The Invasion of Canada (18 page)

As for the prospect of war, they dismiss it. During their walk through the village, Lieutenant Dewar remarks to Beall that he will be sorry if the two countries cannot adjust their difficulties without violence. Everyone to whom the American speaks echoes that sentiment.

The women, being non-combatants, are sent to the American side; the men remain aboard the
Thames
. Beall estimates that there are at least five hundred Indians in town. On July 4, as the sounds of Independence Day cannonades echo across the water from Detroit, two hundred Sauk warriors arrive, the largest and best-formed men Beall has ever seen, though in his eyes they are as savage and uncultivated as any other natives.

On the following day, the sound of Hull’s bugler blowing reveille reveals that the Army of the Northwest has reached the village of Brownstown, directly across the river, less than a day’s march from Detroit. By nightfall, Amherstburg is in a panic. Women and children run crying toward the vessels at the dockside, loading the decks with trunks of valuables. Indians dash about the streets shouting. Consternation and dismay prevail as the call to arms is sounded. The enemy,
in short, is within striking distance of the thinly guarded fort, the sole British bastion on the Detroit frontier. If Hull can seize it in one lightning move, his army can sweep up the valley of the Thames and capture most if not all of Upper Canada.

Beall views it all with mixed feelings. A sensitive and compassionate man who is already starting to pine for his wife Melinda, back in Kentucky, he feels “sensibly for those on both sides who might loose [sic] their lives.” Certainly his British hosts have been decent to the point of chivalry; it is difficult to think of them as the enemy. (Could Beall actually shoot at Dewar if he met him on the field?) On the other hand, he is convinced that his day of deliverance is at hand. Surely General Hull will cross the river, crush all resistance at Amherstburg, free him for further service, and, if the campaign is as decisive as everyone expects, return him swiftly to Melinda’s arms!

THE CRUCIAL DISPATCH to General Hull, announcing the war, is hidden somewhere in the Cleveland mail. Frustration! Walworth, the postmaster, has written orders to forward it at once by express. But where is it? He can guess what it contains, for the news has already reached Cleveland. A young lawyer, Charles Shaler, stands ready to gallop through swamp and forest to the Rapids of the Maumee and on to Detroit, if need be, once the missing document is found. Nobody, apparently, thinks to send him off at once with a verbal message while others rummage for the official one. Hours pass. Shaler chafes. Then somebody suggests the dispatch might be in the Detroit mail. Reluctantly, the postmaster breaks the law, opens the bags, finds the missing paper.

Off goes Shaler, swimming the unbridged rivers, plunging through the wilderness, vainly seeking a relay steed to replace his gasping horse. Some eighty hours later, on the evening of July I (the
Cuyahoga
has already been dispatched) he reaches the rapids, discovers the army has decamped, gallops after it. He reached Hull’s force at two the following morning. The General, half-dressed, reads the dispatch, registers alarm, orders Shaler to keep quiet in the presence of others, calls a council of his officers, orders a boat to take after the
Cuyahoga
. It is too late; she cannot be caught. At dawn the army moves on, Shaler riding with the troops. On reaching Detroit, his much-abused horse drops dead of exhaustion.

The army arrives on July 5, after thirty-five days of struggle through Ohio’s swampy wilderness. The soldiers find a primitive settlement of twelve hundred straggling on the outskirts of a log fort. Like their neighbours on both sides of the river, most of the people are French speaking, descendants of families that settled the land a century before and whose strip farms with their narrow river frontage betray their Québécois background. In Hull’s view they are “miserable farmers,” being descended from voyageurs, traders, soldiers, and artisans – people with no agricultural tradition. They raise apples for cider and gigantic pears for pickling but pay little attention to other forms of agriculture, depending principally on hunting, fishing, and trading with the Indians. In short, they cannot provision his troops – and this is Hull’s dilemma: his supply line is two hundred miles long, stretching south along the makeshift trace his men have hacked out of the forests. To secure his position, Hull must have two months’ provisions. In Chillicothe, the capital, Ohio’s energetic governor, Return Meigs, receives the General’s plea, raises a company of ninety-five citizen volunteers, and sends them north through Urbana as escort for a brigade of pack horses, loaded with flour and provisions, and a drove of beef cattle. But to reach Hull, this supply train must eventually follow the road that hugs the southwestern shore of Lake Erie and the Detroit River. That will be dangerous because the British control the water.

Hull’s more immediate concern is the fate of the baggage captured aboard the
Cuyahoga
. Have the British actually rifled his personal possessions, discovered his official correspondence? He pens a note to Lieutenant-Colonel St. George, the commander at Fort Amherstburg. Dripping with politeness and studiedly casual, it reads more like an interoffice memorandum than a communication between enemies:

St. George, in his reply to Hull, outdoes the General in verbal niceties:

Which, translated, simply means: go to hell.

The bearer of Hull’s letter, under a flag of truce, is Colonel Cass, whose instructions are to spy out the situation at the British fort. Cass takes a good look, reports that rumour has exaggerated the garrison’s strength and also the number of Indians. He believes, and will continue to believe, that Fort Amherstburg can be easily taken.

In spite of the suavity of his correspondence, Thomas Bligh St. George is a badly rattled commander. He is an old campaigner, with forty years of service in the British Army, much of it spent in active warfare on the Mediterranean. But he has been a staff officer for the past decade and clearly has difficulty coping with the present crisis. He commands a lightly garrisoned fort, in need of repair and reinforcement. Across the river an army of two thousand sits poised for invasion. Scrambling about in a fever of preparation he is “so harassed for these five days and nights, I can scarcely write.” Brock, who receives this communication, is dismayed to discover that Lieutenant-Colonel St. George has let three days slip by before bothering to inform him that Hull’s force has reached Detroit.

Fort Amherstburg is in chaos. Indians are coming and going, eating up the supplies; no one can guess their strength from day to day. The same is true of the militia: St. George has no real idea of how many men he commands or whether he has the resources to supply them. The accounts are in disarray, the returns non-existent. He has not enough officers to organize the militia – many of whom are leaving for home or attempting to leave – or enough arms to supply them. Nor does he know how he can pay them.

The little village of Sandwich lies directly across the river from
Detroit, upriver from Amherstburg. This, St. George knows, will be Hull’s invasion point. He stations some militia units at Sandwich but has little hope that they will be effective. To “encourage” them, in St. George’s euphemism, he sends along a detachment of regulars. To supply the wants of his confused and amateur army, St. George is obliged to make use of everything that falls in his way. This includes a brigade of eleven bateaux loaded with supplies that the North West Company has dispatched from Montreal to its post at Fort William at the lakehead. St. George seizes the supplies, impresses the seventy voyageurs.

On the docks and in the streets the Indians are engaged in war dances, leaping and capering before the doors of the inhabitants, who give them presents of whiskey. “I have seen the great Tecumseh,” William Beall, still captive aboard the
Thames
, writes in his diary. “He is a very plane man, rather above middle-size, stout built, a noble set of features and an admirable eye. He is always accompanied by Six great chiefs, who never go before him. The women and men all fear that in the event of Genl. Hull’s crossing and proving successfull, that the Indians being naturally treacherous will turn against them to murder and destroy them.”

Tecumseh’s followers have shadowed Hull’s army all the way through Michigan Territory, warned by their leader to take no overt action until war is declared and he can bring his federation into alliance with Great Britain. Hull has done his best to neutralize him, sending messengers to a council at Fort Wayne, promising protection and friendship if the Indians stay out of the white man’s war.

“Neutral indeed!” cries Tecumseh to the assembled tribes. “Who will protect you while the Long Knives are fighting the British and are away from you? Who will protect you from the attack of your ancient enemies, the western tribes, who may become allies of the British?”

Will a policy of neutrality lead to a restoration of the Indian lands, Tecumseh asks, and as he speaks, takes the emissary’s peace pipe and breaks it between his fingers. And later:

“Here is a chance presented to us – yes, a chance such as will never occur again – for us Indians of North America to form ourselves into one great combination and cast our lot with the British in this war.…”

Tecumseh leaves Fort Wayne with a large party of Shawnee, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Delaware to meet Matthew Elliott at Amherstburg. Hull sends another emissary, urges another council at Brownstown, the Wyandot village directly opposite the British fort. Tecumseh refuses:

“I have taken sides with the King, my father, and I will suffer my bones to bleach upon this shore before I will recross that stream to join in any council of neutrality.”

Like the Americans, the Wyandot are split into camps of hawks and doves. They are important to Tecumseh’s cause because they are the senior tribe, looked up to by all the others. They are Huron, the remnants of the mighty nation destroyed during the French regime. At a great council held on the parade ground at Fort Amherstburg on July 7, one chief, Roundhead, supports Tecumseh. Another, Walk-in-the-Water, advocates neutrality and crosses back into U.S. territory. But Tecumseh has no intention of letting the Wyandot straddle the fence.

Upriver at Detroit, Hull prepares to invade Canada by landing his army at Sandwich. He attempts to move on July 10 but, to his dismay, discovers that hundreds of militiamen, urged on in some cases by their officers, decline to cross the river. They have not committed themselves to fight on foreign soil.

The next day Hull tries again. Two militia companies refuse to enter the boats. One finally gives in to persuasion; the other stands firm. When Hull demands a list of those who refuse to go, the company commander, a Captain Rupes, hands over the names of his entire command. Hull’s adjutant harangues the men. Words like “coward” and “traitor” are thrown at them to no avail. Again the crossing is aborted.

The war has yet to develop beyond the comic opera stage. Across the river at Sandwich an equally reluctant body of citizen soldiers – the militia of Kent and Essex counties, only recently called to service – sits and waits. These young farmers have had little if any training, militia service being mainly an excuse for social carousing. They are not eager to fight, especially in midsummer with the winter wheat ripening in the fields. Patriotism has no meaning for most of them; that is the exclusive property of the Loyalists. The majority are passively pro-American, having moved up from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Isolated on the scattered farms and absorbed in the wearisome if profitable task of clearing the land and working the soil, they have as yet no sense of a larger community. Few have ever seen a newspaper; they learn of the war tardily, through handbills. Whether or not Upper Canada becomes another American state they do not really care.

Lieutenant-Colonel St. George, who is convinced that these unwilling soldiers – most are not even uniformed – will flee to their
homes at the first shot, decides to get them out of the way before the attack is launched. Otherwise, their certain rout would throw his entire force into a state of confusion. The only way he can prevent them from melting away to their farms is to march the lot back to the fort and make the most of them; perhaps their backs can be stiffened by the example of the regulars. Even that is doubtful: from his vantage point in the town of Amherstburg William Beall discovers that many of these former Americans express a desire to join Hull as soon as he crosses into Canada.