_Dinner ordered for a “thousand,” and provisions run out. Fenian
army asleep; what, when it should awake? Pickets, sentries and
passes. Reverend Fenian, Lumsden from “Auld Reekie.” Dimensions
of Welland Canal. Rideau Canal. St. Lawrence Canals. American
vessels with-held from Welland Canal. They re-appear after two
weeks. Horses captured. How bridles were made. New use of telegraph
wires. Milking the cows at Frenchman’s Creek. O’Neil’s pass. Fenian
sentry. Sergeant of the picket._
The village corporation of three at Waterloo, and the less timid of
seven hundred and fifty inhabitants, breathed more freely at nine a.
m. than they had done any minute since daybreak. The “breakfast for
one thousand men” had been amply furnished, and heartily eaten. The
armed multitude, fierce and hungry before, were now filled, and lay
stretched in sleep on the green slopes, or under the trees, or kept
watch by the river side, or as railway pickets. But noon was fast
approaching. The thousand men would be hungry again. The corporation
were ordered to prepare dinner. Where was it to come from? Then
supper would be required, and lodgings for the ensuing night. The
food of the village was already eaten up. It was a fearful prospect,
the awakening of that multitude, now lying drowsily in the fields, in
the orchards, in the woods, in the barns, on the door steps in the
passages, on the sofas, or carpeted floors of private dwellings. But
it was no part of O’Neil’s policy to remain inactive in that village,
risking an attack, without having accomplished something more than
levying breakfast for his forces.
They were roused from sleep, collected and admonished that the time
had arrived to march into the interior. O’Neil’s object was, first,
to gain possession of the Welland canal and two railways at Port
Colborne, situated seventeen miles west from where he then was,
and besides, to strike at the aqueduct which feeds the canal, and
the swing bridge which carries the Welland railway over it at Port
Robinson. He left guards upon the Fort Erie terminus of the Grand
Trunk auxiliary, the Buffalo and Lake Huron railway, a mile south of
the village, besides cutting the telegraph wires on that line, as he
had done on Erie and Niagara track, to prevent intelligence of his
movements going west by way of Port Colborne. He also left pickets in
the woods and at the junction of different roads, and at the ferries
on the Niagara river. The inhabitants were only permitted to move
from their houses to any given point by obtaining written passes from
Fenian officers. One who wrote passes during that day signed his name
L. F. Lumsden. On being recognized by a farmer as a Scotchman and
asked where he came from in Scotland, Lumsden replied, “Auld Reekie,”
a familiar term for Edinburgh; and added that he was an Episcopal
clergyman, as his dress in some measure indicated. This person was
one of the prisoners captured next day, taken by the steamer Robb to
Port Colborne, then to Brantford jail, subsequently to Toronto. After
being prisoner he dropped the name Lumsden, written on the passes
which he was pleased to grant, and called himself Farfarden.
The importance of the Welland canal and the railway running near its
side, in the scheme of Fenian strategy lay in this: that the canal
connects the navigation of Erie and Ontario lakes. Erie is united
by Detroit river, Lake St. Clair and River St. Clair, in the west,
with Lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior, besides several smaller
aggregations of navigable water and tributary streams equal to
one-half the fresh water on the globe. Ontario, after interchange of
commerce with Erie by way of the Welland canal, which obviates the
torrents and falls of Niagara, gives birth to the River St. Lawrence,
the rapids on which, occurring occasionally over a space of ninety
miles, are overcome by a series of magnificent works, known as St.
Lawrence canals. Near to Montreal this river of the life of Canada
receives a tributary hardly inferior to itself, the romantic floods
of northern forests, brown-tinged Ottawa.
The Welland Canal is 30 miles long. It has 27 locks, surmounting a
rise of 350 feet; is 564 feet above sea level at Lake Erie, and
about one thousand miles from the sea, by way of Montreal, Quebec
and Gulf of St. Lawrence. The locks admit vessels 142 feet long by
26 feet beam and 10 feet draught. On the several sections of rapids
between Prescott and Montreal the St. Lawrence Canals admit vessels
184 feet long, 44½ feet beam, and nine feet draught. But all craft
passing from Montreal, the head of ocean navigation, nearly 600 miles
from the sea, are limited to the size of the Welland locks.
The Rideau canal, to connect the eastern outflow of Lake Ontario, at
Kingston, at the head of the St. Lawrence, with the River Ottawa,
and the navigation from Montreal, at a point where stands the city
of Ottawa, overcomes 293 feet of rise, and is 126½ miles long. The
locks are 134 by 33 feet, and 60 inches deep, on the sill. This with
some minor sections of canal on the River Ottawa, was intended to
serve a strategical purpose in the defences of Canada. It was begun
in 1826, and finished so far as for a steamer to pass through, in
1832. Its cost, $3,860,000, was defrayed by the Imperial Government.
It is frequently out of repair, and is not now available for the main
object of its construction. The St. Lawrence Canals and the Grand
Trunk Railway running parallel with them, are available for defensive
purposes, yet so openly exposed to hostile incursions, if such should
ever threaten them, as to be elements of strategical weakness as well
as lines of transport for conveyance of troops and munitions of war.
But in the interests of peace they are works of unspeakable benefit
to Canada, as also to the western United States.
For eight or ten days previous to the day of the Fenian invasion,
June 1st, 1866, American vessels had nearly all disappeared from the
Welland canal, the ship-owners, merchants, forwarders and insurers of
Chicago and Milwaukee, the great commercial ports on Lake Michigan;
and of Detroit. Cleveland and other places in the west, declined
to charter vessels or risk freights on passage through the Welland
canal. They knew that its capture and obstruction formed one of
the earliest acts intended against Canada in the scheme of Fenian
invasion. Except an occasional empty vessel, bound up, none bearing a
United States flag passed through the Welland locks, until two weeks
after O’Neil returned to the American side of the Niagara river.
The steamers of the Northern Transportation Company, plying between
Cleveland on Lake Erie, and Rochester, and Oswego on Lake Ontario,
continued to run.
It was not without delay and difficulty that O’Neil and his officers
collected their forces, extended as these were from old Fort Erie
on the lake shore, and from that north by the station of Buffalo
and Lake Huron branch of the Grand Trunk Railway through Waterloo
Village to the Lower Ferry where they had first landed at daybreak,
in all five miles; and from farm-houses several miles inland, where
already desultory bands had penetrated in search of horses and other
plunder. The other plunder consisted of sheep, turkeys, fowls and
such provisions as hams, crocks of butter, cheeses, sacks of flour
and pigs. The live animals intended for food were shot, and slung
over the backs of horses. Frequently two men, and occasionally three
bestrode one horse. These animals having been in most instances
captured in pasture fields, and such bridles and saddles as the
owners possessed having been removed in their hurried flight to
escape the perils of Fenian imprisonment, the marauding horsemen
contrived a new kind of bridles from a material not before used for
that purpose. They had cut telegraph poles to prevent transmission of
intelligence, they now made bridles for the horses, and strung their
plunder together with the wires. As they assembled at the camping
grounds on Frenchman’s creek, three miles north of the village,
half a mile north of Lower Ferry where they had first landed, the
duplicate and triplicate riders went in with their plunder, the
mouths of the horses bleeding; and some animals which, a few hours
before had been proudly defiant, and too bold in spirit to submit
tamely to such loads as oppressed them, were reduced to obedience
by bayonet wounds which crippled one or both of the hind quarters.
A trotting mare of beautiful form and high reputation, was ridden
into the field of bivouac at the creek, hobbling painfully on three
legs, two Fenians shouting and cursing in wild hilarity seated on
her back, one with his feet to the left, the other with his feet to
the right side, bundles of fowls, turkeys and other plunder on their
shoulders, and a wild warrior on foot, who, a few minutes before had
been a third rider, but had fallen off, inflicting bayonet wounds on
the bleeding flanks of the groaning beast, one of whose hind quarters
was pierced by a bayonet through and through. Farmers who had been
compelled to surrender their horses and who were then prisoners stood
witnesses to these scenes of spoliation and of cruelty.
But I feel bound to suggest that such cases must have been
exceptional. If these western Fenians were experienced cavalry men,
as said to have been, they would know the worth of horses too well to
abuse them. It had been part of the tactics of O’Neil to mount his
entire force on horses, provided he had met, in Canada, the friendly
contingents which he expected but did not meet. Yet still there was
wanton spoliation. Farmers saw their sheep shot in the yards, and out
on the pastures. The family of Mr. Thomas Newbigging, whose house
stands on the south side of Frenchman’s creek, and about forty yards
from Niagara shore, and on whose hay field and orchard, on the north
bank of the creek, O’Neil and his main force planted themselves about
eleven o’clock a. m. 1st of June, saw their cows driven into the yard
from a distant pasture, and two or three Fenian warriors around each
cow struggling to have the first privilege of milking. The restive
cows were subdued as the horses were, by hobbling them with telegraph
wires. When the beasts had been teased and milked all the afternoon
and evening, with nothing to eat for the night, and men were heard
talking of killing one or more to roast on some of the many fires
which they had made of fence rails in the orchard field, one of the
sons of Mr. Newbigging asked Colonel O’Neil to give him permission
and a pass to the lines of sentries to drive the cows to the pasture
field. The answer was, “certainly, tell every man who questions, that
it is Colonel O’Neil’s order that none of your cows shall be injured
or molested.” The young man drove the beasts forth. At a gate four
hundred yards in the rear of the house, a sentry demanded to know who
he was, and where he was going with those cattle? The name of Colonel
O’Neil was given, but the sentry responded by bringing his rifle and
bayonet to the charge, and swearing that he would stick the bayonet
through him for the cursed lie, that he was not taking the cattle
to pasture but attempting to escape with them into the wood; and if
he dared go one step farther his “mouth would be filled with a live
bullet.” The sergeant of the picket came and inquired what was the
matter. On being told he called other men to come and assist to make
a gap in the fence and put the cows in the field. When this was done,
he, assisting to replace the rails, and at the same time charging the
men of the picket to see that the cows were not injured, turned to
Mr. Newbigging and said, “This occupation of your premises and farm
by us is, no doubt, very disagreeable, but we have stringent orders
from Colonel O’Neil to injure no one who quietly submits, nor destroy
property, nor to appropriate anything beyond what is required for
subsistence.” That sergeant and his picket being left behind, when
the Fenian main body marched at midnight of Friday June 1st, were
made prisoners next day; but some escaped across the river early on
the morning of Saturday.