Author's Note: The historical component of the Queenston Heights portion of this article was blatantly plagiarized from an Internet forum post by the CR's Jeff Henion. Thanks Sparky!
On Saturday June 26, 2004 members of the Columbia Rifles went on a battlefield tour - not through the fields of Virginia or someplace else in Dixie; rather, this tour was along the banks of the Niagara River in Ontario and western New York State.
Exploring some of the most notable and bloody battle sites from the War of 1812 were CRs John Tobey, Jeff Henion, Tom Fleming, Steve Tyler, Mike Peterson, and Kevin O'Beirne, together with our pard from the 151st New York, Scott Schotz.
The history of the War of 1812 is unknown to most folks, and what little is popularly remembered often centers around Baltimore's Fort McHenry, the burning of Washington D.C., and the battle of New Orleans. Most of the War of 1812's battles were in the Great Lakes region, particularly along the Niagara River. The Columbia Rifles' 2004 War of 1812 Tour visited the battlefields of Chippawa (now Chippewa), Ontario; Lundy's Lane in Niagara Falls, Ontario: Queenston Heights, Ontario; and Fort Niagara near Youngstown, New York. Each battle has a unique history and its own special bent relative to historic preservation.
One thing was for sure: it was neat to walk hallowed ground struggled over by contending armies - and only thirty minutes from my house, instead of an eight-hour drive. Incredibly, I had never visited most of the sites before.
Because none of the CR "tourists" were particularly familiar with the war on the Niagara, each spent time during the weeks before the event researching the battles we were visiting, and discovered some fascinating history every bit as gripping as the Civil War. Prior to the tour, I made photocopies of several battle maps for each "tourist", which helped our understanding of the ebb and flow of the action at three of the four sites (a map was unnecessary at Fort Niagara).
The Niagara River runs north in a twisted 35-mile path through the Niagara Peninsula between Lakes Erie and Ontario. For approximately half its length the river runs smoothly over the Niagara Escarpment before its 180-foot vertical plunge at Niagara Falls. It then boils through a steep gorge dropping another hundred vertical feet before leveling out at the point where the Niagara Escarpment gives way to the plain leading to Lake Ontario.
In the War of 1812, the torturous pathway of the Niagara River was a battleground between the infant United States and British forces in Upper Canada (Ontario). All goods moving upstream to Lake Erie and the regions beyond, and the numerous British garrisons thereabout, had to pass through this corridor to avoid lengthy overland travel. Boats sailed from Lake Ontario upstream (south) until they reached the village of Queenston on the Ontario shore. Further progress up the river was impractical because of the tremendous current rushing between the vertical walls - nearly 200 feet high - of the Niagara gorge. Goods and troops were therefore unloaded at Queenston and taken via an overland portage to Chippawa, above the Falls. Any enemy incursions along the portage road would have serious consequences for the British, by cutting communication and supply lines to their western possessions. Because of this, both sides built forts along the riverbanks and the flames of war engulfed the Niagara region for two years, from the autumn of 1812 through the end of 1814.
Tour participants gathered at my house on Saturday morning and, piling into a single minivan with groaning shock absorbers, crossed the Niagara River into Ontario via downtown Buffalo's Peace Bridge. We drove northward on the scenic Niagara River Parkway toward Niagara Falls, pausing now and then at roadside historic markers at places where invading Americans landed in 1812, 1814, and 1866, and where Canadians had made a last stand on an island in the river after a failed rebellion in 1837. About thirty minutes after crossing the border, we arrived at the parking lot at the Chippewa battlefield, just south of Niagara Falls.
The battle of Chippawa occurred on July 5, 1814 during the famed summer 1814 Niagara Campaign. On July 3, about 4,000 United States troops under Major General Jacob Brown, consisting of two brigades of U.S. Regulars under Winfield Scott and Eleazar Ripley, and a brigade of New York militia and Indians under Peter B. Porter (father of the future Civil War colonel of the 8th New York Heavy Artillery), crossed the Niagara at Black Rock, two miles north of Buffalo, took Fort Erie, and marched northward toward British units at Fort George, thirty miles away near the mouth of the Niagara on Lake Ontario.
Brown's small army was unlike any other American military force in the country's short history. During the winter of 1813-1814, the 26-year-old martinet Winfield Scott had mercilessly turned the rag-tag regiments into a cohesive, crack fighting force through steely discipline and incessant drill. The only thing unprofessional about Brown's army was its appearance: most of the U.S. Regulars were attired in short gray jackets and white cotton trousers, commonly worn by militia.
The Americans camped for the night of July 4-5 on the Canadian bank of the Niagara a couple miles south of the village of Chippawa. On the morning of July 5, probing parties of redcoats and British-allied Indians sniped at Brown's camp, and Porter's brigade was dispatched to the northwest to drive them off. Musketry popped in the woods a half-mile or so west of the riverbank for much of the morning.
When a force of over a thousand British regulars marched southward along the riverbank from Chippawa, Brown met them head on with Winfield Scott's brigade. As English artillery fire crashed into their ranks, Scott's men calmly formed their battle lines without flinching. The British commanding general, Phineas Riall, watched this military spectacle through his field glass, and initially deceived by the Americans' gray militia jackets, finally exclaimed in alarm, "Those are Regulars, by God!" The two forces advanced to within fifty yards of each other and then opened fire with 0.75-caliber musketry and artillery grapeshot. The carnage lasted only about twenty minutes and when it was done, more than 800 men lay dead and bleeding in the fifty-yard space on the Niagara's bank, and the British were retreating northward. It was the first time in nearly two years of war that Americans had bested the redcoats in an open field, stand-up fight. For this reason, today Chippawa is often referred to as "the birthplace of the professional United States Army".
The battlefield was easy to find and is preserved virtually in its entirety: over 300 acres were officially incorporated into the Niagara Parks Commission in 1995. Today the site looks much as it did in 1814, with a huge, open, triangular field bordered on the north and west by woods, and by the river on the east. While there is no visitors' center, the site includes a short walking trail with a dozen or so well-done interpretive signs that include maps. There is also a large monument with separate plaques dedicated to the memory of the British/Canadians, Americans, and Indians who fought on both sides.
After about 45 minutes at Chippawa on a lovely, sunny summer day, we piled back into the van. The five-mile drive to the Lundy's Lane battlefield in Niagara Falls took about 45 minutes because of heavy tourist traffic at Horseshoe Falls. Most of the boys were incredulous at the outrageous tourist traps in the very-urbanized area near the Falls, including such cheesy addresses as Planet Hollywood, the Hard Rock Cafe, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and loads of awful wax museums, that almost make Gettysburg's Steinwehr Avenue look tasteful. Niagara Falls, Ontario is indeed the very definition of the term, "tourist trap".
We arrived at the Lundy's Lane Historical Museum and spent thirty minutes looking over some musty exhibits from Niagara Falls' past, including an exhibit dedicated to the 1814 Niagara Campaign. Many of us added to our meager War of 1812 libraries in the museum's nice bookshop.
After his victory at Chippawa on July 5, 1814, Brown led his U.S. force northward but was reluctant to assault the British stronghold at Fort George (in modern day Niagara-on-the-Lake, then known as Newark) without the support of the United States Navy's Lake Erie fleet. Fort George was also supported at the time by the British-held Fort Niagara, just a half-mile away on the New York side of the river. After tarrying north of Niagara Falls for nearly three weeks, Brown learned that the navy was not coming and withdrew south toward Chippawa, followed by British Lt. Gen. Sir Gordon Drummond's redcoats.
Late in the afternoon of July 25, 1814 Brown learned of a British probing force just two miles away, near Horseshoe Falls. He dispatched the pugnacious, 6-foot 5-inch Scott and his bloodied brigade to investigate. Considering what happened over the next few hours, it is today almost difficult to believe that neither side was looking for a major battle that evening.
In his characteristic aggressive style, Scott threw his brigade forward and drove the British northward as both sides called for reinforcements. Night was falling through the mist of the nearby thunder of Niagara Falls as the British set up a strong, heavily defended artillery position on a local eminence (later named after General Drummond) capped by, of all things, a cemetery. Lundy's Lane bisected the hilltop running east-west. From dusk at 7:45 p.m. until after midnight, the two sides - more-or-less equally matched in numbers, guts, and determination - poured men and lead into a ferocious struggle for the artillery pieces in the cemetery. Initially the Americans captured the hilltop, against which repeated and desperate British counterattacks broke throughout the night, often in hand-to-hand combat. It was one of the few pitched battles of the black powder era fought almost entirely in darkness. Only the incessant muzzle flashes lit up the ghastly, splattered battlefield and its broken tombstones and shattered trees.
It was by far the most vicious fight of the war, and both sides were severely mauled. Nearly 2,000 men of the 5,000 engaged were killed or wounded - almost 40 percent casualties. Losses were similar for the two sides, and realistically the outcome can best be termed a draw. When it was over, the Americans retired back to their camp near Chippawa thinking they had won the fight, while the British, who occupied the field after sunrise, claimed victory by virtue of possession of the contested ground. Only the battle of New Orleans, as yet five months in the future, was a bloodier fight during this war.
It was early afternoon when we stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the historical museum for the 400-yard hike up Lundy's Lane to the top of Drummond's Hill. Sadly, Americans are not the only ones who pave over their history. The entire battlefield, except for the cemetery on the hilltop itself, has been totally erased by concrete, asphalt, masonry, and urbanization.
We entered the cemetery and saw how the hill commands all the ground between it and the river, and southward for miles toward Chippawa. The cemetery is a bit larger today than it was 190 years ago, and the graves of the dead seemed to be one of the few reminders of the titanic struggle on that warm summer's eve two centuries before.
The cemetery has a few monuments to the battle, all of them devoted to the British and Canadian defenders who "repelled the American invaders". Because most of us are accustomed to tromping Civil War battlefields in the United States, we are used to the idea that the Americans are the "good guys". Here, for the first time, we walked ground where the monuments and plaques reminded us that Americans were the invading foreign enemy.
The valor of the men who fought and bled that late-July night was overwhelming as we stood on Drummond's Hill. We posed for a group photo on the base of the largest monument and then wandered for a while among the tombstones, monuments, and markers placed in memory of unknown soldiers. At one point, Scott Schotz found the grave of a modern-day daredevil who, after surviving a ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel, died in 1985 dropping from the roof of the Houston Astrodome in a barrel. Honest to God, the man's grave marker was a granite barrel, and our undignified guffaws were uncontrollable.
We strolled back down Lundy's Lane and piled into the minivan for the eight-mile trip northward to the battlefield at Queenston Heights, site of one of the United States Army's worst debacles in the early months of the war.
This battlefield encompasses some of the most dramatic landscape in North America outside of Alaska, largely due to the 200-foot-high walls of the Niagara gorge, with the swift river at the bottom of the sheer rock ramparts. Because the cluster of twenty houses called Queenston was important as the downstream end of the crucial portage road around the Falls, the British built a redan on and garrisoned an imposing nearby hill called Queenston Heights.
In the autumn of 1812 an American scheme was hatched to send a large force across the river by boat, scale Queenston Heights, and dislodge the British troops and artillery there. Unfortunately, as with many aspects of American efforts in the first 18 months of the war, the attack, which took place on October 13, 1812, was poorly (ridiculously) planned, badly led, and miserably executed.
Fully half of the American soldiers were ill-trained militia without constitutional obligation to fight on foreign soil. American logistical planning was farcical - to be kind - because no provision was made for the boats used by the first wave to return to the New York shore to ferry over reinforcements. The Yankee general in command was a political appointee without military experience, whose near-total reliance on experienced subordinates led to his virtual incapacitation during the battle when those officers were killed or wounded. Even the American Regulars were only lightly trained and very inexperienced.
It was only through luck, British errors, and sheer guts that the Americans realized success in the initial stages of the battle. After a chaotic river crossing, the Americans lay pinned in their landing area by British artillery on the heights by a mixed force of British Regulars and Canadian militia. A small American band led by Captain (and future Civil War General) John Wool managed scale the heavily wooded side of the Niagara gorge and took the British guns from behind. One has to see the tangled growth and nearly vertical terrain over which Wool's men scrambled to appreciate their feat.
When the British guns were silenced, the Americans drove the British and Canadian force back and seized the Heights. Major General Isaac Brock, the senior British commander and the redcoats' hero of Detroit, was shot from his horse and killed early in the battle leading an impetuous counterattack up the west side of the Heights through open fields.
Unfortunately, by this time the Americans had shot their bolt. Many of the junior officers were wounded, and the expedition's second-in-command was nowhere to be found - his boat was taken down the river far below the landing point. The American commanding general was too busy trying to rustle up supplies of ammunition to exercise any control of the situation. New York State militia units, needed to reinforce the assault forces across the river, balked and refused to cross and fight because they were not legally compelled to do so.
When British reinforcements arrived from nearby Fort George under the command of an experienced officer, the end was near for the faltering American effort. The Yankees on Queenston Heights were pushed against the edge of the gorge where the bulk of them surrendered. The rest fled down the steep slope: some hid in the dense growth while others plunged into the river in a desperate attempt to regain friendly shores. Few of these swimmers survived the crossing. British losses were light: 13 killed including General Brock, 78 wounded, and 21 missing. American casualties totaled over 300 killed and wounded and 925 captured. It was the worst in a long string of U.S. military disasters in the first year of the war.
Today, the Queenston Heights battlefield is a popular attraction in the Parks Canada system (the Canadian version of the National Park Service) and features acres of beautifully manicured parkland dotted here and there with athletic fields, picnic tables, and shelters. Unfortunately, while the terrain is largely the same, the park little resembles its October 1812 appearance, but at least it is "preserved" and not lost to urbanization like Lundy's Lane.
The park was crowded on our arrival and we had to park the van some distance from the battle's epicenter. We hiked over open parkland past picnickers and playing children. The park's centerpiece is an enormous, 180-foot tall monument to British General Isaac Brock. It towered over the trees ahead as we neared the gorge.
The Brock monument is garishly ornate and incredibly impressive, but is also somewhat ironic considering that the British victory at Queenston heights had more to do with the methodical assault made by Brock's second-in-command than with Brock's ill-fated (and fatal) charge early in the fight. As with many figures in the American Civil War, Brock's performance is not nearly as impressive as his legend - something that seemed, after some inflection, to come as a minor surprise to Mike Peterson who, as a school-aged Ontarian, had been taught that Brock was one of the greatest heroes in Canadian history.
The battlefield's brief, steep walking trail is not well marked and is poorly maintained. Instead of the treacherous trail, four of the boys opted to climb the spiral stairway to the top of Brock's monument, while three of us, less amenable to extreme heights and great physical exertion, spent time at an overlook on the gorge wall using binoculars to scan the gorge and the plain up to Fort George, visible a few miles away, and wonder at the fighting over such thickly wooded and steep terrain. We were all able to get a small sense of the desperate nature of the fighting on that October day nearly 192 years ago.
We again piled into the van and crossed the international border into New York through a 45-minute traffic jam at the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, and drove a further ten miles north to Fort Niagara. Our pard Nick Redding, who was working at the fort for the summer as a costumed historical interpreter, met us at the gate attired as a War of 1812 British grenadier. For the next 45 minutes, Nick gave us a wonderful, personal guided tour of the fort's War of 1812 history.
Fort Niagara started as a French trading outpost early in the Eighteenth Century, and was expanded to a walled fortress with outlying earthworks in time for its unsuccessful defense by the French during an epic three-week siege by the British in the Seven Years War (French and Indian War) in 1759. The fort has been extensively modified over the years, up through the 1870s. Today it is a New York State Parks Department historic site, largely focusing on the 1750s era.
The fort was the scene of an American tragedy during the War of 1812. During the night of December 18-19, 1813, British troops crossed the Niagara in secret from Fort George, captured the lax American garrison in nearby Youngstown without violence, and stormed Fort Niagara in a surprise, nighttime assault. The fort's American guards were slipshod in their duty, allowing British forces to enter the fortress without firing a shot. During the ensuing, brief melee' 65 Americans were killed, 15 wounded, and 353 captured. When it was over, the King's Union Jack was flying above the fort, and would remain there until the end of the war. Between December 19 and 31, the British rampaged along the New York shore, burning the villages of Youngstown, Lewiston, Manchester, Schlosser, Black Rock, and Buffalo, all supposedly in retaliation for the American destruction of Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and Fort George in the summer of 1813.
Nick Redding was an extremely good and well-spoken tour guide, and he not only showed us the officers' barracks, powder magazine, and stone-walled redoubts, but also pointed out how the fort had changed over the years from its War of 1812 appearance. It was a professional and well-done tour in which we all learned a lot of new material.
Fort Niagara was the last stop on our schedule. The day ended with a cookout and party at my place, which included the tour boys, several spouses, Nick Redding, and CR Billy Woodhams, who was unable to attend the tour because of a work commitment but came for the party.
It was a fun day of battlefield tramping and learning with good comrades, followed by an evening of excellent conviviality, all without the usual long drive. We're looking at a similar battlefield tour in 2005 or 2006 - this time probably visiting the War of 1812 sites at Fort Erie and Fort George, and the Ridgeway battlefield, site of the major fighting in the 1866 Fenian raid into Ontario.
POSTSCRIPT: A VISIT TO A WAR OF 1812 REENACTMENT
One week after our Niagara River battlefield tour, fired up with War of 1812 fervor, I cajoled my wife into accompanying me as spectators to a War of 1812 reenactment in a Niagara Falls, Ontario city park, which was allegedly portraying the 190th anniversary of the battles of Chippawa and Lundy's Lane. The small park in a heavily urban area was located at the foot of Drummond's Hill - literally on a portion of the Lundy's Lane battlefield.
The "battle" was at 8:00 p.m. which, in our region in early July, meant that the sun was still fully up in the sky. We parked the car, jumped an orange snow fence to avoid paying a paltry event admission fee, and entered the participant camps.
It was depressing to observe the same farbisms, and worse, present in Civil War reenacting. Reenactors are reenactors, regardless of the time period.
It appeared that the British impressionists numbered about 80 infantry and a couple of artillery pieces, and the Americans mustered just over 35 infantry including a few Indian-type skirmishers (?). The Yankee horde was arranged into three-company "battalion", commanded by a paunchy full-bird "colonel" who wore a dangling earring in one ear, plus the skirmishers, who seemed to be under no one's direct command, all.
The event featured the whole Pandora's box of farbisms: female soldiers (an American company was commanded by a woman who, in her defense, knew a helluva lot more about the regiment she portrayed than any of her men, and wore a knapsack into the "battle"), tubby waddling guys (no beards - it was 1812 after all), awful uniforms, specialty portrayals, modern eyewear, what I call "dunked in the Mekong Delta" hats, huge tents full of beer coolers, and other historical sins. The American and British camps were, heck, nearly 100 feet apart in full view of each other.
The "battle" was waged on a flat, mowed lawn bisected by two high-tension power lines from the Ontario Hydro electric plant at the Falls, with characteristic steel towers looming at least 50 feet above the field. The location of the spectator viewing area meant that the backdrop behind the portrayal of armed strife was the six-lane boulevard of Stanley Avenue (crowded with cars) and behind that the high-rise hotels adjacent to the Falls; one building - the Skylon - was literally over 500 feet high. Needless to say, this battle-milieu was something less than mega-authentic.
The "battle" unfolded in a manner totally unlike either the historical actions at Chippawa or Lundy's Lane, and had that feel of "We Made It Up 30 Minutes Before It Started", like many Civil War "battle of something local" events. It opened with a few skirmishers (some of whom cunningly hid behind the transmission towers' legs), escalated to the inevitable artillery duel, and then the "battle lines" took the field and blazed away at each other until the Americans were driven off by superior British numbers to a point a few transmission towers down the field. "Kevlar uniforms" were the order of the day until - surprise - the last five minutes of the battle. "Ice angels" - apparently a curse of virtually all reenactor time periods - followed in the battalions' wakes to tend the casualties in the blistering 67-degree sunset.
Our experience during the "battle" was rounded out by a virulently anti-American yahoo sitting ten feet from us, who loudly criticized anything American in view or heard over the P.A. system from the "battle's" play-by-play commentator. Other nations have their version of The Ugly American, I guess.
After the "battle" we perused sutler row and its bland offering of farb goods, although one vendor had a tent full of nice Osprey books covering various military eras. We went into the camps, where the costumed women and kids camped jointly with the military, and witnessed the British battalion's huzzah-ed dismissal, after which they ran for their beer ration and its inevitable consequences. We talked to some of the American impressionists, most of who were Canadian and grumbled about forced galvanizing to portray "the bad guys" - gee, that sounded familiar. By 9:15 p.m. it was getting dark and we had had our fill of 1812 farbs and, like General Jacob Brown's American force in 1814, we abandoned the ground in favor of a withdrawal southward.
For Further Reading
Graves, Donald E., Where Right and Glory Lead! The Battle of Lundy's Lane, 1814 (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio), 1997. - covers both Chippawa and Lundy's Lane.
Graves, Donald E., Redcoats and Grey Jackets: The Battle of Chippawa, 1814 (Toronto, Dundurn Press), 1994.
Phifer, Mike, "Slugfest at Lundy's Lane", Military Heritage magazine, June 2002, pp. 32-42.
Malcomson, Robert, A Very Brilliant Affair: The Battle of Queenston Heights, 1812 (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio), 2003.
Malcomson, Robert, "'It Remains Only to Fight': The Battle of Queenston Heights, 13 October 1812", printed in Graves, Donald E. ed., Fighting for Canada: Seven Battles, 1758-1945 (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio), 2000.
Malcomson, Robert, Lords of the Lake: The Naval War on Lake Ontario, 1812-1814 (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio), 1998.
Hitsman, J. Mackay (Graves, Donald E., ed.) The Incredible War of 1812: A Military History, 1965 (reprinted: Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 1999).
War of 1812 on the Niagara: A Few Websites
Old Fort Niagara: http://www.oldfortniagara.org
Old Fort Erie: http://www.niagaraparks.com/heritage/forterie.php
Fort George: http://www.niagara.com/~parkscan/ and
http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/on/fortgeorge/default.asp
Chippawa Battlefield Park: http://www.niagaraparks.com/heritage/chippawa.php
Lundy's Lane Historical Museum: http://www.lundyslanemuseum.com
Robin Brass Studio publishers http://www.rbstudiobooks.com