War is hell, they say. But along the Niagara Frontier the War of 1812 was a special kind of hell, a futile succession of battles and skirmishes that left death and devastation in their wake. Often the combatants knew one another as neighbors, trading partners, even members of the same family or, in the case of the Haudenosaunee, as members of the same confederacy, even the same nation. Yet they killed each other just the same.
More people died in the Niagara theater of warfare than anywhere else in the War of 1812. The death toll mounted through three years of intense yet ultimately pointless fighting: more than 100 killed, 150 wounded and 1,000 captured at Queenston Heights in 1812; hundreds more killed at Fort George and Stoney Creek in 1813; a thousand dead at Chippawa, Lundy’s Lane and the Siege of Fort Erie in 1814.
In 1813 and ’14 the fighting became so savage that it spilled over into the displacement of civilian populations, something unheard of at that time. The Americans started it by burning down Niagara-on-the-Lake on a cold and snowy December night; in retaliation the British burned down every town on the U.S. side of the river from Lewiston to Buffalo over the next four weeks. That, in turn, led the Americans to burn Port Dover the following May. The final British retaliation came that August, with the burning of Washington, D.C.
Death came for everyone along the Niagara---uniformed soldiers, native warriors, rank militiamen. William “Tiger” Dunlop, a Scottish surgeon with the British Army, kept a vivid journal of his experiences, “Recollections of the American War of 1812-1814”. In it he described the suffering he witnessed as the only surgeon treating some 220 wounded of both sides at the British field hospital in the aftermath of Chippawa and Lundy’s Lane. It, Dunlop writes, “was too much for us, and many a poor fellow had to submit to amputation whose limb might have been preserved had there been only time to take reasonable care of it. But under the circumstances of the case it was necessary to convert a troublesome wound into a simple one, or to lose the patient's life from want of time to pay him proper attention.”
Those men were the luckier ones, as Dunlop makes clear in recounting the death of an elderly American farmer.
It would be a useful lesson to cold-blooded politicians, who calculate on a war costing so many lives and so many limbs as they would calculate on a horse costing so many pounds—or to the thoughtless at home, whom the excitement of a gazette, or the glare of an illumination, more than reconciles to the expense of a war—to witness such a scene, if only for one hour. This simple and obvious truth was suggested to my mind by the exclamation of a poor woman. I had two hundred and twenty wounded turned in upon me that morning, and among others an American farmer, who had been on the field either as a militia man or a camp follower. He was nearly sixty years of age, but of a most Herculean frame. One ball had shattered his thigh bone, and another lodged in his body, the last obviously mortal. His wife, a respectable elderly looking woman, came over under a flag of truce, and immediately repaired to the hospital, where she found her husband lying on a truss of straw, writhing in agony, for his sufferings were dreadful. Such an accumulation of misery seemed to have stunned her, for she ceased wailing, sat down on the ground, and taking her husband's head on her lap, continued long, moaning and sobbing, while the tears flowed fast down her face; she seemed for a considerable time in a state of stupor, till awakened by a groan from her unfortunate husband, she clasped her hands, and looking wildly around, exclaimed, "O that the King and the President were both here this moment to see the misery their quarrels lead to—they surely would never go to war again without a cause that they could give as a reason to God at the last day, for thus destroying the creatures that He hath made in his own image." In half an hour the poor fellow ceased to suffer.
The last fighting in the Niagara theater took place at the Battle of Cook’s Mills, near present-day Welland, on Oct. 19, 1814. The Americans sent 1,000 troops to destroy grain stored for British forces, defended by 750 men. After an hour of fighting, the British retreated, and the U.S. troops succeeded in burning all the grain, at the cost of a dozen American lives. They buried their dead in shallow graves and returned to Fort Erie and, from there, to Buffalo, having accomplished, essentially, nothing.
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Cast (in order of appearance):
Tiger Dunlop: Guy Valentin
Wife of Mortally Wounded American: Joy Scime
Narrator: Susan Banks
Sound recording: Brandon Nightingale
Sound editing: Micheal Peters Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer
The Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-Aftra) for its assistance in enabling the appearance of Mr. Henderson.
Council Member Mitchell P. Nowakowski and the City of Buffalo for their generous support.