Hughes, Colonel Gore accompanying it, should appear before disaffected
and mutinous St. Denis simultaneously with Wetherall’s appearance at
St. Charles. But the gods of war were not with them as with the others.
Torrents of rain, pitchy darkness, rain turning to snow, men and horses
sinking in mud, harness breaking, knee deep in water or winding along
trails did the column bound for St. Denis find itself, while a few
broken bridges were the only drawback to the victorious Wetherall.
Four miles away, they surmised their plight and slow approach had led
to a warning to their enemies and time for preparation. For eleven
hours they toiled, at the rate of a mile and a half an hour, the mud
pulling off the men’s boots and moccasins. The cavalry were kept busy
driving away parties who were destroying the bridges, all of which had
to be repaired before the gullies and streams could be crossed and the
howitzers carried over. A most useful man was Cornet Campbell Sweeny,
of the Mounted Dragoons, who prevented much damage and was alert in
securing early intelligence. They heard the church bells ring the
alarm--in rebel language usually called the _tocsin_--and they found
a welcome awaiting them from some eight hundred men armed with a scant
stock of good and bad guns, pikes, pitchforks, and cudgels.
Before Colonel Gore left he had sent on young Lieutenant Weir, in
plain clothes, to prepare for the advance. He was to meet the troops
at Sorel, but failed to do so, as they had taken a byroad known as
the Pot-au-Beurre to avoid St. Ours, a stronghold of the rebels. This
Weir did not know. He took a calèche, and insisted that the man should
drive him by the very road which it was impolitic to take. He gave up
this calèche, being urged by a Frenchman to take one driven by himself.
Weir believed the man’s assertions, engaged the calèche for the balance
of his journey, and was driven straight to Nelson’s quarters. When he
arrived there and was stopped by the rebel sentry he boldly asked where
the troops were. This was the first intimation to the others that the
troops were expected. Tied hand and foot, he was put into a cart and
removed under escort. As Weir was at once arrested he had disappeared
before his friends’ arrival. Among the preparations Nelson immediately
set his son Horace and his pupil Dansereau to make bullets.
At the outskirts another skirmishing party gave the troops a brisk
salute, and from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon the
struggle lasted. Success in resistance seemed so uncertain that Nelson
persuaded Papineau to retire and save the person most sacred to the
cause. “It is not here you are most useful,” said he; “we shall want
your presence at another time.” Papineau argued that his retirement at
such a moment might be misinterpreted, but eventually agreed that his
rôle was more that of orator than soldier--to breathe fire-eating words
rather than to stand the fire of Colonel Gore’s guns. Nelson then rode
out to reconnoitre, was afraid he would fall in with the advancing
column, and came back at a hard gallop. In the meantime Captain Markham
at the head of his men was pushing on, taking house after house, till
he reached a stockade across the road which fenced off the large stone
building, four stories high, where Nelson had ensconced himself, with
other houses so situated as to strengthen its position. The howitzer
now came into play; one of the houses was taken, and attention was
turned towards securing a large distillery near by. Captain Markham,
severely wounded in the knee and with two balls in his neck, still kept
with his men; but they, too, began to fall. The previous night’s toil,
the cold and hunger, told on them; ammunition began to run out, and the
insurgents received additions to their numbers from the neighbouring
villages. One of the defenders was Père Laflèche, who had been soldier
before priest and now combined his callings. He was telling his beads
when he first caught sight of the troops, and in a twinkling exchanged
his rosary for a musket. “Hue donc!” he cried, and a ball sped to
the death of an advance guard. Another, David Bourdages, son of a
celebrated patriot, kept two boys busy loading for him for nearly two
hours; he then tranquilly lit his pipe and began again, still smoking.
The chronicle says that nearly every shot dealt death. At that rate
of computation a simple problem in junior mathematics would show that
Bourdages alone could have comfortably despatched half the attacking
force.
Meanwhile Weir, hurried off in Nelson’s cart, complained to his captors
of the tightness of the cords which bound him. Captain Jalbert, two
men, Migneault and Lecour, with the young driver Gustin, who formed
his guard, disputed with him; he insisted, they assailed him, and he
jumped out of the cart and underneath it to escape their blows. He
was fired at twice with pistols, and had sabre cuts on his head and
hands, the latter hacked away, as, tied together, they vainly attempted
to screen the former. Dragged from beneath the cart the butchery was
finished, and the body was secured under the water of the Richelieu by
a pile of stones.
With the troops it had become a question how to manage a retreat. There
was no ambulance, there were seventeen wounded, and it was decided
to remove Captain Markham only. The circumstances demanded that they
should so be left, but their comforts were attended to as far as might
be. The rebel chronicles say that the troops deserted their wounded.
The insurgents had turned from the defensive to the offensive, and came
out to dislodge some of their enemies in rear of a barn; a galling fire
was kept up from the fortified house, and Captain Markham, in transit,
was again wounded, as was also one of his bearers. The rebel fire was
dexterous and precise; the retreating party had to cross a frozen
ploughed field, and Captain Markham was put in the only cart and sent
to the rear. Hughes needed all his cool address to conduct the rear
guard, for the inhabitants seemed to swarm from every direction. Thus
hampered they only removed themselves some three miles when, exhausted,
in a freezing atmosphere, their gun-carriage broken down and frozen
in the ground, they spiked the gun and threw its remaining ammunition
in the river. They kept on their march till daylight, by which time
the men were nearly barefoot, for their moccasins were cut by the
rough ice and frozen earth; their horses were lamed, and the lighted
villages through which they passed made them apprehensive of attack.
At daylight a halt was called, and the men, half dead through fatigue
and hunger, lay wherever they could find a place in the barns of a
deserted farmhouse. A young officer who in the plight of darkness the
night before had got a lantern, stuck it to a pole and sent it on ahead
of the men as a guiding star, now turned his attention to a search for
potatoes--which he found and boiled in sufficient quantity to allow
each man three or four before the weary march was resumed.
Nelson had had his triumph; a short-lived one, for he at once had to
follow the advice so recently given by him to Papineau, that one’s
discretions are one’s best valours. According to a manuscript letter
historically quoted, the English commander had more faith in the
dictum of a priest than in his own guns. Perhaps a submission gained
by obedience to a higher authority than military force might be of
greater service to the crown they served. Wetherall sent for the
curé of St. Denis--as soon as “il voyait qu’il n’avait pas a faire à
des enfants”--and besought him to tell his people that if they did
not succumb they would be tormented in even a worse place than Lower
Canada; that if they persisted, he would refuse them burial. The last
was a former expedient to ensure an appearance of loyalty. Many graves
were to be seen in old gardens or by the wayside along the south coast,
outside of consecrated ground, the graves of “Canadian rebels;” rebels
who, during the Revolution of 1776, had taken part with the Americans,
thinking that by so doing they would hasten the coming of “the old
folks back again.” “You smell English,” said one of them on his
death-bed, raising himself to give his curé a scowling defiance on this
his one strongest conviction, and, turning to the wall, died, outside
the Church but true to France.
After the curé’s menace, “which succeded à merveille,” the men on whom
Nelson had counted were reduced one half, a story confirmed by Colonel
Gore’s later despatch, wherein he also says, “I was accompanied by
Mons. Crenier, the parish priest, who gave me every information in his
power.” The Colonel revisited St. Denis with an increased force, but
found the place abandoned; Nelson had escaped with Papineau and others,
although there were many signs of greater defences having been made.
So the troops marched on to St. Charles with their rescued howitzer.
Montreal was now put in a state of defence; stockades surrounded it,
and only a few gates, well guarded, were left open.
There were two searches now to be made, one for the body of Weir,
another for the bodies, living or dead, of Papineau, Nelson, and
others, the heads of the first two being valued at $4,000 and $2,000
respectively. The melancholy duty of searching for Weir was given to
a lieutenant of the 32nd, Griffin, who, conducted to the place by a
young girl who had witnessed the hiding of it, found the body. Several
of the fingers were split, an axe, some said a spade, having been the
last weapon used upon him. He had taken breakfast with Nelson and
was well treated throughout by him. On leaving the house, Nelson,
in Weir’s presence and after begging him not to be refractory, had
commanded the men to treat him with all possible attention, but on no
account to allow him to escape. Their tale was that the sound of the
firing, as they travelled from the point of attack, so excited Weir
that in his struggles he loosened the binding of one of his arms, and
springing from them ran. They overtook him, and the appearance of his
body told the sequel. It was taken to Montreal for burial with military
honours, in which regulars and volunteers took an equal share. To
the patriot eye this natural action was making “a vile use” of an
“unfortunate occurrence,” to “waken the old British horror against
Frenchmen, Jacobins and blood-thirsty revolutionists.” As a set-off to
this peculiar view of a terrible act there is the following sentence
anent the second occupation of St. Denis, by a Tory paper: “We are
not sanguine enough to expect that any regular opposition will be
attempted.”
“Jock Weir, remember Jock Weir!” now became the war-cry of his incensed
comrades.
The hunt for the leaders began in earnest. Papineau, a lawyer of some
repute, was then a man of about forty-eight years, of good average
height, inclined to corpulency, certainly not the figure to imagine
under small haystacks or at full length in ditches. His face was
strongly marked with those features which proclaim a Jewish ancestor
somewhere; dark very arched eyebrows, hair nearly black, the eye dark,
quick and penetrating; an exterior of determination and force in
keeping with the well-stored mind, conversational power, cultivation
and gentlemanly address which marked the man. His eloquence had passed
into a proverb. An unusually precocious Canadian child always had said
of it, “C’est un Papineau.”
His followers had every excuse for their worship, and thought him
equal, perhaps superior, to Washington. His father, “le père des
patriotes,” who had not let his patriotism go the length of severance
from Britain, frowned on the more advanced son, still keeping to feudal
tenure and the Catholic religion as the priests taught. The Code
Papineau junior had not much feudalism in it, and politics may be said
to have been the son’s religion.
So also did Robert Nelson say that feudal nonsense was abolished
forever, and the Church of not much more account. He and his brother
Wolfred had their own interpretation of their relative’s saying that
“England expects every man to do his duty.” Mrs. Wolfred Nelson’s
grandfather, le Marquis de Fleurimont, was one of the French officers
wounded in September, 1759; afterwards he took the oath of allegiance,
and was again wounded in the repulse of Montgomery before Quebec. These
Frenchified Englishmen seem to have been born for something better
than treason, stratagem and spoils; they took none of the last and
found the first two meant prison and expatriation. Wolfred Nelson was
by far the best looking of the leaders, tall, with handsome features,
and had moreover a brave and manly disposition. His proclamations were
wonderfully worded, his Athanasian rendering declaring the Canadian
Republic to be “one and indivisible.” Colonel Gore sought to take these
prominent men, having heard that they were secreted at St. Hyacinthe.
Accordingly a young officer and a picked party were told off, their
sleighs without bells being timed to arrive after dark at the house
where the leaders were supposed to be. The guide brought the sleighs
there somewhere near midnight, and they found the usual comfortable
French quarters, solid barns with yards and outbuildings. A chain of
sentries was posted round the place and through the buildings; a knock
brought madame, a most charming old lady, to the window; they were very
welcome, and she showed them not only over the house, but she kept
them seeking in many corners they would not have found for themselves,
in cellars where stores of winter vegetables and fruit lay in rows,
cupboards full of treasures, in cavernous depths beyond rafters which
promised a reward for search, but only revealed much bacon and ham,
flitches “the manifest product of a high-caste gramnivorous pig.”
But Papineau, on the watch, had had time to get to a deep ditch which
ran back into the fields, whence he made his way to a small bush near
by. From there he escaped to the States; but Nelson was taken and
lodged in Kingston gaol. Years afterwards, at an evening party, after
his return from France, the charming, white-haired Papineau said to a
gentleman who had been the soldier so prominent in the search, “I hear
you are the officer who came to call on me at Madame ----’s, in ’37.
You little know how nearly you took me.... You did your work admirably,
for, though we were on the watch, I had only just time to run away down
that wet ditch before your sentries met.” Among the effects then seized
were many papers of value to the captors, one of them a letter from
Papineau, finishing, “Continue to push it (the rebellion) as vigorously
as you can,” and another, a schoolboy letter from Nelson’s son, a lad
of fourteen, somewhat after the manner of Tom Sawyer: “I wish that it
(the rebellion) will do well and without any noise, which I hate very
much--except with the other side. I believe that the prediction of that
man Bourgeoi will be accomplished, which is that the province will be
all covered with blood and dead bodies.” A Montreal newspaper deplores
“the fattening of Nelson for the gallows,” and considered that “death
on the scaffold was the best example such a father could give to such
a child.”
And yet Dr. O’Callaghan could write from over the border, “If you are
to blame for the movement, blame then those who plotted and continued
it, and who are to be held in history responsible for it. We, my
friends, were the victims, not the conspirators; and were I on my
deathbed I could declare before heaven that I had no more idea of a
movement of resistance when I left Montreal and went to the Richelieu
River with M. Papineau than I have now of being bishop of Quebec. And I
also know that M. Papineau and I secreted ourselves for some time in a
farmer’s house in the parish of St. Marc, lest our presence might alarm
that country and be made a pretext for rashness.... I saw as clearly as
I now see the country was not prepared.” Dr. O’Callaghan, the _fidus
Achates_ of Papineau, the editor of the _Vindicator_, was not likely to
have been as innocent as he afterwards remembered himself.
Another who managed to hide safely but nearer home, after the battle
of St. Charles, was George Cartier. With his cousin Henri he passed
the winter at the house of Antoine Larose, in his native village of
St. Antoine, and the person destined to be his father-in-law was in
hiding not far off. The future Sir George, to make sure of a quiet
resting-place, wrote, and had published in a Montreal newspaper:
“George E. Cartier, advocate, a young man of great ability and talent,
was found frozen in the woods by his father. He might have served his
Queen in the highest councils of his country had he not been brought
up in a line of politics which led to his untimely end.” He read his
self-description and epitaph, and handed it to his cousin, remarking,
“At present, my dear Henri, we can sleep tranquil.” But he reckoned,
not without his host, who was incorruptible, but without his host’s
servant-maid. The maid had an admirer, and the admirer grew jealous
of the two young men who enjoyed advantages superior to those granted
him, made a scene with his fiancée, threatened to inform on them and
to denounce M. Larose to the authorities for harbouring rebels. So the
two young men, nephews many times removed of the celebrated Jacques,
had to decamp to the less confined neighbourhood of les États Unis. In
after years, when Mackenzie with questionable taste treated the episode
of the rebellion as a comedy, he met M. Cartier, in parliamentary
obstructive debate, and twitted him that they had both been “out” on
the wrong side, and that the Government had shown its appreciation of
the comparative values of their heads. He referred to the price of a
thousand pounds set on his own, and only three hundred on that of the
young man whose sudden demise from hunger and cold in the woods of
Verchères had spoilt “une brilliante carrière.”
* * * * *
Naturally, Montreal was now in a highly excited state, distracted at
defeat and elated at victory; openly rejoicing or inwardly chafing,
as the case might be. The specie in the Bank found its way for safe
keeping to Quebec, ammunition, arms and soldiers began to arrive,
volunteer battalions were formed; the gaol was crowded with prisoners;
the outlets of the city were barricaded, and a general hum of
expectation was in the air.
Detachments of the 1st Royals under Colonel Wetherall, of the 32nd
and 83rd under Maitland and Dundas, the Volunteer Montreal Rifle
Corps under Captain Leclerc, and a strong squadron of horse with six
pieces of artillery, fully served, under command of Major Jackson, one
sunny day defiled through the streets with colours waving and bands
playing. The field battery, rocket troop and all the transports were
on runners, for it was now the 15th of December and the snow was deep.
The Commander-in-chief, the generally popular and much-feared hero of
Waterloo and a hundred other fights, Sir John Colborne, with his richly
caparisoned staff and escorted by two hundred Dragoons, brought up the
rear of this imposing display.
They proceeded to the western extremity of the island, past the ruins
of two old forts and the smaller remains of a larger one, all telling
of former war times. At the expansion of the river, caused by its
narrow outlets, was the Lake of the Two Mountains, where one of the
hills, in summer clothed with richest verdure to the water’s edge, was
called Calvary. Within its shadow lay St. Eustache, St. Benoit, and
Ste. Scholastique; any of them might have been named Golgotha, so soon
were they to become the place of skulls. “Le Grand Brûlé” was so named
before “le vieux brûlot” was to rechristen it with fire and blood, for
a forest fire had swept it at the end of the last or the beginning
of this century; the “Petit Brûlé” was near Ste. Scholastique--names
significant to the dwellers there of a fate worse than burning by
forest fire.
St. Eustache, most picturesque of the early French settlements, was
built on a tongue of land. At that day it consisted of a square of
handsome stone houses, comfortable and well finished, in which the
wealthy but discontented owners lived; hard by were the manor-house,
the presbytère and convent, and in the centre stood the parish church,
its two towers topped by spires as glittering as the “panoply of war”
then in full sight ready for the attack. The people of this village,
between five and six hundred, were enthusiastic Liberals, disaffected
French--traitors, rebels or patriots, according to the point of view.
Sir John Colborne saw them in strong colours, and was determined on
their downfall, extermination if necessary. The defence was under
Dr. Chénier and Girod. The latter, a misguided Swiss adventurer, had
figured in several of the South American revolutionary wars, and later
was a protégé of Perrault the philanthropist; his career was one of
singular folly; he loved to appear in buccaneer style, affected the
manner and language of a dictator, and accented his doings by usually
riding a fine grey mare as his charger, which he had stolen from M.
Dumont, a loyal Canadian. The parish priest, M. Paquin, assisted by
his vicar, who read Colborne’s proclamation--a document not to be
misunderstood and not of a cheerful tenor--succeeded in persuading the
peasants to return to their homes in peace, that nothing but disaster
awaited them if they persisted, and as a result of such persuasions
but one solitary person was left to represent an insurgent garrison.
But some fifteen hundred from about the Brûlé soon replaced them,
some regularly armed, but most of them unarmed. M. Paquin now sent
for Chénier, expostulated with him and showed how his undertaking was
perilous and hopeless. Chénier was moved to tears, but he maintained
that the news of Wetherall’s victory at St. Charles was false; he
was resolved to die with arms in his hands. He and Girod turned the
ecclesiastics out of their house, making it another point of defence
and the church into a citadel. Many of the prudent were by now wending
their way towards Montreal; some arrests followed; and those who
remained and found themselves unarmed were assured by Chénier, “Be easy
about that; there will be men killed. You can take their muskets.”