Lake Erie Stories

by Chad Fraser

  The solemn mass funeral for the officers at Put-in-Bay featured the colours of both the United States and Great Britain flying at half-mast, and Barclay, who miraculously managed to leave his bed for the service, leaning on Perry for support as the bodies of six officers, three British and three American, were committed to a mass grave, the only marker of which became known as the “Perry willow” or “lone willow.” According to local legend, the hearty tree grew from a shoot planted in the burial mound by one of the surviving seamen. Although the Battle of Lake Erie was a point of nationalistic pride in the United States, the creaking willow, which finally fell to the ground almost a hundred years later, in 1900, was the only marker of this sacred site.

  Finally, just two years after the battle’s centenary in 1915, the construction of Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial (known simply as “Perry’s Monument” to the locals) was completed on the site. A committee of nine states and the U.S. government funded the ambitious project. At 107 metres, the memorial, a tower composed of a simple single column, stands as a symbol of the peace that has existed between Canada and the United States ever since the War of 1812. To ensure the high human cost of the Battle of Lake Erie is never forgotten, the position of the officers’ communal grave, upon which the monument is built, is marked on the floor (the remains were moved to the site from their original resting place). When one enters, the stone marking the spot, bearing an inscription that reads simply, “Beneath this stone lie the remains of three American and three British officers killed in the Battle of Lake Erie, September 10, 1813,” is immediately visible.

  From the observation deck of Perry’s Monument, it is possible to see the mainlands of both the United States and Canada on a clear day. Fittingly, the monument is often visible across much of the western basin of Lake Erie, no matter what side of the border one is on.

  For the British, the loss of the Battle of Lake Erie was a devastating blow. In the storied history of the Royal Navy, it marked the first time an entire squadron had been lost in a single battle. Barclay returned to Britain to face a court martial and was thoroughly exonerated, the Admiralty realizing he had done all he could against a clearly superior foe. He retained only limited use of his right arm, and part of his right thigh was cut away as a result of his wounds. One observer noted that Barclay “tottered before a court martial like a Roman trophy.” Though cleared, Barclay’s reputation never recovered. He struggled to find another command and died in Scotland in 1837.

  Photo by author

  Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial towers 107 metres over the Bass Islands.

  The battle also marked the defeat of the British in the Western District. With Lake Erie now under American control, Procter ordered Fort Malden burned and beat a hasty retreat. True to his worst fear, Perry did use his fleet, along with some of the captured British ships to transport a massive force to the Canadian mainland. When the Americans arrived at the village, however, they found no one but a few undoubtedly terrified residents. Shortly afterward, at the Battle of Moraviantown, Procter made a final stand against the invaders, who had chased his weary troops for days along the Thames River. While he managed to escape, Tecumseh was killed, and his Native warriors were left in disarray. Like Barclay, Procter, too, faced a court martial over the Lake Erie campaign, but unlike his Royal Navy comrade, he would find no retribution. He was found partly responsible for the loss of the fleet and of Fort Malden. His career was over. Embittered, he died at Bath on October 31, 1822, at the age of fifty-nine.

  Perry was lauded as a hero and promoted to captain, but the Lake Erie campaign proved to be the high-water mark of his naval career. He was given command of the frigate Java, then, in 1819, he was transferred to the John Adams and sent on a diplomatic mission to Venezuela, where he contracted yellow fever and died less than six years after the Battle of Lake Erie, on August 23, 1819.

  The first real commemoration by the American veterans of the battle was held in 1852, at the home of Judge Lockwood, then one of just a handful of buildings at Put-in-Bay. The veterans laughed, told stories of the old days, and remembered their fallen comrades. They returned to Lockwood’s home every year until 1868, when those who remained were simply too old and ill to make the trip.

  Usher Parsons, who desperately wanted to go but could not because of illness, wrote to a fellow veteran that summer: “The tenth of September is drawing near when we have engaged to commemorate once more the victory on Lake Erie. With failing health, I fear I shall not be able to join you as agreed upon, for life and health are not at our own disposal. I hope that you will go and if I fail to get there, please give my kind regards to such of our friends as retain remembrance of me.”

  Chapter 3

  The Battle of Pelee Island: The Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837

  American and Canadian settlers continued to pour into the Lake Erie frontier during the twenty years that followed the War of 1812. It was almost as though the conflict, which had wreaked such havoc on the area’s settlements and caused many, like Port Dover, Ontario, to be put to the torch, had never happened at all.

  On Pelee Island, on the Canadian side of the Lake Erie island chain in the lake’s western basin (and today Canada’s southernmost community), William McCormick was one of these postwar pioneers. In the spring of 1834, the fifty-year-old county administrator and former member of the Upper Canadian legislature moved his large family, which included eleven children, from their home in Colchester, on the shore of Lake Erie in Essex County, to the remote island. Once established on the island, they began construction of a permanent home, a log homestead at the north end.

  McCormick had first taken an interest in Pelee Island in 1815, one year after the end of the war, when Colonel Thomas McKee, a soldier and high-ranking Indian Department official, died suddenly. McKee had originally been granted the lease to the island, on a 999-year term, by several local Native chiefs in 1788. With his passing, Pelee Island fell to his son and only heir, Alexander. In turn, William McCormick leased it and, with a partner, started a pig farm there.

  Illustration courtesy of National Archives of Canada C-085349

  An 1882 portrayal of a Pelee Island vineyard shows the pastoral nature of the early settlement.

  But apart from McCormick’s hog operation, which he ran from Colchester, there was very little settlement on Pelee Island in the immediate postwar years. Even after William bought the island outright in 1823, only a few European and Native tenant farmers lived there. The only industry of any kind was a small sawmill that cut and shipped limited amounts of cedar, some of which was used in the reconstruction of Fort Malden, at Amherstburg, after the British had burned it in order to prevent the fort, which was their headquarters in the Western District of Upper Canada (present-day southwestern Ontario), from falling into the hands of American invaders during the war.

  But in a larger context, McCormick’s arrival on Pelee Island could not have come at a worse time. Aside from the physical challenges of carving out a settlement in the isolated, unforgiving wilderness, there was political danger in the air; all of Upper Canada, in fact, was crackling with the fear of armed insurrection. What McCormick couldn’t have known at the time was that his tiny, remote island haven would soon find itself squarely at the centre of the action.

  Trouble had been brewing throughout the first few years of the 1830s, when William Lyon Mackenzie, a fiery publisher and former member of the colonial legislature, had been stirring up resistance to the “Family Compact,” the colony’s well-connected ruling elite, and their ardent champion, British Lieutenant-Governor Francis Bond Head. A week before his protests turned to open rebellion, Mackenzie had published a multi-page broadsheet manifesto calling on all English-Canadian colonists to rise up against the government and assert their independence. Mackenzie backed his argument for rebellion in the manifesto:

  . . . with governors from England, we will have bribery at elections, corruption, villainy and discord in eve
ry township, but independence would give us the means of enjoying our many blessings. Our enemies in Toronto [the colony’s capital] are in terror and disarray — they know their wickedness and dread our vengeance.

  On the evening of December 5, 1837, Mackenzie moved to turn the anger imbued throughout the manifesto into action. Leading an angry, largely drunken mob armed with muskets and pitchforks, he set off from Montgomery’s Tavern, north of Toronto, down Yonge Street toward the colonial legislature. These men, who dubbed themselves the “Patriots,” had one simple objective: the armed overthrow of Head’s government and the creation of an American-style democracy in the colony.

  They had only marched about five kilometres, however, when one of the rebels, spotting an approaching government police patrol, fired his musket. The rest of the group, believing they were under attack, quickly dispersed in terrified confusion. The police responded with a musket volley of their own, and, when the smoke cleared, one rebel lay dead and several others were wounded. The leaders of the uprising were left with few options; unable to return to their homes, many, including Mackenzie, soon fled the city and made for the American border. Almost before it began, the first major confrontation of the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837 was over.

  Illustration courtesy of National Archives of Canada C-085349

  Upper Canadian rebellion leader William Lyon Mackenzie.

  For most English Canadians, the story of the rebellion ends here. But what is not as well known is that Mackenzie’s attempted uprising had strong support in the Upper Canadian countryside. This is especially true of the Western District, where hundreds of men from communities like St. Thomas and London, under the command of another former parliamentarian, Charles Duncombe, were on the march toward Toronto to support Mackenzie on the day of the confrontation. When news of Mackenzie’s defeat reached them, Duncombe decided to disband this ragtag force, causing many of the rebels to simply melt back into the population and return to their farms. Interestingly, their wily commander eluded capture by sneaking across the border into Michigan disguised as a woman. This was surely no mean feat for the tall, bearded Duncombe.

  Sympathy for the rebels in the countryside was given a further boost by the Upper Canadian militia itself. Immediately following the Montgomery’s Tavern incident, Head ordered 400 militiamen under the command of Hamilton aristocrat Colonel Allan MacNab to occupy the troublesome western communities and subdue the rebels. The force later ballooned to over 1,900 men, and the occupation caused great hardship for the townsfolk, who were forced to billet MacNab’s undisciplined soldiers. Historian Edwin C. Guillet describes the situation in his authoritative 1968 book on the rebellion, The Lives and Times of the Patriots: “In many instances the soldiery drove away cattle and sold them cheap to their friends . . . wheat was seized in large quantities, and what was not worth stealing was wantonly destroyed; jars of preserves were ruined by the addition of filth, and every other species of villainy [was] practiced by the ultra-loyal gangs.”

  As a result of such careless and destructive tactics, MacNab’s plan to intimidate the rural population failed. Mackenzie and his men found many willing hands to help them make their way to safety in the United States.

  Once there, they began to plot their revenge.

  Liberators or Invaders?

  This was the uncomfortable environment in which the settlers of Pelee Island found themselves in early 1838, a mere twelve kilometres from the Upper Canadian coastline. The McCormick family, having arrived less than four years earlier, had only recently finished construction of their new homestead, which consisted of two log cabins connected by a small apartment at the island’s north end.

  At this time, Pelee Island was far from the birdwatcher’s and wine drinker’s paradise that it is today. The island’s interior was still heavily forested, and contained a rich diversity of plant life. Scattered throughout the interior on small clearings were a handful of log homes and farmsteads built by the tenant farmers. Dauntingly, the lowlands (about two-thirds of the island) were covered by dense marsh, as Thaddeus Smith, who wrote the first definitive history of Pelee Island, entitled simply Point au Pelee Island, in 1899, describes:

  There were three marshes, two small ones, and one over 4,000 acres [1,618 hectares] extending entirely across the island, and it was impossible to pass from north to south except on a narrow, sandy strip thrown up by the waves. This marsh was often overflowed by water running into it from the lake. It was always covered with water from a foot to five feet deep, but was overrun with a heavy growth of aquatic grapes and other vegetation.

  The winter of 1837–38 had been harsh, but the settlers had provisioned themselves well and were hunkered down in their small homesteads, anxiously awaiting the spring thaw and the return of the growing season. Across the nearby border with the United States, however, events beyond their control were about to worsen their situation considerably.

  The rebels had regrouped in New York State by late December of 1837, and had occupied tiny Navy Island, just inside the Canadian border on the Niagara River. The island’s only two inhabitants, a farmer and his wife, had fled before the Patriot advance, and the rebels proceeded to turn their home into a de facto military base. By this time, of course, the Patriot cause had captured the attention of many Americans living along the border, and had aroused considerable sympathy among the men of nearby Buffalo and from settlements all along the southern shore of Lake Erie. Many were only too happy to seize the opportunity to cause trouble for Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects, especially in the wake of the War of 1812. St. Catharines resident Robert Marsh, who joined Mackenzie at Navy Island, captures the sentiment in his Narrative of a Patriot Exile, published over a decade later: “It was all excitement in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and all along the frontier, as well as Lockport, Rochester, and in fact, the whole country was awake, many and strong were the inducements for young, as well as married men, to engage in so glorious a cause; if they had families, there were plenty that would see them provided for.”

  No doubt one of the major “inducements” for these men, many of whom were drawn from the lowest classes of the young country’s citizenry, was Mackenzie’s promise of free land in Upper Canada once it was “liberated.” All told, they would swell Mackenzie’s invasion force at some points during the occupation of Navy Island to over a thousand men.

  Meanwhile, across the river from Navy Island on the Canadian mainland, a force of more than 4,000 British regulars and Upper Canadian militiamen, again commanded by Allan MacNab, had gathered and begun to sporadically bombard the rebels with artillery fire. While at first this had little effect (MacNab was all too aware of the political dangers of firing cannons toward American territory), the sniping between the two groups continued to escalate. On December 29, things reached a boiling point. MacNab sent a small raiding party to storm the rebel steamship Caroline, which the rebels used to ferry their supporters between the island and the American mainland. This they quickly accomplished, setting the steamer on fire once they managed to climb aboard. Burning and out of control, the ship drifted lazily downriver, where it beached and broke into pieces just short of tumbling over Niagara Falls (though later authors, for dramatic effect, would claim that the Caroline did, in fact, plunge to her untimely end). One rebel, who was an American citizen, was killed in the incident.

  Illustration courtesy of National Archives of Canada C-004788

  A fanciful sketch of the destruction of the steamer Caroline. In reality, it ran aground before reaching Niagara Falls.

  But even with the Buffalo recruits swelling their numbers, in the end the Patriots proved no match for MacNab’s well-trained and well-armed troops. With the Caroline destroyed, their link to the American mainland was dramatically weakened, and supplies and men dwindled. On January 13, MacNab unleashed a heavy artillery bombardment on the island and soon had Mackenzie’s invaders in full retreat.

  Seeing his army on the run, Mackenzie’s top “general,” Rensselaer V
an Rensselaer, quickly convened an emergency session of the revolutionary “government-in-exile” (which by this time had begun calling itself the government of the Republic of Canada). It was quickly decided that it would be futile to continue the fight along the heavily fortified Niagara frontier. Instead, the Patriots hatched a new plan: they would redirect their strength to the more sparsely defended (and arguably more sympathetic) Western District. Loading their wagons with muskets and ammunition they had mostly stolen or borrowed from the Americans, the remaining rebel troops set off along the southern shore of Lake Erie toward Ohio, gathering manpower and weapons from sympathetizers along the way.

  But, despite their high hopes, the Patriots would fare little better in the western Lake Erie region during the opening weeks of 1838. Their first raids in the region were complete fiascos. The rebels were quickly dispersed, and thoroughly embarrassed, by British regulars and Canadian militia at Fighting Island, and later at Bois Blanc Island, both on the Detroit River near Amherstburg. In February, soldiers from Fort Malden took the Patriots’ only ship, the stolen schooner Anne, while she drifted off Amherstburg in the Detroit River. After bombarding the Anne with artillery and musket fire from shore, members of the Kent and Essex militia waded into the frigid river and clambered aboard. They had little difficulty overrunning the remnants of the defeated crew. Patriot commander Edward Theller describes the taking of his ship in his 1841 account of the rebellion: