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    Tag: Fort Niagara

    • Betsy Doyle

      The War of 1812 is often forgotten in the string of wars that make up American history.  If people think of it at all it’s largely in thinking about the White House being set on fire by the British.  But some of the fiercest fighting took place on the shores of Lake Ontario at  Fort Niagara.   The strategic nature of the fort resulted in battles to control it in the French and Indian War, then the Revolutionary War, and finally the War of 1812.  War was officially declared on June 18, 1812.  It would reach Fort Niagara soon enough.

      A young woman named Betsy Doyle and her four children followed Betsy’s husband Andrew across the Niagara River to Fort Niagara in 1810, where she served as either a nurse or a laundress.  Andrew served in the American Army, and for two years they lived in relative peace.  But in October 1812 Andrew was captured by the British at the Battle of Queenstown.  He would never see Betsy again.  As a Canadian, Andrew was considered a traitor and was shipped off to England to spend the next three years in prison.  Betsy and her four children remained at Fort Niagara.

      On November 21, 1812 Fort Niagara came under fire from the British in a battle that would make Betsy Doyle famous, but not infamous.  The American Army would fire hot shot at the British.  Hot shot was cannonballs and grape shot that was heated red hot in the coals, loaded quickly into a cannon and shot at ships or the British outpost across the river.  The hot shot was devastating to ships in particular.  But it was very dangerous for the gun crew that was loading it into the cannon as it could easily trigger an explosion that would kill anyone nearby.  One crew was killed just this way on that day.  But Betsy Doyle continued to bring hot shot up, help load the gun and run back to the coals for more.  The commanding officer called Betsy Doyle’s actions that day brave, and she was certainly a hero.

      Thirteen months later the British with Native American allies would turn the tables on the Americans, seizing Fort Niagara in a particularly gruesome fashion.  When the Americans refused to surrender, the British commander offered no quarter and gave the order to bayonet them all.  Betsy and her children somehow escaped that day, but December in enemy territory in Upstate New York almost guaranteed that they wouldn’t survive long.  But somehow they did, walking over 300 miles in the bitter New York winter to Albany.

      Betsy was never paid for her heroism a Fort Niagara, and would die six years later.  I’ve wondered where her gravestone is, as I’d like to pay her a visit.  For all of her courage on November 21, 1812 and the four month walk across New York State to keep her four children alive, there isn’t enough recognition of Betsy Doyle.  The tablet that honors her isn’t prominently displayed at Fort Niagara, it’s on the top floor of the French Castle, near where she fought alongside American men on that day in 1812.  It might be hidden because they got her name wrong and called her Fanny Doyle instead of Betsy.  It’s unfortunate that someone hasn’t given her a proper tribute.  You can find her story if you search for it, but she’s largely lost to history.  Her husband Andrew came back to the United States but never found her and married someone else the same year that Betsy died.  Her story is tragic and heroic all at once.

    • Keep Your Head Down and Sap That Fort

      The northeast United States is dotted with old forts that once played a critical role in our history.  Four of the most famous during the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War were Fort Duquesne, Fort William Henry, Fort Niagara and Fort Stanwix.   They were famous because they each occupied a critical point in the waterway transportation of the day, and because of their strategic important each was attacked (sometimes on multiple occasions).  Because they were protecting waterways, each was located on relatively flat land.  Without the high ground and hard ledge that prevented digging, each of these forts was attacked using the same tactic; siege trenching called sapping.

      The act of laying siege on a fort requires significant manpower, patience and a willingness to continue pressing forward towards the enemy, thus pressuring them to surrender.  A well-entrenched enemy isn’t going to wave the white flag and come out if they’ve got strong enough fortifications, enough food, enough manpower of their own, and enough ammunition to continue the fight… in short, if they have enough hope that they’ll prevail in the fight.  To diminish this hope, an army laying siege would deploy multiple strategies – negotiation, bombardment, psychological warfare, and sapping.  Sapping was the act of digging trenches closer and closer to the fortification, where bombs could be set to open up the walls.  Trenches were dug in a zig-zag towards the fort to avoid enfilading, which is devastating fire directed directly down the trench killing many people at once.

      “By persistently hanging on the enemy’s flank, we shall succeed in the long run in killing the commander-in-chief.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

      There are two ways to fire on the enemy; defilade was firing straight into the face of the force attacking you, and enfilade, which is flanking fire.  Enfilading is a favorite tactic for any army or navy as its lethally efficient.  One cannonball can take out a hundred soldiers as it flies down the column destroying everything in hits.  In the Battle of Trafalgar raking fire shot into the stern of the French ship Bucentaure resulted in 195 killed and another 85 wounded – simply stunning casualties in any battle, but particularly on a ship.  Enfilading creates carnage quickly.

      Forts were built with enfilading in mind.  Bastions protruding at the corners opened up fields of fire by eliminating blind spots, making them very challenging to approach.  Bastions provided defenders with an opportunity to apply cross fire into attackers, creating an enfilade.  A quick look at the Google Earth images for Fort Niagara, Fort Stanwix and Fort William Henry (rebuilt on original footprint) show the shape of the forts.  Fort Niagara, pressed up against a point on Lake Ontario, didn’t have the complete star shape because it didn’t have the threat of armies rolling up on their flank, but you can see how the walls offered fields of fire consistent with enfilading attackers.

      So sappers – trench diggers – had to contend with steady musket and cannon fire raining down on them from many angles.  This had to be one of the worst jobs in the army, especially in soil with heavy rocks and roots, to be digging a trench while someone is trying to kill you from an elevated position.  But sapping worked, and throwing bodies at a problem has historically been appropriate behavior with European armies.  To give sappers a fighting chance of finishing the trench, they used mantlets and other protective structures to shield them from enemy fire.  Eventually the fort they were digging towards would run out of ammunition, or the besieged would grow exhausted from constant bombardment, and momentum would shift from the inside to the outside of the fort.  There’s another definition for sapping, and that’s gradually draining the strength and energy from someone, and that’s exactly what a siege would do to the inhabitants of the fort.  Watching the enemy get closer and closer must have been incredibly stressful, especially when you knew some of those enemy chose not to take prisoners.

      Fort Duquesne, in what is now Pittsburgh, wasn’t the most robust fort to begin with, and quickly fell to the French siege to begin hostilities in the French and Indian War in North America.  At Fort William on Lake George, the British and American forces held until their cannon began to overheat and fail.  A failing cannon was a dangerous thing indeed, often exploding and killing the crew that was manning it.  During the Revolutionary War, Fort Stanwix famously held the siege off, but largely because the British, loyalists and Iroquois laying siege on them were scared off prematurely by Benedict Arnold’s deception (fed a rumor that he was much closer and with a much larger force than he actually had).  If it weren’t for Arnold’s ploy the fort may have fallen within a day or two.

      Sappers got the enemy to your walls, but cannon was the great equalizer.  Without cannon to pulverize walls and the people behind them, armies had to play a waiting game.  Basically starving the besieged out.  With enough stores the army might run out of time before they were able to get through.  The Shawnee tried this tactic on Boonesborough in Kentucky; burning crops and killing cattle to starve the settlers out.  When it didn’t work quickly enough they dug a tunnel towards the settlers walls to plant British gunpowder.  Heavy rains collapsed that tunnel killing many of the Shawnee and saving the settlers.  Tunneling, or mining, was different from sapping in that you’re completely underground and vulnerable to these types of collapses.  The most famous mining attack took place at the Battle of Messines in Belgium during World War One when upwards of 10,000 German soldiers were killed when a million pounds of explosives mined below the German lines were exploded.  Clearly, digging towards the enemy didn’t end with the Revolutionary War, and no war proved that like World War One.

      Having walked through a few forts in my time, I’m struck by the amount of work that went into their construction.  It must have been formidable and more than a little terrifying to be on the outside trying to fight your way in.  But being trapped on the inside surely wasn’t much better.  When you hear about the defenders of Fort Stanwix or Fort William Henry fighting to exhaustion, knowing the fate of many who surrendered to the Native American warriors in other battles, its clear there wasn’t much pleasure rendered on that side of the wall either.  Troops sent to relieve the besieged were often vulnerable to ambush, which is exactly what happened at La Belle-Famille during the siege on Fort Niagara and at Oriskany during the siege on Fort Stanwix.

      Sapping offered refuge from the designed killing fields that star shaped forts created.  It was a harsh, horrific, exhausting slog digging under fire from the perimeter to the fort walls.  The alternative was an exposed, high-casualty ground level attack.  Given the choice, I’d probably have grabbed a shovel myself.  Thankfully, I can just stroll the grounds and contemplate the violence that took place around these forts early on in our history.

    • The French Castle on Lake Ontario

      I paid a quick visit to Fort Niagara when I arrived in Buffalo earlier than anticipated.  The site is an active museum, but it closes at 5 PM.  I arrived at 4:15 and set about to quickly absorb as much information as I could in the museum before walking through the incredibly well-preserved/restored fort.  I could make a dozen posts just on Fort Niagara’s history, and I think I may just do that over time, but today I’ll focus on the crown jewel of the site; Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Lery’s “machicolated house”, known forever since as the French Castle.

      Wikipedia describes a machicolation as “a floor opening between the supporting corbels of a battlement, through which stones or other material, such as boiling water or boiling cooking oil, could be dropped on attackers at the base of a defensive wall.”  The French Castle doesn’t have the traditional boxlike structures you might see in a castle in Europe, but the third floor dormers clearly serve this purpose.  For the French, the primary concern in 1725 was defending against attacking Iroquois, who resented their permanent presence at the strategic point on at the mouth of the Niagara River as it flowed into Lake Ontario.  The French had built two forts here previously, Fort Conti in the winter of 1678-1679, and Fort Denonville, the ill-fated staging ground the French used for aggressive campaigns against the Iroquois in 1687.  The French met with a delagation of the Iroquois Nation and requested a “house of peace” be built on the site.  They were granted permission and construction began in earnest, and completed in 1726.

      As a history buff, and particularly as someone fascinated with the period when this fort was active, walking into the French Castle is extraordinary.  It’s a time warp into the past, and looking out onto Lake Ontario on a beautiful June afternoon, it looked very much like it would have for the French soldiers stationed there…  save for Toronto rising up on the horizon.  On this day, the buses of tourists were leaving for the day, the roving pack of Boy Scouts were busy taking pictures elsewhere, and I was almost alone wandering around in the French Castle.  I made a point of walking through each of the rooms open to the public – and almost every room was open – and soaking up the history of the place.

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      Contrast Fort Niagara with a fort the English built at roughly the same time (1726 vs. 1754), Fort Western in what is now Augusta, Maine.  Fort Western was for the British pushing the limits of exploration at that time, and the fort was built with a wooden stockade and wooden buildings designed to defend against Abenaki raids.  Fort Niagara is huge by comparison, built of stone, and with a much larger military presence.  Wooden stockade fencing, as with Fort Western, was initially utilized, and eventually when the threat moved from attacks from Native Americans to British military campaigns with cannon, earthworks and walls were built to reinforce the perimeter.

      The French Fort would eventually be occupied by, in succession, the French, the British, the United States, the British (War of 1812) and finally back to the United States.  It’s witnessed some incredible history in the last 293 years.  I was delighted to see it so well-preserved, and can’t wait to get back to this little corner of the northeast.