Chapter IX: Niagara and the Loss of Canada

The importance of Niagara in trade and warfare was early recognized by both the French and the English as well as by the Iroquois. La Salle and Denonville, in their desire to monopolize the Indian trade, had built fortified storehouses on the shore of the river, but both had been destroyed by the Iroquois. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English began to make serious inroads on the fur trade of the interior, and the French became more anxious than ever to secure a permanent foothold at Niagara. For twenty-five years French and English orators harangued at Indian councils, begging for permission to build forts or trading houses at that point; governors wrote home for the necessary funds to purchase the Indians’ consent; and rival traders watched every camp on the river with suspicion. At length French diplomacy won the day. In 1720, Joncaire, with the help of Charles Le Moyne, Chevalier de Longueuil, gained from the Indians a reluctant consent to the building of a bark house at Niagara. He made the most of this permission, and on the site of Lewiston built a large house, forty feet wide and thirty long, which could accommodate fifty traders. This he surrounded with a high fence or palisade and named the Magazin Royal. In their turn the English built a similar, though smaller, house at Oswego (1722), from which the Indians could go by portage by the Oswego River to Lake Oneida, and, gaining the Mohawk, could paddle their fur-laden canoes to Albany.

In their first permission to the French, the Iroquois had carefully stipulated that the house to be built at Niagara should be of bark, for they had learned the danger of stone forts. Now, Le Moyne told them that he could not keep his skins dry in a bark house, and wrung from them an unwilling consent to the erection of a stone house, provided it be “no stone fort.” The authorities at once wrote to the king, asking for money to defray the expense of building a house of solid masonry. De Léry, the king’s chief engineer, who had come out to fortify Quebec and Montreal, was directed to proceed to Niagara, and to build this trading house. He decided not to put it near Joncaire’s station, which was seven miles up the river, where the rapids made further navigation impossible, but to place it at the outlet of the river into Lake Ontario. On the eastern bank of the Niagara, near its mouth, he began the erection of the stone structure which stands to-day as the oldest part of the government buildings at Fort Niagara. It took two summers in time and thirty thousand livres in money to build. When completed, the house of stone possessed four bastions erected with a massiveness of construction that makes it strong after nearly two hundred years have passed away. Charles Le Moyne, who had gained the Indians’ consent to the building of this stone house, was put in command and held it for many years. The first Charles Le Moyne came to Canada in 1654, and for a century his sons and grandsons played most important parts in the building up of the French power in the New World. Two of his sons led the attack on Schenectady, and later founded Louisiana; a third son fell in the defence of Quebec against Sir William Phips in 1690, and another in the struggle with the English for Hudson’s Bay. The second Charles Le Moyne accompanied La Barre and Denonville on their expeditions against the Iroquois, and the third established this fortified post at Niagara.

In a hundred and forty years, more or less, the French had made wonderful progress in opening up the interior of North America to exploration and trade; they had founded settlements at the extremities of their dominion on the St. Lawrence and the lower Mississippi, and had connected these by a chain of forts on the Great Lakes and the northern tributaries of the Mississippi; but they had established only one strong colony in the interior, the settlement at Detroit. As the middle of the eighteenth century approached, they awoke to the need of making good their claim to the Ohio Valley, building a line of forts at Presque Isle on Lake Erie, Le Bœuf, Venango, and Duquesne, on the route from that lake to the Ohio River. They also strengthened themselves by erecting a fort on the southern shore of Lake Erie at Sandusky, about halfway between Cleveland and Detroit. The energy of the French was in part due to the exhibition of an intention of the English to enter the great interior basin; but the French activity aroused the English, and in 1754 the final contest for the control of the continent began in the western wilderness of Virginia and Pennsylvania. With the war elsewhere, this book has nothing to do; the campaigns for the capture of Duquesne, Louisbourg, Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Montreal, all took place far away from the shores of the Great Lakes; but it was the success of the English in these other fields that determined the fate of the interior. From the beginning the importance of Niagara had been recognized by both combatants, but the strength of its position deferred an attack upon it for several years. In 1758 the English captured Fort Frontenac, and the next summer made a determined attack on Niagara.

The fort at Niagara was now commanded by a French officer and engineer, Captain Pouchot; he had strengthened and enlarged the fortifications and had a garrison of six hundred men well supplied with food and ammunition. The English general, Prideaux, marched with a force of twenty-three hundred men from Oswego and laid siege to the fort. The English engineers opened the trenches so near the fort that they were obliged to withdraw and build a second series. When the artillery was placed in position and opened fire, one of the first shells to be discharged burst prematurely, and a fragment striking General Prideaux on the head, killed him instantly. Sir William Johnson took command in his place and carried on the siege effectively.

In two or three weeks the French garrison was reduced to the last extremity. The walls and defences were riddled with shot and broken through; more than a hundred of the defenders were killed or seriously wounded, and all were worn out with the strain of the constant defence day and night. Captain Pouchot still held out, for ever since the siege began he had been watching for expected assistance from the western posts. An army of thirteen hundred French and Indians had been gathered from the stations of the Illinois River and from Detroit, Michilimackinac, Le Bœuf, and Venango, to defend the Ohio Valley. As soon as Pouchot heard that the English were coming to attack Niagara he had sent a summons to the leaders of this force to come to his aid, and now he was daily and hourly expecting their arrival, together with the garrison of Fort Duquesne, which had abandoned that place on the approach of an English army under General Forbes.

The western reënforcement was even now coming up Lake Erie under the leadership of two French generals. It was an oddly assorted force, such as no other time or place could have produced. A company of well-drilled colonial militia paddled their boats beside the canoes of a war-party of Indians who had been induced by traders to come from their distant homes to take part in the white men’s strife. Hardly less savage than the Indian warriors were the western traders and coureurs de bois, who had lived so long in Indian wigwams that they had adopted the dress, the war-paint, and the customs of their neighbors. All the members of this mixed company were alike, however, in one thing,--they were skilled in the warfare of the woods.

From Lake Erie the fleet paddled past the site of Buffalo and down the swift-moving Niagara River around Grand Island, and, on the morning of July 24, 1759, the soldiers and Indians landed at the head of the portage path, a mile and a half above the falls. Here the French found the ruins of their Fort of the Portage, of Fort Little Niagara, a trading station which had been fortified in 1750. Joncaire, a son of the Joncaire who built the first trading house on the river, had occupied this post till recently, but had burned it at the approach of the British. The army made its way up over the rough seven-mile portage path and down over the rocks to the old French trading house. From here they proceeded cautiously along the bank of the river.

Sir William Johnson had meanwhile been informed by scouts of the approach of the expected French reënforcement. He divided his twenty-three hundred men into three bodies,--one to guard the boats on Lake Ontario, one to hold the trenches, and the third to cut off the advance of the southern army. For this last company he picked the provincial light infantry, two companies of grenadiers, and a hundred and fifty men of the Forty-sixth Regiment. They were commanded by Colonel Massey, under whose orders they threw up, about a mile and a half up the river from the fort, a rough breastwork of felled trees behind which they could stand and pour shot into the ranks of the advancing enemy. The Iroquois warriors who had come with Johnson were placed along the flanks of the English. They had recently shown signs of disaffection, and when the French army came in sight they opened a parley with the Indian allies of the French. This did not last long, for they could come to no agreement, and without further delay the savages threw themselves into the fight with wild war-whoops.

The French made a gallant fight, but were fatally hampered by their unprotected position. For half an hour they made sallies, retreating each time after heavy losses, but led back for another assault by those who survived of their heroic officers. At last their ranks were completely broken, and they fled along the shore to regain the portage road around the falls and escape to their boats. For five miles the English pursued them through the woods, capturing and bringing back as many as they could overtake. The bravery of the French officers and the desperate efforts that they made to check the retreat are shown by the fact that nearly all of them were either killed or captured. Their followers hastened back to their boats and retreated across Lake Erie, burning, on their way, Presque Isle, Le Bœuf, and Venango, and journeying to the safe and distant fort of Detroit.

On the morning of July 24th, Captain Pouchot, shut up in the fort at Niagara, heard the sound of distant firing and began to watch for his allies. Through the open spaces of the forest, he could see in the far distance, moving forms and groups of men meeting and parting. The English had evidently gone out to attack the advancing army; the cannonading from the trenches which had sounded for so long in the ears of the garrison had ceased, and the trenches seemed deserted. Captain Pouchot called for volunteers to sally forth from the fort and destroy the English works; but as soon as they appeared the English soldiers stationed there by Johnson sprang up from their hiding places behind the works and forced the French to retreat into their fortification.

At last the sound of distant firing stopped and the smoke of guns ceased to rise from the scene of the conflict. The garrison waited hour after hour in anxious suspense. About two o’clock in the afternoon a friendly Indian slipped through the lines and told of the utter rout of the relieving force. Captain Pouchot refused to believe him, but at four o’clock, after a sharp cannonade from the English had been answered by a similar discharge from the besieged garrison, a trumpet was sounded in the English trenches, and an officer approached the fort with a demand for its surrender. He presented also a paper with the names of the captive French officers. Captain Pouchot still refused to admit to the enemy his belief in the disaster, and sent an officer of his own to see the prisoners. His worst fears were confirmed when the officer returned with the report that under a shelter of boughs near Johnson’s tent were sixteen officers, some of them severely wounded.

All hope for the French was gone, and Captain Pouchot could only endeavor to arrange for his garrison honorable terms of surrender. Such terms the English, recognizing the gallant conduct of their enemies, were glad to grant. The French were accorded all the honors of prisoners of war, although they must be sent under guard to New York. Pouchot asked and was granted a special stipulation that they should be protected from their Indian enemies, who might take this occasion to revenge themselves for the massacre at Fort William Henry three years before. He signed the articles of surrender and delivered over to the English the fort with ten officers and four hundred and eighty-six men, besides women and children.

The surrender of Niagara broke the line of communication between Montreal and the interior. In the next year, 1760, the Marquis de Vaudreuil signed articles of capitulation by which Canada and all its dependencies passed into the hands of the English, and French supremacy on the Great Lakes was ended. It remained only for the conquerors to take possession of the other French posts on the Great Lakes.