weeks we had lost sixty men. From a hundred at the beginning of autumn, we were now scarce forty, and February was not gone. A few of us, perhaps with stouter stomachs than the rest, did all the duty of the post. We brought the firewood and we buried the dead—picking the frozen clods with infinite toil, that we might lay the bones of our comrades beyond the reach of wolves. Sometimes it was the scurvy, sometimes it was the cold, sometimes, methinks, it was naught but a weak will—or as we say, the broken heart; but it mattered not, the end was the same. More than twenty died in March; and although we were now but a handful of skeletons and accustomed to death, I had no thought of sorrow or of grief, so dulled had my spirit become, until one morning I found the brave De Troyes drawing with frightful pains his dying breath. With the name of a maid he loved upon his lips, the light went out; and with heavy heart I buried him in that crowded ground, and fain would have lain down with him.

And now with our commander under the snow, what little spirit still burned in the best of us seemed to die down. I too bore the signs of the distemper, yet to no great extent, for of all the garrison I had labored by exercise to keep myself wholesome, and in the woods I had tasted of barks and buds and roots of little herbs, hoping to find something akin in its juices to the herbe de scorbut[8] which I have known to cure sick sailors. But now I gave over these last efforts for life; for, thought I, spring is tardy in these latitudes. Many weeks must yet pass before the noble Marquis at Montreal (where comforts are) will care to send the promised troop. And the Western savages, our allies the Illinois, the Ottawais, the Miamis, were they not coming to succor us here and to raid the Iroquois cantons? But of what account is the savage's word!

So I thought, and I turned myself on my pallet. I listened. There was no sound in all the place save the beating of a sleet. "It is appointed," I said within me. "Let the end come." And presently, being numb with the cold, I thought I was on a sunny hillside in Anjou. It was the time of the grape-harvest, and the smell of the vines, laughter and sunshine filled the air. Young lads and maids, playmates of my boyhood days, came and took me by the hand....

A twinge of pain made the vision pass. I opened my eyes upon a huge savage, painted and bedaubed, after their fashion. It was the grip of his vast fist that had brought me back from Anjou.

"The Iroquois, then," I thought, "have learned of our extremity, and have broken in, to finish all. So much the better," and I was for sinking back upon the boards, when the savage took from a little pouch a handful of the parched corn which they carry on their expeditions. "Eat," he said, in the language of the Miamis. And then I knew that relief had come—and I knew no more for a space.

Now this was Michitonka himself, who had led his war party from beyond Lake Erie, where the Chevalier de Tonty and Du Luth were, to see how we fared at Fort Denonville, and to make an expedition against the Senecas—of whom we saw no more, from the time the Miamis arrived. There were of all our garrison but twelve not dead, and among those who threw off the distemper was the Father de Lamberville. His recovery gave us the greatest joy. He lay for many weeks at the very verge of the grave, and it was marvelous to all to see his skin, which had been so empurpled and full of malignant humors, come wholesome and fair again. I have often remarked, in this hard country, that of all Europeans the Fathers of the Holy Orders may be brought nearest to death, and yet regain their wonted health. They have the same prejudice for life that the wildest savage has. But as for the rest of us, who are neither savage nor holy, it is by a slim chance that we live at all.

Now the Father, and two or three of the others who had the strength to risk it, set out with a part of Michitonka's people to Cataracouy[9] and Montreal, to carry the news of our extremity. And on a soft April day as we looked over lake, we saw a sail; and we knew that we had kept the fort until the relief company was sent as had been commanded. But it had been a great pinch.

Now I am come to that which after all I chiefly set out to write down; for I have ever held that great woes should be passed over with few words, but it is meet to dwell upon the hour of gladness. And this hour was now arrived, when we saw approach the new commandant, the Sieur Désbergeres, captain of one of the companies of the Detachment of the Marine, and with him the Father Milet, of the Society of Jesus. There was a goodly company, whose names are well writ on the history of this New France: the Sieurs De la Mothe, La Rabelle, Demuratre de Clerin and de Gemerais, and others, besides a host of fine fellows of the common rank; with fresh food that meant life to us.

Of all who came that April day, it was the Father Milet who did the most. The very morning that he landed, we knelt about him at mass; and scarce had he rested in his cabin than he marked a spot in the midst of the square, where a cross should stand, and bade as many as could, get about the hewing of it; and although I was yet feeble and might rest as I liked, I chose to share in the work, for so I found my pleasure. A fair straight oak was felled and well hewn, and with infinite toil the timber was taken within the palisades and further dressed; and while the carpenters toiled to mortise the cross-piece and fasten it with pins, Father Milet himself traced upon the arms the symbols for the legend:

And these letters were well cut into the wood, in the midst of them being the sign of the Sacred Heart. We had it well made, and a place dug for it, on a Thursday; and on the next morning, which was Good Friday, the reverend Father placed his little portable altar in the midst of the square, where we all, officers and men, and even some of the Miamis who were yet with us, assembled for the mass. Then we raised the great cross and planted it firmly in the midst of the little square. The service of the blessing of it lay hold of my mind mightily, for my fancy was that this great sign of victory had sprung from the midst of the graves where De Troyes and four score of my comrades lay; and being in this tender mood (for I was still weak in body) the words which the Father read from his breviary seemed to rest the more clearly in my mind.

"Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini." Father Milet had a good voice, with a sort of tenderness in it, so that we were every one disposed to such silence and attention, that I could even hear the little waves lapping the shore below the fort. And when he began with the "Oramus"—"Rogamus te Domine sancte Pater omnipotens,"—I was that moved, by the joy of it, and my own memories, that I wept—and I a soldier!

It may be believed that the Sunday which followed, which was the Paschal, was kept by us with such worship and rejoicing as had never yet been known in those remote parts. Holy men had been on that river before, it is true; but none had abode there for long, nor had any set up so great a cross, nor had there ever such new life come to men as we knew at Fort Denonville that Easter.

For a space, all things went well. What with the season (for spring ever inspires men to new undertakings) and the bitter lessons learned in the great pinch of the past winter, we were no more an idle set, but kept all at work, and well. Yet the Iroquois pestered us vastly, being set on thereto by the English, who claimed this spot. And in September there came that pilot Maheut, bringing his bark La General over the shoal at the river's mouth all unexpected; and she was scarce anchored in the little roadstead than Désbergeres knew he was to abandon all. It was cause of chagrin to the great Marquis, I make no doubt, thus to drop the prize he had so tried to hold; but some of us in the fort had no stomach for another winter on the Niagara, and we made haste to execute the orders which the Marquis de Denonville had sent. We put the guns on board La General. We set the gate open, and tore down the rows of pales on the south and east sides of the square. Indeed the wind had long ago begun this work, so that towards the lake the pales (being but little set in the earth) had fallen or leaned over, so they could readily have been scaled, or broken through. But as the order was, we left the cabins and quarters standing, with doors ajar, to welcome who might come, Iroquois or wolf, for there was naught within. But Father Milet took down from above the door of his cabin the little sun dial. "The shadow of the great cross falls divers ways," was his saying.

Early the next morning, being the 15th of September, of the year 1688, being ready for the embarkation, Father Milet summoned us to the last mass he might say in the place. It was a sad morning, for the clouds hung heavy; the lake was of a somber and forbidding cast, and the very touch in the air forebode autumnal gales. As we knelt around the cross for the last time, the ensign brought the standards which Désbergeres had kept, and holding the staves, knelt also. Certain Miamis, too, who were about to make the Niagara portage, stayed to see what the priest might do. And at the end of the office Father Milet did an uncommon thing, for he was mightily moved. He turned from us toward the cross, and throwing wide his arms spoke the last word—"Amen."

There were both gladness and sorrow in our hearts as we embarked. Lake and sky took on the hue of lead, foreboding storm. We durst carry but little sail, and at the sunset hour were scarce a league off shore. As it chanced, Father Milet and I stood together on the deck and gazed through the gloom toward that dark coast. While we thus stood, there came a rift betwixt the banked clouds to the west, so that the sun, just as it slipped from sight, lighted those Niagara shores, and we saw but for an instant, above the blackness and the desolation, the great cross as in fire or blood gleam red.

With Bolton at Fort Niagara.

WITH BOLTON AT FORT NIAGARA.

One pleasant September day in 1897 it was my good fortune, under expert guidance, to follow for a little the one solitary trail made by the American patriots in Western New York during the Revolutionary War, the one expedition of our colonial forces approaching this region during that period. This was the famous "raid" led by Gen. John Sullivan in the summer of 1779. Our quest took us up the long hill slope west of Conesus Lake, in what is now the town of Groveland, Livingston Co., to a spot—among the most memorable in the annals of Western New York, yet unmarked and known to but a few—where a detachment of Sullivan's army, under Lieut. Boyd, were waylaid and massacred by the Indians. It was on the 13th of September that this tragedy occurred. Two days later Gen. Sullivan, having accomplished the main purpose of his raid—the destruction of Indian villages and crops—turned back towards Pennsylvania, returning to Easton, whence the expedition had started. He had come within about eighty miles of the Niagara. "Though I had it not in command," wrote Gen. Sullivan in his report to the Secretary of War, "I should have ventured to have paid [Fort] Niagara a visit, had I been supplied with fifteen days' provisions in addition to what I had, which I am persuaded from the bravery and ardor of our troops would have fallen into our hands."[10] This was the nearest approach to any attempt made by the Americans to enter this region during that war.

The events of Sullivan's expedition are well known. Few episodes of the Revolution are more fully recorded. But what is the reverse of the picture? What lay at the other side of this Western New York wilderness which Sullivan failed to penetrate? What was going on, up and down the Niagara, and on Buffalo Creek, during those momentous years? We know that the region was British, that old Fort Niagara was its garrison, the principal rendezvous of the Indians and the base from which scalping parties set out to harry the frontier settlements. The most dreadful frontier tragedies of the war—Wyoming, Cherry Valley, and others—were planned here and carried out with British coöperation. But who were the men and what were the incidents of the time, upon our Niagara frontier? So far as I am aware, that period is for the most part a blank in our histories. One may search the books in vain for any adequate narrative—indeed for any but the most meager data—of the history of the Niagara region during the Revolution. The materials are not lacking, they are in fact abundant. In this paper I undertake only to give an inkling of the character of events in this region during that grave period in our nation's history.[11]

In 1778, Colonel Haldimand, afterward Sir Frederick, succeeded Gen. Guy Carleton in the command of the British forces in Canada. He was Commander in Chief, and Governor of Canada, until his recall in 1784. Lord North was England's Prime Minister, Lord George Germaine in charge of American affairs in the Cabinet. Haldimand took up his residence at Quebec, and therefrom, for a decade, administered the affairs of the Canadian frontier with zeal and adroitness. He was a thorough soldier, as his letters show. He was also an adept in the treatment of matters which, like the retention by the British of the frontier posts for thirteen years after they had been ceded to the Americans by treaty, called for dogged determination, veiled behind diplomatic courtesies. The troops which he commanded were scattered from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Lake Michigan; but to no part of this long line of wilderness defense—a line which was substantially the enemy's frontier—did he pay more constant attention than to Fort Niagara. There were good reasons for this. Fort Niagara was not only the key to the upper lakes, the base of supplies for Detroit, Michillimackinac and minor posts, but it had long been an important trading post and the principal rendezvous of the Six Nations, upon whose peculiarly efficient services against the American frontiers Sir Frederick relied scarcely less than he did upon the British troops themselves. It was, therefore, with no ordinary solicitude that he made his appointments for Niagara.

I cannot state positively the names of all officers in command at Fort Niagara from the time war was begun, down to 1777. Lieut. Lernault, afterwards at Detroit, was here for a time; but about the spring of '77 we find Fort Niagara put under the command of Lieut. Col. Mason Bolton, of the 34th Royal Artillery. He had then seen some years of service in America; had campaigned in Florida and the West Indies; had been sent to Mackinac and as far west as the Illinois; and it was no slight tribute to his ability and fidelity, when Haldimand put the Niagara frontier into his hands. Here, for over three years, he was the chief in command. In military rank, even if in nothing else, he was the principal man in this region during the crucial period of the Revolution. He commanded the garrison at Fort Niagara, and its dependencies at Schlosser and Fort Erie. Buffalo was then unthought of—it was merely Te-hos-e-ro-ron, the place of the basswoods; but at the Indian villages farther up Buffalo Creek, which came into existence in 1780, the name of Col. Bolton stood for the highest military authority of the region. And yet, incredible as it may seem, after all these years in which—to adapt Carlyle's phrase—the Torch of History has been so assiduously brandished about, I do not know of any printed book which offers any information about Col. Mason Bolton or the life he led here. Indeed, with one or two exceptions, in which he is barely alluded to, I think all printed literature may be searched in vain for so much as a mention of his name.

Other chief men of this frontier, at the period we are considering, were Col. Guy Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs; Sir John Johnson, son of the Sir William who captured Fort Niagara from the French in 1759; Col. John Butler, of the Queen's Rangers; his son Walter; Sayenqueraghta, the King of the Senecas; Rowland Montour, his half-breed son-in-law; and Brant, the Mohawk hero, who, equipped with a New England schooling and enlightened by a trip to England, here returned to lead out scalping parties in the British interests.

Col. Bolton had been for some time without authentic news of the enemy, when on the morning of December 14, 1777, the little garrison was thrown into unwonted activity by the arrival of Capt. La Mothe, who reported that Gen. Howe had taken Philadelphia, and that the rebels had "sustained an incredible loss." By a forced march of Howe, La Mothe averred, Gen. Washington had been defeated, "with 11,000 rebels killed, wounded and prisoners." Two days later the excitement was increased by the arrival at the fort of some Delaware Indians, who brought the great news that Washington was killed and his army totally routed. "I had a meeting of the chiefs of the Six Nations," wrote Bolton to Gen. Carleton, "about an hour after the express arrived and told them the news. They seemed extremely pleased and have been in good temper ever since their arrival." Oddly enough, this news was confirmed by a soldier of the 7th Regiment, who had been taken prisoner by the Americans, but had escaped and made his way to Niagara. He further embellished the report by declaring that 9,000 men under Lord Percy defeated 13,000 rebels at Bear's Hill on December 20th, under Washington, that Gates was sent for to take the command when Washington was killed, and that 7,000 volunteers from Ireland had joined Howe's army. Washington at this time, the reader will remember, had gone into winter quarters with his army at Valley Forge.

There were 2,300 Indians at Fort Niagara at this period, all making perpetual demands for beef, flour and rum. The license of the jubilee over Washington's death probably was limited only by the scantiness of provisions and the impossibility of adding to the store. Cold weather shut down on the establishment, the vessels were laid up, and all winter long Col. Bolton and his men had no word contradicting the report of Washington's death. As late as April 8th, the following spring, he wrote to Gen. Carleton that "all accounts confirm Washington being killed and his army defeated in December last, and that Gates was sent for to take the command."

The British early were apprised of Sullivan's intended raid, and although powerless to prevent it, kept well posted as to its progress. The various parties which Sullivan encountered, were directed from Fort Niagara. "Since the rebels visit the Indian country," wrote Gen. Haldimand to Sir John Johnson, September 14, 1779, "I am happy they are advancing so far. They can never reach Niagara and their difficulties and danger of retreat will, in proportion as they advance, increase." Again he wrote twelve days later: "You will be able to make your way to Niagara, and if the rebels should be encouraged to advance as far as that place, I am convinced that few of them will escape from famine or the sword. All in my power to do for you is to push up provisions, which shall be done with the utmost vigor, while the river and lake remain navigable, although it may throw me into great distress in this part of the province, should anything happen to prevent the arrival of the fall victuallers." There was however genuine alarm at Fort Niagara, and even Sir Frederick himself, though he wrote so confidently to Bolton, in his letters to the Ministry expressed grave apprehensions of what might happen.

What did happen was bad enough for British interests, for though the Americans turned back, the raid had driven in upon Bolton a horde of frightened, hungry and irresponsible Indians, who had to be fed at the King's expense and were a source of unmeasured concern to the overworked commandant, notwithstanding the independent organization of the Indian Department which was effected.

To arrive at a just idea of conditions hereabouts at this period, we must keep in mind the relation of the fluctuating population, Indians and whites, to the uncertain and often inadequate food supply.

Fort Niagara at this time—the fall of '78—was a fortification 1,100 yards in circumference, with five bastions and two blockhouses. Capt. John Johnson thought 1,000 men were needed to defend it; "the present strength," he wrote, "amounting to no more than 200 rank and file, including fifteen men of the Royal Artillery and the sick, a number barely sufficient to defend the outworks (if they were in a state of defense) and return the necessary sentries, should the place be infested by a considerable force.... With a garrison of 500 or a less number, it is impregnable against all the savages in America, but if a strong body of troops with artillery should move this way, I believe no engineer who has ever seen these works will say it can hold out any considerable time."

On May 1st, 1778, there had been in the garrison at Fort Niagara 311 men. Half a dozen more were stationed at Fort Schlosser, and thirty-two at Fort Erie, a total of 349, of whom 255 were reported as fit for duty. At this time Maj. Butler's Rangers, numbering 106, had gone on "an expedition with the Indians towards the settlements of Pennsylvania or New York, whichever he finds most practicable and advantageous to the King's service." These raids from Fort Niagara were far more frequent than one would infer from the histories—even from the American histories whose authors are not to be suspected of purposely minimizing either their number or effect. But it appears from the records that not infrequently the expeditions accomplished nothing of more consequence than to steal stock. Horses, cattle and sheep were in more than one instance driven away from settlements far down on the Mohawk or Susquehanna, and brought back alive or dead along the old trails, to Fort Niagara.

To illustrate the methods of the time: In a report to Brig. Gen. Powell, Maj. Butler wrote: "In the spring of 1778 I found it absolutely requisite for the good of His Majesty's service, with the consent and approbation of Lt. Col. Bolton, and on the application of the chiefs and warriors of the five united nations ..., to proceed to the frontiers of the colonies in rebellion, with as many officers and men of my corps as were then raised, in order to protect the Indian settlements and to annoy the enemy." At this time many of his men were new recruits from the colonies, sons or heads of Loyalist—or as we used to say, on this side the border, of Tory—families. As they approached American frontier settlements, the loyalty to King George of some of his men became suspicious, so that Butler issued a proclamation that all deserters, if apprehended, were to be shot. In the letter just quoted from he reports that this order had a good effect. Many curious circumstances arose at the time, due to the British or American allegiance of men who before the war had been friendly neighbors, but who now met as hostiles, as captor and captive, sometimes as victor and victim. There was a constant flight, by one route and another, of Loyalist refugees to Fort Niagara. Thus, by a return of Feb. 12, 1779, 1,346 people were drawing rations from the stores of that place, of whom sixty-four were "distressed families," that is, Tories who had fled from the colonies (mostly from the Mohawk Valley); and 445 Indians. The war parties left early in the spring, and during the summer the supply boats could get up from the lower stations. Then came that march of destruction up the Genesee Valley; winter shut down on lake and river communication, and the most distressed period the frontier had known under British rule set in. In October, immediately after the invasion, Col. Bolton wrote (I quote briefly from a very full report): "Joseph Brant ... assures me that if 500 men had joined the Rangers in time, there is no doubt that instead of 300, at least 1,000 warriors would have turned out, and with that force he is convinced that Mr. Sullivan would have had some reason to repent of his expedition; but the Indians not being supported as they expected, thought of nothing more than carrying off their families, and we had at this Post the 21st of last month 5,036 to supply with provisions, and notwithstanding a number of parties have been sent out since, we have still on the ground 3,678 to maintain. I am convinced your Excellency will not be surprised, if I am extremely alarmed, for to support such a multitude I think will be absolutely impossible. I have requested of Major Butler to try his utmost to prevail on the Indians whose villages have been destroyed to go down to Montreal for the winter, where, I have assured him, they would be well taken care of; and to inform all the rest who have not suffered by the enemy that they must return home and take care of their corn."

Neither plan worked as hoped for. It was difficult to get the Indians to consent to go down the river, or even to Carleton Island; and as Sullivan had destroyed every village save two, few of the Senecas could be induced to return into the Genesee country. Bolton's urgent appeals for extra provisions were also doomed to disappointment, owing to the lateness of the season or the lack of transports.

The winter after Sullivan's raid, Guy Johnson distributed clothing to more than 3,000 Indians at Fort Niagara. But the cost of clothing them was trifling compared with the cost of feeding them. Expeditions against the distant American settlements were planned, not more through the desire for retaliation, than from the necessity of reducing the number of dependents on Fort Niagara. When the inroads on provisions grew serious, the Indians were encouraged to go on the war-path. But so exceedingly severe was the winter, so deep was the snow on the trails, that not until the middle of February could any parties be induced to set out. The number camped around the fort, consuming the King's pork, beef, flour and rum, rose as we have seen, to more than 5,000. Many starved and many froze.

Much could be said regarding the British policy of dealing with the Indians at Fort Niagara, but I may only touch upon the subject at this time. Haldimand, and behind him the British Ministry, placed great reliance upon them. The uniform instruction was that the Indians should be maintained as allies. On April 10, 1778, Lord George Germaine wrote to Gen. Haldimand that the designs of the rebels against Niagara and Detroit were not likely to be successful as long as the Six Nations continued faithful. Presents, honors, and the full license of the tomahawk and scalping-knife were allowed them. With a view to promoting their fidelity, Joseph Brant was made a colonel. Significant, too, was the settling of a generous allowance for life upon Brant's sister, Sir William Johnson's consort; which act was approved, about this time, by the august council at Whitehall.

The British watched the state of the Indian mind as the sailor watches his barometer at the coming of a storm. And the Indian mind, though always cunning, was sometimes childlike in the directness and simplicity of its conclusions. The constant flight to Fort Niagara of refugee Tories was remarked by the savages, and in turn noted and reported to Gen. Haldimand. "The frequent passing of white people to Niagara," wrote Capt. John Johnson to Gen. Carleton, October 6, 1778, "is much taken note of by the Indians, who say they are running away and that they (the Tories) have begun the quarrel and leave them (the Indians) to defend it." However, Johnson counted on being able to change their minds, for he added: "I hope in my next to inform you of giving the rebels an eternal thrashing."

The usual British good sense—the national tradesman's instinct—seems to have been temporarily suspended, held in abeyance, at the demands of these Indians. In his report of May 12, '78, Col. Bolton writes that he has approved bills for nearly £18,000 "for sundries furnished savages which Maj. Butler thought absolutely necessary, notwithstanding all the presents sent to their posts last year; 2,700 being assembled at a time when I little expected such a number, obliged me to send to Detroit for a supply of provisions, and to buy up all the cattle, etc., that could possibly be procured, otherwise this garrison must have been distressed or the savages offended, and of course, I suppose, would have joined the rebels. Even after all that was done for them they scarce seemed satisfied." In June he writes that only eight out of twenty puncheons of rum ordered for Fort Niagara had been received, and that "much wine has been given to the savages that was intended for this post."

One reads in this old correspondence, with mingled amusement and amazement, of the marvelous attentions paid these wily savages. Childlike, whatever they saw in the cargoes of the merchants, they wanted, and England humored and pampered them, lest they transfer their affections. We have Guy Johnson's word for it, under date of Niagara, July 3, 1780, that "many of the Indians will no longer wear tinsel lace, and are become good judges of gold and silver. They frequently demand and have received wine, tea, coffee, candles and many such articles, and they are frequently nice in the choice of the finest black and other cloth for blankets, and the best linnen and cambrick with other things needless to enumerate.... The Six Nations are not so fond of gaudy colors as of good and substantial things, but they are passionately fond of silver ornaments and neat arrows." Elsewhere in these letters a requisition for port wine is explained on the ground that it was demanded by the chiefs when they were sick—dainty treatment, truly, for stalwart savages whose more accustomed diet was cornmeal and water, and who could feast, when fortune favored, on the reeking entrails of a dead horse.

Now and then, it is true, advantages were taken of the Indians in ways which, presumably, it was thought they would not detect; all, we must grant, in the interest of economy. One was in the matter of powder. The Indians were furnished with a grade inferior to the garrison powder. This was shown by a series of tests made at Fort Niagara by order of Brig. Gen. Powell—Col. Bolton's successor—on July 10, 1782. We may suppose it to have been an agreeable summer day, that there was leisure at the fort to indulge in experiments, and that there were no astute Indians on hand to be unduly edified by the result. At Gen. Powell's order an eight-inch mortar was elevated to forty-five degrees, and six rounds fired, to find out how far one half a pound of powder would throw a forty-six pound shell. The first trial, with the garrison powder, sent the shell 239 yards. For rounds two and three Indian Department powder was used; the fine-glazed kind sent the shell eighty-two yards, the coarser grain carried it but seventy-nine yards. Once more the garrison powder was used; the shell flew 243 yards, while a second trial of the two sorts of Indian Department powder sent it but eighty-four and seventy-six yards, or about three to one in favor of the white man. With the garrison powder, a musket and carbine ball went through a two and one-quarter-inch oak plank, at the distance of fifty yards, and lodged in one six inches behind it; but with the Indian powder these balls would not go through the first plank.

This seems like taking a base advantage of the trustful Indian ally, especially since he was to use his powder against the common foe, the American rebel; in reality, however, the Indians were wasteful and irresponsible, and squandered their ammunition on the little birds of the forest and even in harmless but expensive salvos into the empty air.

Another economy was practiced in the Indian Department: when the stock ran low the rum was watered. Sometimes the precious contents of the casks were augmented one third, sometimes even two thirds, with the more abundant beverage from Niagara River, so that the garrison rum, like the garrison powder, "carried" two or three times as well as did that of the Indian Department; but whether this had a salutary effect upon the thirsty recipients is a problem the solution of which lies outside the range of the exact historian.

Difficult as it was to hold the allegiance of the savage, it was harder yet—nay, it was impossible—to make him fight according to the rules of civilized warfare. The British Government from the Ministry down stand in history in an equivocal position in this matter. Over and over again in the correspondence which I have examined, one finds vigorous condemnation of the Indian method of slaughter of women and children, and the torture of captives. Over and over again the officers are urged not to allow it; and over and over again they report, after a raid, that they deplore the acts of wantonness which were committed, and which they were unable to prevent. But nowhere do I find any suggestion that the services of the Indians be dispensed with. Throughout the Revolution, the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas and Delawares—for the last, also, were often at Fort Niagara—were sent against the Americans, by the British. The Oneidas, as is well known, were divided and vacillating in their allegiance. In August, 1780, 132 of them who hitherto had been ostensibly friendly to the Americans, were induced to go to Niagara and give their pledges to the British. When they arrived Guy Johnson put on a severe front and censured them for their lack of steadfastness to the King. According to him, some 500 Oneidas in all came to the fort that year and declared themselves ready to fight the Americans. The last party that arrived delivered up to the Superintendent a commission which, he says, "the Rebels had issued with a view to form the Oneidas into a corps, ... they also delivered up to me the Rebel flag."

So far as I am aware this is the first mention of the Stars and Stripes on the banks of the Niagara. By resolution of June 14, 1777, the American Congress had decreed "That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." A little over three years had passed since John Paul Jones had first flung to the breeze, at the mast of his ship Ranger, this bright banner of the new nation. It was not to appear in a British port for two and a half years to come; sixteen years were to pass before it could fly triumphant over the old walls of Fort Niagara; but France had saluted it, Americans were fighting for it, and although it is first found here in hostile hands, yet I like to reckon from that August day in 1780, the beginning, if in prophecy only, of the reign of that new constellation over the Niagara region.

Col. Bolton's life at Fort Niagara was one of infinite care. Besides the routine of the garrison, he was constantly harrassed by the demands of the Indians, whom the British did not wish to feed, but whom they dared not offend. The old fort, which now sleeps so quietly at the mouth of the river, was a busy place in those days. There was constant coming and going. Schooners, snows[12] and batteaux with provisions from Quebec, or with munitions of war or detachments of troops for Detroit or Michillimackinac, were constantly arriving. I question if the lower Niagara were not busier in that period than it is now. The transfer of supplies around the falls—the "great portage"—was hard and tedious work. Not Quebec, but Great Britain, was the real base of supplies. There were many detentions, and constant interruption in shipment, at every stage of the way. Sometimes a cargo of salt pork from Ireland or flour from London would reach Quebec too late in the summer to admit of transfer to the posts until spring. Sometimes, in crossing Lake Ontario, the provisions would be damaged so as to be unfit for use; sometimes they would be lost. Then not only the garrison at Niagara had to face starvation, but Col. Bolton soon had his ears ringing with messages and maledictions from Detroit and Mackinac, buried still farther in the wilderness, and all looking to Niagara for food and clothing. At such times of distress the upper posts questioned whether goods intended for them were not irregularly held at Niagara; the meanwhile, Col. Bolton would be straining every effort to get provisions enough to keep his own command from starvation. Indian supplies and traders' goods, too, were liable to loss and detention; and on very slight provocation, the demands of the Indians grew insolent.

There were constant desertions, too, among the troops. Indeed, there seems never to have been a time at Fort Niagara when desertions were not frequent, and, more than once, so numerous as to threaten the very existence of the garrison. This, however, not in Bolton's time. As the correspondence shows, he enjoyed the utmost confidence of his superiors, and there is nothing to indicate that his men were not as devoted to him as any officer could expect at a frontier post where service meant hard work and possible starvation.

Frequent as had been the raids against the settlements before the expedition of Sullivan, they became thereafter even more frequent; and, if less disastrous, they were so merely because the American frontier settlements had already paid their utmost tribute to Butler and Brant. The expeditions, along certain much-worn trails, had to go farther and farther in order to find foes to attack or cattle to steal. This was especially so in the valleys of the Mohawk and Susquehanna; yet in one quarter and another this border warfare went on, and there is no lack of evidence, in the official correspondence, of its effectiveness. Thus, writing from Fort Niagara, August 24, 1780, Guy Johnson reports: "I have the pleasure to inform your excellency that the partys who subdivided after Capt. Brant's success at the Cleysburg"—an expedition which he had previously reported—"have all been successful; that Capt. Brant has destroyed twenty houses in Schoharie and taken and killed twelve persons, besides releasing several women and children. Among the prisoners is Lieut. Vrooman, the settlement of that name being that which was destroyed. The other divisions of that party have been also successful, particularly Capt. David's party, and the number of killed and taken by them within that time, so far as it has come to my hands, is, killed, thirty-five, taken, forty-six, released, forty.... The remaining inhabitants on the frontiers are drawing in so as to deprive the rebels of any useful resources from them. I have at present on service, several partys that set out within one and the same week, and I apprehend that falling on the frontiers in different places at the same time will have a good effect." September 18th he writes, telling of the destruction of "Kleysberg," "containing a church, 100 houses and as many barnes, besides mills and 500 cattle and horses." In the same letter he wrote: "I have now 405 warriors out in different parties and quarters, exclusive of some marched from Kadaragawas.... The greater part of the rest are at their planting grounds, and many sick here, as fevers and fluxes have for some time prevailed at this Post." October 1st he reports the number of men in the war parties sent out from Fort Niagara as 892. A return, dated June 30, 1781, shows that the war parties "have killed and taken during the season already 150 persons." September 30th he reports an expedition under Walter Johnson and Montour, in which about "twenty rebels" were killed; and on that day Capt. Nelles arrived with eleven prisoners taken in Pennsylvania. A postscript to this letter says: "Since writing, I have received the disagreeable news of the death of the gallant Montour, who died of the wounds he received in the action before related. He was a chief of the greatest spirit and readiness, and his death is a loss." We can well believe that; for Montour, who, from the American view-point, had the reputation of being a fiend incarnate, had indeed shown "spirit and readiness" in stealing cattle, burning log cabins, killing and scalping their occupants or bringing them captive to Fort Niagara.

In another paper[13] I have stated that I have traced out the individual experiences in captivity of thirty-two of these Americans, who were taken by the Indians and British and brought as prisoners to Fort Niagara. How much might be done on this line may be judged from a review of Col. Johnson's transactions, furnished by that officer at Montreal, March 24, 1782, in which it is stated that the number of Americans killed and taken captive by parties from Fort Niagara, amounted at that time to near 900. The time was rife with like experiences. For instance, there was the famous raid on Cherry Valley, from which Mrs. Jane Campbell and her four children, after a long detention among the Indians, were brought to Fort Niagara. There was Jane Moore, who was also taken at Cherry Valley, and who subsequently was married to Capt. Powell of the Niagara garrison in the winter of 1779—the ceremony, by the Church of England service, so impressing Joseph Brant that he immediately led up to the minister the squaw with whom he had been living for a long time, and insisted on being married over again, white man's fashion. There was Lieut. Col. Stacia, another prisoner from Cherry Valley, whose head Molly Brant wanted for a football. Some of the stories of these captives, like that of Alexander Harper, who ran the gauntlet at Fort Niagara (the ordeal apparently being made light in his case), are familiar to readers of our history; others, I venture to say, are unknown. For instance, there were John and Robert Brice, two little boys, who were taken in 1779 near Rensselaerville by a scouting party, and brought, with other prisoners and eight scalps, to Fort Niagara. But they did not come together. Robert, who was but eleven years old, was taken to Fort Erie and sold to a lake sailor for the sum of £3. This little Son of the Revolution was kept on the upper lakes until 1783, when he was summoned to Fort Niagara where he met his brother John, from whom he had parted near the mouth of the Unadilla River some four years before. They were sent to Montreal with nearly 200 liberated captives, and ultimately the boys reached Albany and their friends. Then there is the story of Nancy Bundy, who, her husband and children being killed, was brought to Fort Niagara and sold into servitude for $8. There was the famous Indian fighter, Moses Van Campen, whose adventures and captivity in our region are the subject of a whole book. There were Horatio Jones and Jasper Parrish, who passed from Indian captives into the useful role of interpreters for the whites.

Thus I might go on, naming by the score the heroes and heroines of Indian captivities whose sufferings and whose adventures make up the most romantic chapter in our home annals, as yet for the most part unwritten. But I take time now to dwell, briefly as possible, upon but one of these captivities—one of the notable incidents during Col. Bolton's time at Fort Niagara. This was the capture of the Gilbert family. It made so great a stir, even in those days accustomed to war and Indian raids, that in 1784 a little book was published in Philadelphia giving the history of it. The original edition[14] has long since been one of the scarcest of Americana. But in the unpublished correspondence between Gen. Haldimand and the officers at Fort Niagara, I find sundry allusions to "the Quaker's family," and statements which go to show that the British at least were disposed to treat them well, and to effect their exchange as soon as possible. Notwithstanding, it was a long and cruel captivity, and presents some features of peculiar significance in our local history.

About sunrise on the morning of April 25, 1780, a party of eleven painted Indians suddenly issued from the woods bordering Mahoning Creek, in Northampton County, Penn. They had come from Fort Niagara, and were one of those scalping parties for the success of which so many encouraging messages had passed from Whitehall to Quebec, and from Quebec to the frontier, and to stimulate which Guy Johnson had been so lavish with the fine linen, silver ornaments and port wine. The party was commanded by Rowland Montour, John Montour being second in command. Undiscovered, they surrounded the log house of the old Quaker miller, Benjamin Gilbert. With tomahawk raised and flint-locks cocked they suddenly appeared at door and windows. The old Quaker offered his hand as a brother. It was refused. Partly from the Quaker habit of non-resistance, partly from the obvious certainty that to attempt to escape meant death, the whole household submitted to be bound, while their home was plundered and burned. Loading three of Gilbert's horses with booty, and placing heavy packs on the back of each prisoner old enough to bear them, the expedition took the trail for Fort Niagara, more than 200 miles away. This was "war" in "the good old days."

There were twelve prisoners in the party, of whom but five were men. The patriarch of the household, Benjamin, was sixty-nine years old; Elizabeth, his wife, was fifty-five; Joseph, Benjamin's son by a former wife, aged forty-one; another son, Jesse, aged nineteen, and his wife Sarah, the same age. There were three younger children, Rebecca, Abner and Elizabeth, respectively sixteen, fourteen and twelve; Thomas Peart, son to Benjamin Gilbert's wife by a former husband, aged twenty-three; a nephew, Benjamin Gilbert, aged eleven; a hired man, Andrew Harrigar, twenty-six; and Abigail Dodson, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a neighbor; she had had the ill-luck to come to Gilbert's mill that morning for grist, and was taken with the rest. Half a mile distant lived Mrs. Gilbert's oldest son, Benjamin Peart, aged twenty-seven, his wife Elizabeth, who was but twenty, and their nine-months-old child. Montour added these to his party, making fifteen prisoners in all, burned their house and urged all along the trail, their first stop being near "Mochunk." (Mauch Chunk.)

I must omit most of the details of their march northward. On the evening of the first day Benjamin Peart fainted from fatigue and Rowland Montour was with difficulty restrained from tomahawking him. At night the men prisoners were secured in a way which was usual on these raids, throughout Western New York and Pennsylvania, during those dismal years. The Indians cut down a sapling five or six inches in diameter, and cut notches in it large enough to receive the ankles of the prisoners. After fixing their legs in these notches, they placed another pole over the first, and thus secured them as in stocks. This upper pole was then crossed at each end by stakes driven into the ground. The prisoners thus lay on the ground, on their backs. Straps or ropes around their necks were made fast to near-by trees. Sometimes a blanket was granted them for covering, sometimes not. What rest might be had, preparatory to another day's forced march, I leave to the imagination.

During the early stages of this march the old couple were constantly threatened with death, because unable to keep up. On the fourth day four negroes who claimed that they were loyal to the King, that they had escaped from the Americans and had set out for Fort Niagara, were taken up by Montour from a camp where he had left them on his way down the valley. These negroes frequently whipped and tortured the prisoners for sport, Montour making no objection. On the 4th of May, the Indians separated into two companies; one taking the westward path, and with this party went Thomas Peart, Joseph Gilbert, Benjamin Gilbert—the little boy of eleven—and Sarah, wife of Jesse. The others kept on the northerly course. Andrew Harrigar, terrified by the Indian boast that those who had gone with the other party "were killed and scalped, and you may expect the same fate tonight," took a kettle, under pretence of bringing water, but ran away under cover of darkness. After incredible hardships he regained the settlements. His escape so angered Rowland Montour that he threw Jesse Gilbert down, and lifted his tomahawk for the fatal blow; Elizabeth, Jesse's mother, knelt over him, pressed her head to her son's brow and begged the captain to spare his life. Montour kicked her over and tied them both by their necks to a tree; after a time, his passion cooling, he loosed them, bade them pack up and take the trail. This is but a sample incident. I pass over many.

None suffered more on the march than Elizabeth Peart, the girl mother. The Indians would not let her husband relieve her by carrying her child, and she was ever the victim of the whimsical moods of her captors. At one time they would let her ride one of the horses; at another, would compel her to walk, carrying the child, and would beat her if she lagged behind. By the 14th of May Elizabeth Gilbert had become so weak that she could only keep the trail when led and supported by her children. On this day the main party was rejoined by a portion of the party that had branched off to westward; with them were two of the four captives, Benjamin Gilbert, Jr., and Sarah, wife of Jesse. On this day old Benjamin was painted black, the custom of the Indians with prisoners whom they intended to kill. Later on they were joined by British soldiers, who took away the four negroes and did something to alleviate the sufferings of the white prisoners. The expedition had exhausted its provisions and all that had been taken from the Gilberts. A chance hedgehog, and roots dug in the woods, sustained them for some days. May the 17th they ferried across the Genesee River on a log raft. Provisions were brought from Fort Niagara, an Indian having been sent ahead, on the best horse; and on the morning of the 21st of May they heard, faintly booming beyond the intervening forest, the morning gun at Fort Niagara. An incident of that day's march was a meeting with Montour's wife. She was the daughter of the great Seneca Sayenqueraghta, the man who led the Indians at Wyoming,[15] and whose influence was greater in this region, at the time we are studying, than even that of Brant himself. He was the Old King of the Senecas, called Old Smoke by the whites. Smoke's Creek, the well-known stream which empties into Lake Erie just beyond the southwest limit of Buffalo, between South Park and Woodlawn Beach, preserves his name to our day. It was there that he lived in his last years; and somewhere on its margin, in a now unknown grave, he was buried. His daughter the "Princess," was, next to Molly Brant, the grandest Indian woman of the time on the Niagara. As she met the wretched Gilberts, "she was dressed altogether in the Indian costume, and was shining with gold lace and silver baubles." To her Rowland Montour presented the girl Rebecca, as a daughter. The princess took a silver ring from her finger and put it on Rebecca's, which act completed the adoption of this little Quaker maid of sixteen into one of the most famous—possibly the most infamous—family of the Niagara region during the Revolutionary period.

At a village not far from Fort Niagara, apparently near the present Tuscarora village on the heights east of Lewiston, Montour painted Jesse, Abner, Rebecca and Elizabeth Gilbert, Jr., as Indians are painted, and gave each a belt of wampum; but while these marks of favor were shown to the young people, the mother, because of her feebleness, was continually the victim of the displeasure and the blows of the Indians. On May 23d, being at the Landing—what is now Lewiston—they were visited by Captains Powell and Dace from the fort, and the next day, just one month from the time of their capture, they trudged down the trail which is now the pleasant river road, towards the old fort, protected with difficulty from the blows of the Indians along the way.

Now followed the dispersion of this unhappy family. After the Indian custom, the young and active prisoners were sought by the Indians for adoption. Many brave American boys went out to live, in the most menial servitude, among the Senecas and other tribes who during the later years of the Revolution lived on the Genesee, the Tonawanda, Buffalo, Cazenove, Smoke's, and Cattaraugus creeks. The old man and his wife and their son Jesse were surrendered to Col. Johnson. Benjamin Peart, Mrs. Gilbert's son, was carried off to the Genesee. The other members of the party were held in captivity in various places; but I may only stay now to note what befel the little Rebecca and her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peart.

As already stated, Rebecca had been adopted by Rowland Montour's wife. In the general allotment of prisoners, her cousin, Benjamin Gilbert, the lad of eleven, also fell to this daughter of Sayenqueraghta. She took the children to a cabin where her father's family, eleven in number, were assembled. After the usual grand lamentation for the dead, whose places were supposed now to be filled by the white prisoners, this royal household departed by easy stages for their summer's corn-planting. They tarried at the Landing, while clothing was had from the fort. The little Quaker girl was dressed after the Indian fashion, "with short-clothes, leggins and a gold-laced hat"; while Benjamin, "as a badge of his dignity, wore a silver medal hanging from his neck." They moved up to Fort Schlosser (just above the falls, near where the present power-house stands), thence by canoe to Fort Erie; then "four miles further, up Buffalo Creek, where they pitched their tent for a settlement." Here the women planted corn; but the little Rebecca, not being strong, was allowed to look after the cooking. The whole household, queen, princess and slave, had to work. The men of course were exempt; but the chief advantage of Sayenqueraghta's high rank was that he could procure more provisions from the King's stores at Fort Niagara than could the humbler members of the tribe. The boy Ben had an easy time of it. He roamed at will with the Indian boys over the territory that is now Buffalo; fished in the lake, hunted or idled without constraint, and it is recorded that he was so pleased with the Indian mode of life, that but for his sister's constant admonition he would have dropped all thought of return to civilization, and cheerfully have become as good an Indian as the best of them. At eleven years of age savagery takes easy hold.

These children lived with Montour's Indian relatives for over two years; sharing in the feasts when there was plenty, going pinched with hunger on the frequent occasions when improvidence had exhausted the supply. There were numerous expeditions, afoot and by canoe, to Fort Niagara. On one occasion Rebecca, with her Indian family, were entertained by British officers at Fort Erie, when Old Smoke drank so much wine that when he came to paddle his canoe homeward, across the river, he narrowly escaped an upset on the rocky reef, just outside the entrance to Buffalo Creek. On every visit to Fort Niagara Rebecca would look for release; but although the officers were kind to her, they did not choose to interfere with so powerful a family as Montour's. It was shortly after one of these disappointments that she heard of her father's death. For some months she was sick; then came news of the death of her Indian father, Rowland Montour, who succumbed to wounds received in the attack already noted. There was great mourning in the lodge on Buffalo Creek, and Rebecca had to make a feint of sorrow, weeping aloud with the rest.

In the winter of '81-'82 a scheme was devised by friends at the fort for abducting her from the Indians, but it was not undertaken. In the spring of '82 peremptory orders came from Gen. Haldimand that all the remaining members of the Gilbert family who were still in captivity should be taken from the Indians; but after a council fire had been lighted, Old Smoke, Montour's widow, and the rest of the family, Rebecca and Ben included, moved six miles up the lake shore—apparently to Smoke's Creek—where they stayed several weeks making maple sugar. Then, a great pigeon roost being reported, men and boys went off to it, some fifty miles, and the delighted young Ben went too. Of all the Gilbert captives he alone seems to have had experiences too full of wholesome adventure and easy living to warrant the expenditure of the least bit of sympathy upon him. But sooner or later the wily Indians had to heed Sir Frederick's command, and on the 1st of June, 1782, after upwards of two years of captivity, Rebecca and her cousin were released at Fort Niagara, and two days later, with others, embarked for Montreal.

Far more cheerless were the experiences of Elizabeth Peart. She was parted from her husband, adopted by a Seneca family, and was also brought to raise corn on Buffalo Creek. Early in her servitude among the Indians her babe was taken from her and carried across to Canada. She was but twenty years old herself; the family that had taken her came by canoe to Buffalo Creek, where they settled for the corn-planting. This was in the spring of 1780. All manner of drudgery and burdens were put upon her. Her work was to cultivate the corn. Falling sick, the Indians built a hut for her by the side of the cornfield, and then utterly neglected her. Here she remained through the summer, regaining strength enough to care for and gather the corn; when this was done, her Indian father permitted her to come and live again in the family lodge. At one time a drunken Indian attacked her, knocked her down, and dragged her about, beating her. At another, all provision failing, she tramped with others four days through the snow to Fort Niagara. Here Capt. Powell's wife—who had been a prisoner herself—interceded in Elizabeth's behalf, but to no avail. She was however given an opportunity to see her babe, which was being cared for by an Indian family on the Canadian side of the river, opposite Fort Niagara. This privilege was gained for the poor mother by bribing her Indian father with a bottle of rum. So far as I am aware, this was the best use to which a bottle of rum was put during the Revolutionary War. But back to Buffalo Creek the unhappy mother had to come. Her release was finally obtained by artifice. Being allowed to visit Fort Niagara, where she had some needlework to do for the white people, she feigned sickness, and by one excuse and another the Indians were put off until she could be shipped away to Montreal.

Of the Gilbert family and those taken with them by Montour, only the old man died in captivity. The adventures of each one would make a long story, but may not be entered upon here. By the close of '82 they were all released from the Indians, and after a detention at Montreal, reached their friends in Pennsylvania and set about the reëstablishment of homes.

Beyond question, Elizabeth Peart and Rebecca Gilbert were the first white women ever on the site of the present city of Buffalo. They were brave, patient, patriotic girls; no truer Daughters of the American Revolution are known to history. It would seem fitting that their memory should be preserved and their story known—much fuller than I have here sketched it—by the patriotic Daughters of the Revolution of our own day, who give heed to American beginnings in this region.

I have dwelt at length on the Gilbert captivity, not more because of its own importance than to illustrate the responsibilities which constantly rested on the commandant at Niagara, at this period. We now turn to other phases of the service which engaged the attention and taxed the endurance of Col. Bolton.

From the time of the conquest of Canada in 1760 down to the opening of the Revolution, there had been a slow but steady growth of shipping on the lakes, especially on Lake Ontario. On this lake, as early as 1767, there were four brigs of from forty to seventy tons, and sixteen armed deck-cutters. Besides the "King's ships" there were still much travel and traffic by means of canoes and batteaux. One of the first effects of the war with the American colonies was to beget active ship-building operations by the British; for Lake Ontario, at Oswegatchie, Oswego and Niagara; and for Lake Erie, at Navy Island, Detroit and Pine River. An official return made in July, 1778, the summer after Col. Bolton assumed command at Niagara, enumerates twelve sailing craft built for Lake Ontario since the British gained control of that lake in 1759, and sixteen for Lake Erie; seven of the Lake Ontario boats had been cast away, two were laid up and decayed; so that at this time—midsummer of '78—there were still in service only the snow Haldimand, eighteen guns, built at Oswegatchie in 1771; the snow Seneca, eighteen guns, built in 1777; and the sloop Caldwell, two guns, built in 1774. A memorandum records that Capt. Andrews, in the spring of 1778, sought permission to build another vessel at Niagara, to take the place of the Haldimand, which, he was informed, could not last more than another year. The vessel built, in accordance with this recommendation, was a schooner; her construction was entrusted to Capt. Shank, at Niagara, across the river from the fort. We may be sure that Col. Bolton visited the yard from time to time to note the progress of the work. There was discussion over her lines. "Capt. Shank was told that he was making her too flat-bottomed, and that she would upset." The builder laughed at his critics and stuck to his model. She was launched, named the Ontario, and was hastened forward to completion, for the King's service had urgent need of her.

Col. Bolton had long been in bad health, wearied with the cares and perplexities of his position and eager to get away from Fort Niagara. One source of constant annoyance to his military mind was the traders' supplies, which turned the fort into a warehouse and laid distasteful duties upon its commandant. His letters contain many allusions to the "incredible plague and trouble caused by merchants' goods frequently sent without a single person to care for them." "Last year," so he wrote in May, '78, "every place in this fort was lumbered with them, and vessels were obliged to navigate the lakes until Nov. 30th." The vessels were primarily for the King's service, but when unemployed were allowed to be used in transporting merchants' goods, under certain regulations. The next statement in the same letter gives some idea of the magnitude of the transactions involved in the various departments in this region at the period: "I have drawn a bill of £14,760-9-5"—nearly $74,000—"on acct. of sundries furnished Indians by Maj. Butler, also another on acct. of Naval Dept. at Detroit for £4,070-18-9. Between us I am heartily sick of bills and accounts and if the other posts are as expensive to Government as this has been I think Old England had done much better in letting the savages take possession of them than to have put herself to half the enormous sum she has been at in keeping them. Neither does the climate agree with my constitution, which has already suffered by being employed many years in the West Indies and Florida, for I have been extremely ill the two winters I have spent here with rheumatism and a disorder in my breast."

One source of annoyance to Bolton was a detachment of Hessians which was sent to augment the garrison at Fort Niagara. Col. Bolton did not find them to his liking, nor was life at a backwoods post at all congenial to these mercenaries, fighting England's battles to pay their monarch's debts. They refused to work on the fortifications at Niagara; whereupon, in November, 1779, Col. Bolton packed them off down to Carleton Island. Alexander Fraser, in charge of that post, wrote to Gen. Haldimand that he had ordered the "jagers" to be replaced by a company of the 34th. "Capt. Count Wittgenstein," he added, "fears bad consequences should the Jagers be ordered to return." Nowhere in America does the British employment of Hessian troops appear to have been less satisfactory than on this frontier. At Carleton Island, as at Niagara, they refused to work, many of them were accused of selling their necessaries for rum, and the Count de Wittgenstein himself was reprimanded.

There were difficulties, too, with the lake service. Desertion and discontent followed an attempt to shorten the seamen's rations. In the summer of '78, the sailors on board the snow Seneca, at Niagara, asked to be discharged, alleging that their time had expired the preceding November, and the yet more remarkable reason that they objected to the service because they had been brought up on shore and life on the rolling deep of Lake Ontario afforded "no opportunity of exercising our Religion, neither does confinement agree with our healths." Like many lake sailors at this period they were probably French Canadian Catholics, with loyalty none too strong to the British cause.

Bolton stuck to his post throughout that season, the year of alarm that followed, and the succeeding period of distress. The most frequent entries in his letters record the arrival of war parties, and his anxiety over the enormous expense incurred for the Indians by Maj. Butler. "Scalps and prisoners are coming in every day, which is all the news this place affords," he writes in June, '78; and again, the same month: "Ninety savages are just arrived with thirteen scalps and two prisoners, and forty more with two scalps are expected. All of these gentry, I am informed, must be clothed."[16] While there does not seem ever to have been an open break between Bolton and Butler, yet the former looked with dismay, if not disapproval, upon the endless expenditure incurred for the Indians. In August, 1778, he wrote: "Maj. Butler, chief of the Indian Department, gives orders to the merchants to supply the savages with everything to answer their demands, of which undoubtedly he is the best judge and only person who can satisfy them or keep them in temper. He also signs a certificate that the goods and cash issued and paid by his order were indispensably necessary for the government of His Majesty's service. The commanding officer of this post is thus obliged to draw bills for the amount of all these accounts, of which it is impossible he can be a judge or know anything about.... I only mention these things to show Yr Excellency the disagreeable part that falls to my lot as commanding officer; besides this is such a complicated command that even an officer of much superior abilities than I am master of, would find himself sometimes not a little embarrassed at this Post."

Bolton was seriously ill during the winter of '79-'80, as indeed were many of his garrison. In April, 1780, he reports his wretched health to Gen. Haldimand. All through the succeeding summer he stuck to his post; but on September 13th, worn out and discouraged, he asked to be allowed to retire from the command of the upper posts and lakes. September 30th he again wrote, begging for leave of absence. Some weeks later the desired permission was sent, and Bolton determined to stay no longer. Late in October the new Ontario, which Capt. Shank had built across the river from the fort, was finished and rigged; she carried sixteen guns, and was declared ready for service. She was ordered to convey a company of the 34th down to Carleton Island. It was a notable departure. The season was so late, no other opportunity for crossing Lake Ontario might be afforded until spring. Lieut. Royce, with thirty men of the 34th, embarked, under orders; so did Lieut. Colleton of the Royal Artillery. Capt. Andrews, superintendent of naval construction, at whose solicitations the Ontario had been built, being at Fort Niagara at the time, also took passage. There was the full complement of officers and crew. Several passengers—licensed Indian traders and fur merchants, probably—crowded aboard; and among those who sailed away from Fort Niagara that last October day, was Col. Bolton. It was the Ontario's first voyage; and we may be sure that there was no lack of speculation and wise opinion in the throng of spectators who watched her round the bar at the mouth of the river and take her course down the lake. The old criticism about her flat bottom and lack of draught was sure to be recalled. But the Ontario, with her notable passenger list, had sailed, and the only port she ever reached was the bottom of the lake. It is supposed she foundered, some forty miles east of Niagara, near a place called Golden Hill. On the beach there, some days after, a few articles were found, supposed to have come ashore; but no other sign, no word of the Ontario or of any of the throng that sailed in her has been had from that day to this. In due time news of the loss reached Quebec. Sincere but short were the expressions of sorrow in the correspondence that followed. "The loss of so many good officers and men," wrote Haldimand, "particularly at this period, and the disappointment of forwarding provisions for the great consumption at the upper posts, will be severely felt."[17] It was the fortune of war, and already the thought turned to those who had depended upon a return cargo of provisions by the Ontario. And so passes Mason Bolton out of the history of Fort Niagara.

What Befel David Ogden.

WHAT BEFEL DAVID OGDEN.

It was my privilege, in the summer of 1896, to share in the exercises which marked the Centennial of the delivery of Fort Niagara by Great Britain to the United States. As I stood in that old stronghold on the bank above the blue lake, strolled across the ancient parade ground, or passed from one historic building to another, I found myself constantly forgetting the actual day and hour, and slipping back a century or two. There was a great crowd at Fort Niagara on this August day; thousands of people—citizens, officials, soldiers and pleasure-seekers; but with them came and went, to my retrospective vision, many more thousands yet: missionary priests, French adventurers, traders, soldiers of the scarlet, and of the buff and blue. I saw Butler's Rangers in their green suits; and I saw a horde of savages, now begging for rations from the King's stores, now coming in from their forays, famished but exultant, displaying the scalps they had taken, or leading their ragged and woebegone captives. It was upon these captives, whose romantic misfortunes make a long and dramatic chapter in the history of Fort Niagara, that my regard was prone to center. Their stories have nowhere been told, so far as I am aware, as a part of the history of the place; many of them never can be told; but of others some details may be recorded.

Throughout the whole period of the Revolutionary War, Fort Niagara was a garrisoned British post, of varying strength. It was the supply depot for all arms and provisions which were destined for the upper posts of Detroit and Michillimackinac; it was the rendezvous of the Senecas, who worked the Government for all the blankets and guns, trinkets and provisions which they could get; it was the headquarters of Col. Guy Johnson, Indian Superintendent; and it was the resting-place and base of operations of They-en-dan-e-gey-ah—in English, Joseph Brant; of Butler and his rangers, and of numerous other less famous but more cruel Indians, British and Tory leaders. No American troops reached Fort Niagara to attack it. Only once was it even threatened. Yet throughout the whole period of the war parties sallied forth from Fort Niagara to plunder, capture or kill the rebel settlers wherever they could be reached.

Sixty years ago Judge Samuel De Veaux wrote of this phase of the history of Fort Niagara:

This old fort is as much noted for enormity and crime, as for any good ever derived from it by the nation in occupation.... During the American Revolution it was the headquarters of all that was barbarous, unrelenting and cruel. There, were congregated the leaders and chiefs of those bands of murderers and miscreants, that carried death and destruction into the remote American settlements. There, civilized Europe revelled with savage America; and ladies of education and refinement mingled in the society of those whose only distinction was to wield the bloody tomahawk and scalping-knife. There, the squaws of the forest were raised to eminence, and the most unholy unions between them and officers of the highest rank, smiled upon and countenanced. There, in their strong hold, like a nest of vultures, securely, for seven years, they sallied forth and preyed upon the distant settlements of the Mohawks and Susquehannahs. It was the depot of their plunder; there they planned their forays, and there they returned to feast, until the hour of action came again.[18]

This striking passage, which the worthy author did not substantiate by a single fact, may stand as the present text. I have undertaken to trace some of the flights of the birds of prey from this nest, and to bring together the details relating to the captives who were brought hither. From many sources I have traced out the narratives of thirty-two persons who were brought to Fort Niagara captive by the Indians, during the years 1778 to 1783. Among them is my boy hero Davy Ogden, whose adventures I undertake to tell with some minuteness. Just how many American prisoners were brought into Fort Niagara during this period I am unable to say, though it is possible that from the official correspondence of the time figures could be had on which a very close estimate could be based. My examination of the subject warrants the assertion that several hundred were brought in by the war parties under Indian, British and Tory leaders. In this correspondence, very little of which has ever been published, one may find such entries as the following:

Guy Johnson wrote from Fort Niagara, June 30, 1781:

In my last letter of the 24th inst. I had just time to enclose a copy of Lieut. Nelles's letter with an account of his success, since which he arrived at this place with more particular information by which I find that he killed thirteen and took seven (the Indians not having reckoned two of the persons whom they left unscalped)....

Again:

I have the honor to transmit to Your Excellency a general letter containing the state of the garrison and of my Department to the 1st inst., and a return, at the foot, of the war parties that have been on service this year, ... by which it will appear that they have killed and taken during the season already 150 persons, including those last brought in....

Again he reports, August 30, 1781:

The party with Capt. Caldwell and some of the Indians with Capt. Lottridge are returning, having destroyed several settlements in Ulster County, and about 100 of the Indians are gone against other parts of the frontiers, and I have some large parties under good leaders still on service as well as scouts towards Fort Pitt....

Not only are there many returns of this sort, but also tabulated statements, giving the number of prisoners sent down from Fort Niagara to Montreal on given dates, with their names, ages, names of their captors, and the places where they were taken. There were many shipments during the summer of '83, and the latest return of this sort which I have found in the archives is dated August 1st of that year, when eleven prisoners were sent from the fort to Montreal. It was probably not far from this time that the last American prisoner of the Revolution was released from Fort Niagara. But let the reader beware of forming hasty conclusions as to the cruelty or brutality of the British at Fort Niagara. In the first place, remember that harshness or kindness in the treatment of the helpless depends in good degree—and always has depended—upon the temperament and mood of the individual custodian. There were those in command at Fort Niagara who appear to have been capable of almost any iniquity. Others gave frequent and conspicuous proofs of their humanity. Remember, secondly, that the prisoners primarily belonged to the Indians who captured them. The Indian custom of adoption—the taking into the family circle of a prisoner in place of a son or husband who had been killed by the enemy—was an Iroquois custom, dating back much further than their acquaintance with the English. Many of the Americans who were detained in this fashion by their Indian captors, probably never were given over to the British. Some, as we know, like Mary Jemison, the White Woman of the Genesee, adopted the Indian mode of life and refused to leave it. Others died in captivity, some escaped. Horatio Jones and Jasper Parrish were first prisoners, then utilized as interpreters, but remained among the Indians.[19] And in many cases, especially of women and children, we know that they were got away from the Indians by the British officers at Fort Niagara, only after considerable trouble and expense. In these cases the British were the real benefactors of the Americans, and the kindness in the act cannot always be put aside on the mere ground of military exchange, prisoner for prisoner. Gen. Haldimand is quoted to the effect that he "does not intend to enter into an exchange of prisoners, but he will not add to the distresses attending the present war, by detaining helpless women and children from their families."[20]

I have spoken of Mrs. Campbell, who was held some months at Kanadasaga. The letter just cited further illustrates the point I would make:

A former application had been made in behalf of Col. Campbell to procure the exchange of his family for that of Col. Butler, and the officer commanding the upper posts collected Mr. Campbell's and the family of a Mr. Moore, and procured their release from the Indians upon the above mentioned condition with infinite trouble and a very heavy expense. They are now at Fort Niagara where the best care that circumstances will admit of, is taken of them, and I am to acquaint you that Mrs. Campbell & any other women or children that shall be specified shall be safely conducted to Fort Schuyler, or to any other place that shall be thought most convenient, provided Mrs. Butler & her family consisting of a like number shall in the same manner have safe conduct to my advance post upon Lake Champlain in order that she may cross the lake before the ice breaks up.

The official correspondence carried on during the years 1779 to '83, between Gen. Haldimand and the commanding officers at Fort Niagara shows in more than one instance that American prisoners were a burden and a trouble at that post. Sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Campbell, who was finally exchanged for Mrs. Butler and her children, they were detained as hostages. More often, they were received from the Indians in exchange for presents, the British being obliged to humor the Indians and thus retain their invaluable services. Thus, under date of Oct. 2, 1779, we find Col. Bolton writing from Fort Niagara to Gen. Haldimand: "I should be glad to know what to do with the prisoners sent here by Capt. Lernault. Some of them I forwarded to Carleton Island, and Maj. Nairne has applied for leave to send them to Montreal. I have also many here belonging to the Indians, who have not as yet agreed to deliver them up."[21]

I could multiply at great length these citations from the official correspondence, but enough has been given to show that the wholesale condemnation of the British, into whose hands American prisoners fell, is not warranted by the facts. But there is no plainer fact in it all than that the British organized and aided the Indian raids, and were, therefore, joint culprits in general.

And this brings us to the subject of scalps. For many years Fort Niagara was called a scalp-market. The statement is frequent in early writers that the British officers offered about eight dollars for every American's scalp, and that it was this offer, more than anything else, which fired the Indians to their most horrible deeds. Many scalps were brought into Fort Niagara, but I have failed, as yet, to find any report, or figure, or allusion, in the British archives pointing to the payment of anything whatever. Further search may discover something to settle this not unimportant matter; for we may readily believe that if such payments were made the matter would be passed over as unobtrusively as possible, especially in the reports to the Ministry. The facts appear to be that warriors who brought scalps into Fort Niagara gave them to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, or his deputy, and then received presents from him. Probably these presents were proportioned to the success on the warpath.

These facts and reflections are offered to assist the reader's ready understanding and imagination in following in detail the adventures of one out of the many prisoners whose paths we have glanced at; for of all these unfortunate patriots who were thus brought to the "vultures' nest" none has laid hold of my interest and my imagination more strongly than has David Ogden. He was born in a troublous time, and the hazards of border life were his sole heritage, save alone a sturdy intrepidity of character which chiefly commends him to me as the typical hero of all the heroic souls, men, women, and children, who came through great bereavements and hardships, into old Fort Niagara as prisoners of war. Davy was born at Fishkill, Dutchess Co., New York, in 1764. His parents made one remove after another, in the restless American fashion, for some years taking such chances of betterment as new settlements afforded; first at Waterford, Saratoga Co.; then in the wilderness on the head-waters of the Susquehanna near the present village of Huntsville; then up the river to the settlement known in those days as Newtown Martin, now Middlefield; and later, for safety, to Cherry Valley. Here David's mother and her four boys were at the time of the famous massacre of November, 1778. When the alarm was given Mrs. Ogden snatched a blanket, and with her little ones began a flight through the woods towards the Mohawk. With them also fled Col. Campbell, of the patriot militia. Coming to a deserted cabin whose owner had fled, they did not scruple to help themselves to a loaf of bread, which Col. Campbell cut up with his sword. After another flight of some hours through a storm of mingled snow and rain, they came to the house of one Lyons, a Tory, who was absent, presumably because busied in the black work at Cherry Valley. Mrs. Lyons, who seems to have shared her husband's sentiments, refused the refugees anything to eat, but finally let the mother and children spend the night on the floor. Col. Campbell left the Ogdens here and pushed on alone towards Canajoharie; while Mrs. Odgen and her hungry little ones went on by themselves through the snow. That day they came to a more hospitable house, where the keen suffering of that adventure ended; and some days later, on the Mohawk, the father rejoined the family, he also having escaped the massacre at Cherry Valley.

This incident may be reckoned the mere prelude of our Davy's adventures; for the next spring, having reached the mature age of fourteen, he volunteered in the service of his country, entered upon the regular life of a soldier, and began to have adventures on his own account. The year that followed was spent in arduous but not particularly romantic service. He was marched from one point to another on the Mohawk and the Hudson; saw André hanged at Tappan, and finally was sent to the frontier again, where at Fort Stanwix,[22] in the spring of 1781, what we may regard as the real adventures of Davy Ogden began.

A party of eleven wood-choppers were at work in the heavy timber about two miles from the fort, and every day an armed guard was sent out from the garrison to protect them. On March 2d, Corporal Samuel Betts and six soldiers, Davy among them, were detailed on this service. I conceive of my hero at this time as a sturdy, well-seasoned lad, to whom woodcraft and pioneer soldiering had become second nature. I would like to see him among city boys of his own age to-day. Most things that they know, and think of, would be quite out of his range. But there is a common ground on which all healthy, high-minded boys, of whatever time or station in life, stand on a level. I do not know that he had ever been to school, or that he could read, though I think his mother must have looked to that. But I do know that he was well educated. He was innocent of the bicycle, but I'll warrant he could skate. I know he could swim like an otter—as I shall presently record—and when it came to running, he would have been a champion of the cinder-path, to-day. He knew the ways of poverty and of self-denial; knew the signs of the forest, of wild animal and Indian; and best of all, I am sure he knew just why he was carrying a heavy flint-lock in the ragged, hungry ranks of the American "rebels." It must be admitted, I linger somewhat over my hero; but I like the lad, and would have the reader come into sympathy with him. I can see him now as he followed the corporal out of the fort that March morning. He wore the three-cornered cocked-up hat of the prescribed uniform, and his powder-horn was slung at his side. The whole guard very likely wore snowshoes, for the snow lay three feet deep in the woods, and a thaw had weakened the crust.

Late in the afternoon, soldiers and wood-choppers were startled by the yells of Indians and Tories, who had gained a hill between them and the fort. Brant had achieved another of his surprises, and there was no escape from his party, which seemed to fill the woods. His evident intent was to make captives and not to kill, though his men had orders to shoot or tomahawk any who fired in self-defense. Two of Davy's companions were wounded by the enemy. One of them, Timothy Runnels, was shot in the mouth, "the ball coming through his cheek; and yet not a tooth was disturbed, a pretty good evidence, in the opinion of his comrades, that his mouth was wide open when the ball went in." It fared more seriously with the other wounded soldier. This man, whose name was Morfat, had his thigh broken by a bullet. The Indians rushed upon him as he fell at Davy's side, tomahawked him, scalped him, stripped him and left him naked upon the snow, thus visiting a special vengeance upon one who was said to be a deserter from the British. It is further chronicled that Morfat did not immediately die, but lived until he was found, hours after, by a party from the fort, finally expiring as his comrades bore him through the gate of Fort Stanwix.

Davy Ogden had seen this dreadful thing, but with no sign of fear or sickness. He had already mastered that scorn of suffering and death which always commended the brave to their Indian captors. He was ranged up with the other prisoners, and Brant asked of each his name. When Davy gave his, the great chief exclaimed:

"What, a son of Ogden the beaver-hunter, that old scouter? Ugh! I wish it were he instead of you! But we will take care of his boy or he may become a scouter too!"

Thus began David's captivity, as the prisoner, and perhaps receiving some of the special regard, of Brant himself. There could have been little doubt in Davy's mind, from the moment of his capture, that he was to be carried to Fort Niagara; yet the first move of the party was characteristic of Indian strategy; for instead of taking the trail westward, they all marched off to the eastward, coming upon the Mohawk some miles below Fort Stanwix. They forded the river twice, the icy water coming above their waists. On emerging upon the road between Fort Stanwix and Fort Herkimer, Brant halted his sixteen prisoners and caused the buckles to be cut from their shoes. These he placed in a row in the road, where the first passing American would be sure to see them. There was something of a taunt in the act, and a good deal of humor; and we may be sure that Joseph Brant, who was educated enough, and of great nature enough, to enjoy a joke, had many a laugh on his way back to Niagara as he thought of those thirty-two buckles in a row.

The prisoners tied up their shoes with deerskin strings, and trudged along through the night until the gleam of fires ahead and a chorus of yells turned their thoughts towards the stake and an ignominious martyrdom. But their fate was easier to meet. In a volley of sixteen distinct yells for the prisoners and one for the scalp, the party—said to number 100 Indians and fifty Tories—entered the first camp, where squaws were boiling huge kettles of samp—pounded corn—eaten without salt. All fared equally well, and all slept on the ground in the snow, Davy and his fellows being guarded by British soldiers.

The next day's march brought them to Oneida Castle, often the headquarters of Brant in his expeditions. Here the Indians dug up from the snow a store of unhusked corn, and shelled and pounded a quantity for their long march. Here, too, Davy's three-cornered Revolutionary hat was taken from him, and in its place was given him a raccoon skin. All of the captives except the corporal were similarly treated and the Indians showed them how to tie the head and tail together. On some the legs stuck up and on others the legs hung down. I do not know how Davy wore his—with a touch of taste and an air of gaiety, no doubt; and we may be sure it made a better head-covering for a march of 250 miles at that season than would the stiff hat he had lost. Corporal Betts alone was permitted to keep his hat, as insignia of rank, and it is to be hoped he got some comfort out of it.

It would take too long to give all the dismal details of Davy's dreary tramp across the State. Other captivities which I have spoken of had incidents of more dire misery and greater horror than befel the party to which Ogden belonged; and this is one reason why I have chosen to dwell upon his adventures, because my aim is, by a personal narrative, to illustrate the average experience of the time.

There were hundreds of American prisoners brought to Fort Niagara during the period we are studying, but it would be far from just to their captors, and would throw our historical perspective out of focus, to take the extreme cases as types for the whole.

Yet, put it mildly as we can, the experience persists in being serious. At Oneida Castle Brant, evidently fearing pursuit, roused his party in the middle of the night, and a forced march was begun through the heavy timber and up and down the long hills to the westward. When the moon went down they halted, but at the first streak of daylight they pushed on, not waiting even to boil their samp. An occasional handful of parched corn, pounded fine and taken with a swallow of water, was all the food any of the party had that day.

The next encampment was on the Onondaga River, south of the lake; and here occurred an incident as characteristic of Indian character as was the row of shoe-buckles in the road. Some Indians found a small cannon, which had probably been abandoned by one of the detachments sent out by Sullivan on his retreat from the Genesee in '79. Brant, who had plenty of powder, ordered his American prisoners to load and fire this gun a number of times, the Indians meanwhile yelling in delight and the Tories and British enjoying the chagrin of the helpless Americans. Then the march was resumed; over the watershed to Cayuga Lake, which they crossed on the ice near the outlet, a long train, each man far from his fellow, for the ice was rotten and full of air-holes; then along the old trail to Seneca River, which they forded; thence the route was west by north, one camp being somewhere between the present villages of Waterloo and Lyons. Brant on this expedition appears to have kept to the north of Kanadasaga.[23] A day later they came to the outlet of Canandaigua Lake, where the Indians, finding a human head which they said was the head of a Yankee, had an improvised game of football with it, with taunts and threats for the edification of their prisoners. The next day they crossed the Genesee River, at or near the old Genesee Castle. And still, as throughout all this march, unsalted, often uncooked, samp was their only food.

On the march Davy and each of his fellows had worn about their necks a rope of some fourteen or sixteen feet in length. In the daytime these ropes were wound about their necks and tied. At night they were unwound, each prisoner placed between two captors, and one end of the rope was fastened to each of the double guard. Under the circumstances it is no reflection upon our hero's courage that he had not made his escape.

West of the Genesee, and beyond the country which had been ravaged by Sullivan, signs of Indian occupancy multiplied; but as yet there was no other food than corn to be had for their ill-conditioned bodies. As they filed along the trail, through the snow and mud of March, they met another large party just setting out from Niagara on a foray for prisoners and scalps. There were noisy greetings and many exultant yells; and as the outbound savages passed the prisoners, they snatched from each one's head the raccoon-skin cap; so that for the rest of the journey Davy and his companions met the weather bare-headed—all save Corporal Betts, to whom again was still spared the old three-cornered hat. The incident bespeaks either the lack of control or the negligent good nature of Brant, for fifteen raccoon-skins at Fort Niagara would surely have been worth at least fifteen quarts of rum. Corporal Betts, however, must have got little comfort out of his hat; for seeing him look so soldierly in it, the whim seized upon Brant to compel the unlucky corporal to review his woebegone troops.

"Drill your men," said the fun-loving chief, "and let us see if these Yankees can go through the tactics of Baron Steuben."

And so poor Betts, but with a broken spirit, mustered his forlorn guard, dressed them in a straight line, and put them through the manual according to Steuben. I doubt if the history of Western New York can show a stranger military function than this reluctant muster of patriot prisoners under compulsion of a playful tiger of an Indian, jeered at meanwhile by British soldiers from Fort Niagara. When these latter went too far in their ridicule Brant stopped them. "The Yankees," he said angrily, "do it a damned sight better than you can."

This affair took place, as nearly as I can make out, somewhere between Batavia and Lockport; probably not far from the old Indian village of Tonawanda.

Being now in the valley of the Tonawanda, Brant seems to have sent ahead a runner to announce his approach; for the second or third day after crossing the Genesee they were met by a party from the fort, bringing pork and flour, whereupon there was a camp and a feast; with the not strange result that many of them had to return to the astringent parched corn as a corrective.

From this point on Davy and his friends were subjected to a new experience; for, as they passed through the Indian villages, the old women and children exercised their accustomed privilege of beating and abusing the prisoners. On one occasion, as Davy was plodding along the path, a squaw ran up to him, and, all unawares, hit him a terrific blow on the side of the head, whereupon the boy came near getting into trouble by making a vigorous effort to kick the lady. At another time, as David marched near Brant, he saw a young Indian raise a pole, intending to give the prisoner a whack over the head. Davy dodged, and the blow fell on Brant's back. The chief, though undoubtedly hurt, paid no attention to the Indian lad, but advised Davy to run, and Davy, knowing perfectly well that to run away meant torture and death, wisely ran towards the fort, which was but a few miles distant. A companion named Hawkins, who had marched with him, ran by his side. And, as they ran, they came upon still another village of the Senecas, from which two young savages took after them. Believing that their pursuers would tomahawk them, the boys let out a link or two of their speed, and coming to a creek where logs made a bridge, Hawkins hid under the bridge, while Davy ran behind a great buttonwood tree. The young Indians, however, had seen them, and on coming up, one of them promptly went under the bridge, and the other around the tree for Davy. This Indian held out his hand in friendship, and said: "Brother, stop." And the boys, seeing that the Indians had no tomahawks and could do them no harm, were reassured, and they all went on together toward Fort Niagara.

Soon they met a detail of soldiers from the fort, who detained them until the rest of the party came up, when Davy saw that some of his friends had been so badly wounded by the assaults of these village Indians that they were now being carried. As the party went on together, the path was continually lined with Indians, whose camps were on the open plains about the fort; and the clubbing and beating of the prisoners became incessant. This was all a regular part of a triumphal return to Fort Niagara of a party of British and Indians with American prisoners, and was the mild preliminary of that dread ordeal known as running the gauntlet.

When Davy, well to the front of the procession, had been marched some distance farther through the wood, he looked out upon a clearing, across which extended a long line of fallen trees, which lay piled with the butts inward, so that the sharpened points of the forked branches all pointed outwards, making a chevaux-de-frise upon which one might impale himself, but which could scarcely be scaled. Beyond this barrier, as Davy looked, he saw, first, the wagon road which ran between this chevaux-de-frise and the palisades or pickets of the fort beyond. Within the palisades he could see the outlines of the fortification, the upper part of the old castle which still stands there, and other buildings, and over all the red flag of Great Britain. But while he noted these things, his chief regard must have fallen upon the great crowd of Indians who were ranged along on either side of the road between the outwork of fallen trees and the palisades—two close ranks of painted savages in front, and behind them on either side a dense mass of yelling, gesticulating bucks, squaws, old men and children, impatient for the passing of the prisoners. Beyond, the British sentries, officers and other inmates of the fort, awaited the sport, like spectators at a play.

Davy knew the gravity and the chances of the situation. He knew the Indian custom, which does not seem to have been at all interfered with by the officers in command at Niagara,[24] which allowed the spectator to assault or wound the prisoner who should run between the ranks, in any way which his ingenuity could suggest, except with hatchets and knives; these could be used only on prisoners whose faces were painted black, by which sign wretches doomed to death were known; yet any prisoner, even the black-painted ones, who lived through the gauntlet and gained the gate of the fort, was safe from Indian judgment, and could rest his case upon the mercies of the British.

I do not know whether or not Davy's heart stood still for a second, but I am bound to say there was not a drop of craven blood in his veins. He was not exactly in training, as we would say of a sprinter today—his diet, the reader will remember, had been somewhat deficient. But if he hesitated or trembled it was not for long. We can see him as he stands between the soldiers from the fort—bareheaded, ragged, dirty; a blanket pinned about his shoulders and still with the rope about his neck by which he was secured at night. And now, as his guards look back to see the others come up, Davy tightens the leather strap at his waist, takes a deep breath, bends low, darts forward, and is half way down the line before the waiting Indians know he is coming.

How he does run! And how the yells and execrations follow! There is a flight of stones and clubs, but not one touches the boy. One huge savage steps forward, to throw the runner backward—he clutches only the blanket, which is left in his hands, and Davy runs freer than before. The twenty rods of this race for life are passed, and as the boy dashes upon the bridge by which the road into the fort crosses the outer ditch, he is confronted by an evil-looking squaw, who aims a blow with her fist square at his face. Davy knocks up her arm with such force that she sprawls heavily to the ground, striking her head on one of the great spikes that held the planking. And straight on runs Davy, not down the road along the wall to the place set for prisoners, but through the inner gate, under the guard-house; and so, panting and spent, out upon the old parade-ground.

Thus came the boy-soldier of the Revolution, David Ogden, to Fort Niagara, 118 years ago.

The sentries hailed him with laughter and jeers, and asked him what he was doing there. "Go back," they said, "under the guard-house and down the road outside the wall, to the bottom."

This was where Guy Johnson's house stood, and there the prisoners were to report. But when Davy looked forth he concluded that discretion was the better part of valor, for the angry Indians had closed upon his fellows who followed, and were clubbing them, knocking them down and kicking them; so that of the whole party taken prisoners near Fort Stanwix, Davy Ogden was the only one who reached Fort Niagara without serious harm. Turning back upon the parade ground he flatly refused to go out again, whereupon the officer of the guard was called, who questioned him, took pity on him, and sheltered him in his own quarters for three days.

Now, if this were a mere story, we would expect, right here, a happy turn in Davy's fortunes. As matter of fact, the most dismal days in Davy's life were just to begin. He had hoped that the worst would be detention at the fort, and a speedy shipment down the lake to Montreal, for exchange. But after some days he was summoned to Guy Johnson's house, where were many Indians, and here he was handed over to a squaw to be her son, in place of one she had lost in the war. David was powerless; and after what, many years later, he described as a powwow had been held over him, he was led away by the squaw and her husband. A British soldier, named Hank Haff, added to his grief by telling him that he was adopted by the Indians and would have to live with them forever; and, as he was led off across the plain, away from his friends and even from communication with the British, who were at least of his own blood, it was small consolation to know that his adopted father's name was Skun-nun-do, that the hideous old hag, his mother, was Gunna-go-let, that there was a daughter in the wigwam named Au-lee-zer-quot, or that his own name was henceforth to be Chee-chee-le-coo, or "Chipping-bird"—a good deal, I submit, for a soldier of the Revolution to bear, even if he were only a boy.[25]

David lived with this fine family for over two years, being virtually their slave, and always under circumstances which made escape impossible. He dressed in Indian fashion, and learned their language, their yells and signal whoops. During the first months of his adoption, their wigwam was about four miles from the fort—presumably east or southeast of it; and one of David's first duties was to go with Gunna-go-let out on to the treeless plain overlooking Lake Ontario, where the old squaw had found a prize in the shape of a horse which had died of starvation. David helped her cut up the carcass and "tote" it home—and he was glad to eat of the soup which she made of it. They were always hungry. Skun-nun-do being a warrior, the burden of providing for the family fell upon Gunna-go-let. Her principal recourse was to cut faggots in the woods and carry them to the fort. Many a time did she and Davy Ogden carry their loads of firewood on their backs up to the fort, glad to receive in exchange cast-off meat, stale bread or rum. So much of this work did Davy do during the two years that he was kept with these Indians that his back became sore, then calloused.

When he had lived with Gunna-go-let three months, she packed up and moved her wigwam to the carrying-place, now Lewiston. Here there was cleared land, and some 200 huts or wigwams were pitched, while the Indians planted, hoed and gathered a crop of corn. Davy was kept hard at work in the field, or in carrying brooms, baskets and other things to the fort for sale.

When he had been at the carrying-place about a year and a half, he saw a large party of captives brought in from the settlements. Among them was a young woman who had been at Fort Stanwix when Ogden was on duty there. As she sat in the camp, Davy being present, she began to observe him carefully. Although our hero was dressed as an Indian—Indian gaiters, a short frock belted at the waist, and with his hair cut close to the scalp over the whole head except a long tuft on the crown—yet this poor girl saw his real condition and soon learned who he was. There was no chance for confidences. What little they said had to be spoken freely, without feeling, as if casually between strangers indifferent to each other. She told David that she was gathering cowslip greens in a field, when an Indian rushed upon her and carried her away. What she endured while being brought to the Niagara I leave to the imagination. Davy saw her carried away by her captors across the river into Canada; and thus vanishes Hannah Armstrong, for I find no mention of her except in this reminiscence of her drawn from Ogden's own lips.

About this time David was taken to the fort, old Gunna-go-let having heard that the British would give her a present for the lad. Davy trudged the nine miles from their hut to the fort with a good heart, for to him the news meant a chance of exchange. At Guy Johnson's house he and his mother sat expectant on the steps. Presently out came Capt. Powell, who had married Jane Moore—who had herself been brought to the fort a captive from Cherry Valley. This fine couple, from whom the lad had some right to expect kindness, paraded up and down the "stoop" or verandah of the house for a while, the wife hanging on her captain's arm and both ignoring the boy. At length they paused, and Capt. Powell said:

"You are one of the squaw boys? Do you want to quit the Indians?"

"Yes," said Davy, heart in mouth.

"What for?" quizzed the captain.

"To be exchanged—to get back home, to my own country."

"Well," said Powell, "if you really want to get free from the Indians come up and enlist in Butler's Rangers. Then we can ransom you from this old squaw—will you do it?"

"No, I won't!" blazed Davy, fiercely.

Capt. Powell turned on his heel. "Go back with the Indians again and be damned!" and with that he vanished into the house; and we have no means of knowing whether Jane, his wife, had by this time become so "Tory" that she made no protest; but it is pleasanter to think of her as remembering her own captivity, and, still loyal at heart, as interceding for the boy.[26] But that was the end of it for this time, and back Davy went, with an angry squaw, to continue his ignoble servitude until the next spring. Then word spread all through the region that the prisoners must be brought into Fort Niagara, and this time Davy was not disappointed, for with many others he was hurried on board the schooner Seneca and carried to Oswego. Obviously the news of the preparations for a peace had reached Niagara. Although the Treaty of Paris was not signed until September 3d of that year (1783), yet the preliminary articles had been agreed upon in January. The order from the British Ministry to cease hostilities reached Sir Guy Carleton about the 1st of April, and a week or so would suffice for its transmission to Niagara. Captives who had been detained and claimed by the Indians continued to be brought in during that summer, but we hear no more of returning war parties arriving with new prisoners. The War of the Revolution was over, even at remote Niagara, although for one pretext and another—and for some good reasons—the British held on to Fort Niagara and kept up its garrison for thirteen years more.

With the sailing of the Seneca the connection of Davy Ogden with Fort Niagara ended; but no one who has followed his fortunes thus far can wish to drop him, as it were, in the middle of Lake Ontario. That is where Davy came near going, for a gale came up which not only made him and the throng of others who were fastened below decks desperately sick, but came near wrecking the schooner. She was compelled to put in at Buck's Island, and after some days reached Oswego, then strongly garrisoned. Here Davy stayed, still a prisoner, but living with the British Indians, through the winter. In the spring, with a companion named Danforth, who stole a loaf of bread for their sustenance, he made his escape. He ran through the woods, twenty-four miles in four hours; swam the Oswego River, and on reaching the far side, and fearing pursuit, did not stop to dress, but ran on naked through the woods until he and his companion hoped they had distanced their pursuers. A party had been sent after them from the fort, but on reaching the point where the boys had plunged into the river, gave up the chase. Ogden and Danforth pressed on, around Oneida Lake—having an adventure with a bear by the way, and another with rattlesnakes—and finally, following old trails, reached Fort Herkimer, having finished their loaf of bread and run seventy miles on the last day of their flight. Here Davy was among friends. The officers promptly clothed him, gave him passports, and in a few days he found his parents at Warrensburg, in Schoharie County.

When the War of 1812 broke out, David took his gun again. He fought at the Battle of Queenston, where forty men in his own company were killed or wounded. Two bullets passed through his clothes, but he was unharmed. We can imagine the interest with which he viewed the Lewiston plateau where he had lived with Gunna-go-let more than thirty years before. After the war he returned East, and in 1840 was living in the town of Franklin, Delaware Co., being then seventy-six years old. The story of his adventures was gathered from his own lips, but I do not think it has ever been told before as a part of the history of the Niagara frontier.

A Fort Niagara Centennial.

A FORT NIAGARA CENTENNIAL.

With Especial Reference to the British Retention of that Post for Thirteen Years after the Treaty of 1783.[27]

The part assigned to me in these exercises is to review the history of Fort Niagara; to summon from the shades and rehabilitate the figures whose ambitions or whose patriotism are web and woof of the fabric which Time has woven here. It is a long procession, led by the disciples of St. Francis and Loyola—first the Cross, then the scalping-knife, the sword and musket. These came with adventurers of France, under sanction of Louis the Magnificent, who first builded our Fort Niagara and with varying fortunes kept here a feeble footing for four score years, until, one July day, Great Britain's wave of continental conquest passed up the Niagara; and here, as on all the frontier from Duquesne to Quebec,

"The lilies withered where the Lion trod."[28]

The fragile emblem of France vanished from these shores, and the triple cross waved over Fort Niagara until, 100 years ago to-day, it gave way to a fairer flag. This is the event we celebrate, this, with the succeeding years, the period we review: a period embracing three great wars between three great nations; covering our Nation's birth, growth, assertion and maintenance of independence. The story of Fort Niagara is peculiarly the story of the fur trade and the strife for commercial monopoly; and it is, too, in considerable measure, the story of our neighbor, the magnificent colony of Canada, herself worthy of full sisterhood among the nations. It is a story replete with incident of battle and siege, of Indian cruelty, of patriot captivity, of white man's duplicity, of famine, disease and death,—of all the varied forms of misery and wretchedness of a frontier post, which we in days of ease are wont to call picturesque and romantic. It is a story without a dull page, and it is two and a half centuries long.

Obviously something must be here omitted, for your committee have allotted me fifteen minutes in which to tell it!

Let us note, then, in briefest way, the essential data of the spot where we stand.

A French exploratory expedition headed by Robert Cavelier, called La Salle, attempted the first fortification here in 1679.[29] There was a temporary Indian village on the west side of the river, but no settlement here, neither were there trees on this point. Here, under the direction of La Motte de Lussiere, were built two timber redoubts, joined by a palisade. This structure, called Fort Conty, burned the same year, and the site of Fort Niagara was unfortified until the summer of 1687, when the Marquis de Denonville, Governor General of Canada, after his expedition against the Senecas, made rendezvous on this point, and (metaphorically) shaking his fist at his rival Dongan, the Governor of the English Colony of New York, built here a fort which was called Fort Denonville. It was a timber stockade, of four bastions; was built in three days, occupied for eleven months by a garrison which dwindled from 100 men to a dozen, and would no doubt entirely have succumbed to the scurvy and the besieging Iroquois but for the timely arrival of friendly Miamis. It was finally abandoned September 15, 1688, the palisades being torn down, but the little huts which had sheltered the garrison left standing. How long they endured is not recorded. All traces of them had evidently vanished by 1721, when in May of that year Charlevoix rounded yonder point in his canoe and came up the Niagara. His Journal gives no account of any structure here. Four years more elapsed before the French ventured to take decided stand on this ground. In 1725 Governor De Vaudreuil deputed the General De Longueil to erect a fort here. The work was entrusted to the royal engineer Chaussegros de Léry—the elder of the two distinguished engineers bearing that name. He came to this spot, got his stone from Lewiston Heights and his timber from the forest west of the river, and built the "castle." Some of the cut stone was apparently brought from the vicinity of Fort Frontenac, now Kingston, across the lake. The oldest part of this familiar pile, and more or less of the superstructure, is therefore 171 years old.[30] There is, however, probably but little suggestion of the original building in the present construction, which has been several times altered and enlarged. But from 1725 to the present hour Fort Niagara has existed and, with one brief interim, has been continuously and successively garrisoned by the troops of France, England, and the United States.

By 1727 De Léry had completed the fortification of the "castle," and the French held the post until 1759, when it surrendered to the English under Sir William Johnson. It was in its last defence by the French that the famous Capt. Pouchot first established the fortification to the eastward, with two bastions and a curtain-wall, apparently on about the same lines as those since maintained. The story of the siege, the battle, and the surrender is an eventful one; it is also one of the most familiar episodes in the history of the place, and may not be dwelt upon here.

July 25, 1759, marks the end of the French period in the history of Fort Niagara. The real significance of that period was even less in its military than in its commercial aspect. During the first century and more of our story the possession of the Niagara was coveted for the sake of the fur trade which it controlled. I cannot better tell the story of that hundred years in less than a hundred words, than to symbolize Fort Niagara as a beaver skin, held by an Indian, a Frenchman, an Englishman and a Dutchman, each of the last three trying to pull it away from the others (the poor Dutchman being early bowled over in the scuffle), and each European equally eager to placate the Indian with fine words, with prayers or with brandy, or to stick a knife into his white brother's back.

This vicinity also has peculiar precedence in the religious records of our State. It was near here[31] that Father Melithon Watteaux, the first Catholic priest to minister to whites in what is now New York State, set up his altar.[32] It has been claimed, too, by eminent authority, that on this bank of the Niagara, was acquired by the Catholic Church its first title to property in this State[33]; and here at Fort Niagara, under the French régime, ministered Fathers Lamberville and Milet, Crespel and others of shining memory. But the capture of Fort Niagara by Sir William Johnson overthrew the last altar raised by the French on the east bank of the Niagara.

The first period of British possession of this point extends from 1759 to 1796. This includes the Revolutionary period, with sixteen years before war was begun, and thirteen years after peace was declared. When yielded up by the French, most of the buildings were of wood. Exceptions were the castle, the old barracks and magazine, the two latter, probably, dating from 1756, when the French engineer, Capt. Pouchot, practically rebuilt the fort. The southwest blockhouse may also be of French construction. A tablet on the wall of yonder bake-house says it was erected in 1762. There were constant repairs and alterations under the English, and several periods of important construction. They rebuilt the bastions and waged constant warfare against the encroaching lake. In 1789 Capt. Gother Mann, Royal Engineer, made report on the needs of the place, and his recommendations were followed the succeeding year. In his report for 1790 he enumerates various works which have been accomplished on the fortifications, and says: "The blockhouse [has been] moved to the gorge of the ravelin so as to form a guard-house for the same, and to flank the line of picketts.... A blockhouse has been built on the lake side." This obviously refers to the solid old structure still standing there.[34]

The real life of the place during the pre-Revolutionary days can only be hinted at here. It was the scene of Sir William Johnson's activities, the rendezvous and recruiting post for Western expeditions. Here was held the great treaty of 1764; and here England made that alliance with the tribes which turned their tomahawks against the "American rebels." It may not be too much to say that the greatest horrors of the Revolutionary War had their source in this spot. Without Fort Niagara there would have been no massacre of Wyoming,[35] no Cherry Valley and Bowman's Creek outrages. Here it was that the cunning of Montour and of Brant joined with the zeal of the Butlers and Guy Johnson, and all were directed and sanctioned by the able and merciless Haldimand, then Governor General of Canada. When Sullivan, the avenger, approached in 1779, Fort Niagara trembled; had he but known the weakness of the garrison then, one page of our history would have been altered. The British breathed easier when he turned back, but another avenger was in the camp; for the 5,000 inflocking Indians created a scarcity of provisions; and starvation, disease and death, as had been the case more than once before on this point, became the real commanders of the garrison at Fort Niagara.

I hurry over the Revolutionary period in order to dwell, briefly, on the time following the treaty of 1783. By that treaty Great Britain acknowledged the independence of this country. When it was signed the British held the posts of Point au Fer and Dutchmen's Point on Lake Champlain, Oswegatchie on the St. Lawrence, Oswego, Niagara, Detroit and Mackinac. The last three were important depots for the fur trade and were remote from the settled sections of the country. The British alleged that they held on to these posts because of the non-fulfillment of certain clauses in the treaty by the American Government. But Congress was impotent; it could only recommend action on the part of the States, and the impoverished States were at loggerheads with each other. England waited to see the new Nation succumb to its own domestic difficulties. It is exceedingly interesting to note at this juncture the attitude of Gov. Haldimand. In November, 1784, more than a year after the signing of the treaty, he wrote to Brig. Gen. St. Leger: "Different attempts having been made by the American States to get possession of the posts in the Upper Country, I have thought it my duty uniformly to oppose the same until His Majesty's orders for that purpose shall be received, and my conduct upon that occasion having been approved, as you will see by enclosed extract of a letter from His Majesty's Minister of State, I have only to recommend to you a strict attention to the same, which will be more than ever necessary as uncommon returns of furs from the Upper Country this year have increased the anxiety of the Americans to become masters of it, and have prompted them to make sacrifices to the Indians for that purpose"; and he adds, after more in this vein, that should evacuation be ordered, "on no account whatever are any stores or provisions to be left in the forts" for the use of the Americans.

Not only did Haldimand, during the years immediately following the treaty, refuse to consider any overtures made by the Americans looking to a transfer of the posts, but he was especially solicitous in maintaining the garrisons, keeping them provisioned, and the fortifications in good repair. There were over 2,000, troops, Loyalists and Indians, at Fort Niagara, October 1, 1783. A year later it was much the best-equipped post west of Montreal; and ten years later it was not only well garrisoned and armed, mounting twelve 24-pounders, ten 12-pounders, two howitzers and five mortars, with large store of shell and powder, but it had become such an important depot of supply to the impoverished Loyalists that a great scandal had arisen over the matter of feeding them with King's stores; and the last spring of the Britishers' sojourn here was enlivened by the proceedings of a court of inquiry, with a possible court-martial in prospect, over a wholesale embezzlement of the King's flour.

Haldimand prized Niagara at its true value. In October, 1782, several months before peace was declared, with admirable forethought and diplomacy, he wrote to the Minister: "In case a peace or truce should take place during the winter ... great care should be taken that Niagara and Oswego should be annexed to Canada, or comprehended in the general words, that each of the contending parties in North America should retain what they possessed at the time. The possession of these two forts is essentially necessary to the security as well as trade of the country."[36] He ordered the commandant at Fort Niagara to be very much on his guard against surprise by the wily Americans, and at the same time to "be very industrious in giving every satisfaction to our Indian allies."[37]

On the 2d of May, 1783, an express messenger from Gen. Washington arrived at Fort Niagara, bringing the terms of the treaty. The news gave great uneasiness to Indian-Supt. Butler. "Strict attention to the Indians," he wrote next day to Capt. Mathews, "has hitherto kept them in good humor, but now I am fearful of a sudden and disagreeable change in their conduct. The Indians, finding that their lands are ceded to the Americans, will greatly sour their tempers and make them very troublesome." The British, with good reason, were constantly considering the effect of evacuation upon the Indians.

The Americans made an ineffectual effort to get early possession of the posts. New York State made a proposition for garrisoning Oswego and Niagara, but Congress did not accede. On January 21, 1784, Gov. Clinton advised the New York State Senate and Assembly on the subject. The British commander [Haldimand], he said, had treated the Provisional Articles as a suspension of hostilities only, "declined to withdraw his garrison and refused us even to visit those posts."[38] The Legislature agreed with the Governor that nothing could be done until spring.[39] Spring found them equally impotent. In March Gov. Clinton sent a copy of the proclamation announcing the ratification of the treaty to Gen. Haldimand: "Having no doubt that Your Excellency will, as soon as the season admits, withdraw the British garrisons under your command from the places they now hold in the United States, agreeable to the 7th Article of the Treaty, it becomes a part of my duty to make the necessary provisions for receiving the Post of Niagara and the other posts within the limits of this State, and it is for this purpose I have now to request that Your Excellency would give me every possible information of the time when these posts are to be delivered up."

Lieut.-Col. Fish, who carried Gov. Clinton's letter to Quebec, received no satisfaction. Gen. Haldimand evaded anything like a direct reply, saying that he would obey the instructions of His Majesty's Ministers—whom he was meanwhile urging to hold on to the posts—but he gave the American officer the gratuitous information that in his [Haldimand's] private opinion "the posts should not be evacuated until such time as the American States should carry into execution the articles of the treaty in favor of the Loyalists; that in conformity to that article [I quote from Haldimand's report of the interview to Lord North], I had given liberty to many of the unhappy people to go into the States in order to solicit the recovery of their estates and effects, but that they were glad to return, without effecting anything after having been insulted in the grossest manner; that although in compliance with His Majesty's order, and [to] shun everything which might tend to prevent a reconciliation between the two countries, I had make no public representation on that head. I could not be insensible to the sufferings of those who had a right to look up to me for protection, and that such conduct towards the Loyalists was not a likely means to engage Great Britain to evacuate the posts; for in all my transactions," he adds, "I never used the words either of my 'delivering' or their 'receiving' the posts, for reasons mentioned in one of my former letters to Your Lordship." And with this poor satisfaction Col. Fish was sent back to Gov. Clinton.[40]

In June, Maj.-Gen. Knox, Secretary of War, sent Lieut.-Col. Hull to Quebec on the same errand. In a most courteous letter he asked to be notified of the time of evacuation, and proposed, "as a matter of mutual convenience, an exchange of certain cannon and stores now at these posts for others to be delivered at West Point upon Hudson's River, New York, or some other convenient place," and he added that Lieut.-Col. Hull was fully authorized to make final arrangements, "so that there may remain no impediment to the march of the American troops destined for this service." Holdfast Haldimand sent him back with no satisfaction whatever, and again exulted, in his report to Lord Sydney, over his success in withstanding the Americans.[41] It was with great reluctance that in the summer of 1784 he reduced the number of British vessels by one on each of the lakes Erie and Ontario. "It appears to be an object of National advantage," he wrote to an official of the British Treasury, "to prevent the fur trade from being diverted to the American States, and no measure is so likely to have effect as the disallowing, as long as it shall be in our power, the navigation of the lakes by vessels or small crafts of any kind belonging to individuals; hence I was the more inclined to indulge the merchants, though in opposition to the plan of economy which I had laid down."[42]

In October, 1784, Congress ordered 700 men to be raised for garrisoning the posts; but the season was late, the States impotent or indifferent, and nothing came of the order. Congress faithfully exercised all the power it possessed in the matter. In 1783, and again in 1787, it unanimously recommended to the States (and the British commissioner was aware, when the treaty was made, that Congress could do no more than recommend) to comply speedily and exactly with that portion of the treaty that concerned creditors and Royalists. The States were unable to act in concert, and alleged infractions of the compact by the British, as, indeed, there were. There was a sporadic show of indignation in various quarters over the continued retention of the posts; but in view of more vital matters, and consciousness that the British claim of unfulfilled conditions was not wholly unfounded, the agitation slumbered for long periods, and matters remained in statu quo.

The establishment of the Federal Constitution in 1789 gave the States a new and firmer union; and the success of Wayne's expedition materially loosened the British hold on the Indians and the trade of the lake region; so that Great Britain readily agreed to the express stipulation in the commercial treaty of 1794, that the posts should be evacuated "on or before the 1st of June, 1796." This treaty, commonly called Jay's, was signed in London, November 19, 1794, but not ratified until October 28, 1795. No transfer of troops was then reasonably to be expected during the winter. Indeed, it was not until April 25, 1796, that Lord Dorchester officially informed his council at Castle St. Louis that he had received a copy of the treaty. Even then the transfer was postponed until assurances could be had that English traders among the Indians should not be unduly dealt with.[43] There was much highly-interesting correspondence between Lord Dorchester and the commandant at Niagara on this point; with James McHenry, our Secretary of War; with Robert Liston, the British Minister at Philadelphia; and, of course, with the Duke of Portland and others of the Ministry. Capt. Lewis, representing the United States, was sent to Quebec for definite information of British intention. He fared better than the American emissaries had twelve years before. He was cordially received and supplied with a copy of the official order commanding evacuation of the posts. Whereupon, having received the assurance which his Government had so long sought, he immediately requested that the posts should not be evacuated until the troops of the United States should be at hand to protect the works and public buildings. "Being desirous," wrote Lord Dorchester, "to meet the wishes of the President, I have qualified my orders in a manner that I think will answer this purpose."[44] Thus it happened that the evacuation occurred at several different dates. It not being thought necessary to await the coming of American forces at the small posts on Lake Champlain and at Oswegatchie, the British withdrew from those points without ceremony about July 1st. Detroit followed, July 11th; then Oswego, July 15th. Most of the garrison appears to have left Fort Niagara early in July, but an officer's guard remained until August 11th,[45] when American troops arrived from Oswego, and the Stars and Stripes went to the masthead.

I have dwelt upon this period in the history of Fort Niagara at some length, partly because it is the exact period marked by our celebration today, partly because most of the data just related are gleaned from unpublished official MSS., of which but scant use appears to have been made by writers on the subject.

Of Fort Niagara under the American flag I shall be very brief. No loyal American can take pride in telling of its surrender to the British, December 19, 1813. There was neither a gallant defense nor a generous enemy. Cowardice on the one hand and retaliation on the other sum up the episode. The place was restored to the United States March 27, 1815, and with the exception of one brief interim has been maintained as a garrison to this day. The Morgan affair of 1826 need only be alluded to. The last defensive work of consequence—the brick facing of the bastions, fronting east—dates from 1861.

In the continental view, Fort Niagara was never of paramount importance. Before the British conquest, Niagara was the key to the inner door, but Quebec was the master-lock. The French Niagara need never have been attacked; after the fall of Quebec it would inevitably have become Great Britain's without a blow. In English hands its importance was great, its expense enormous. Without it, Detroit and Mackinac could not have existed; yet England's struggle with the rebellious colonies would have been inevitable, and would have terminated exactly as it did, had she never possessed a post in the lake region. And of Fort Niagara as an American possession, the American historian can say nothing more true than this: that it is a striking exemplification of the fact that his beloved country is ill prepared upon her frontiers for anything save a state of international amity and undisturbed peace.