It was but as a side clap of the great American Revolution that the last French cannon were pointed against the English forts on Hudson Bay. When France sided with the American colonies a fleet of French frigates was dispatched under the great Admiral La Pérouse against the fur posts of the English Company. One sleepy August afternoon in 1782, when Samuel Hearne, governor of Fort Churchill, was sorting furs in the courtyard, gates wide open, cannon unloaded, guards dispersed, the fort was electrified by the sudden apparition of three men-of-war, sails full blown, sides bristling with cannon, plowing over the waves straight for the harbor gate. French colors fluttered from the masthead. Sails rattled down. Anchors were cast, and in a few minutes small boats were out sounding the channel for position to attack the fort. Hearne had barely forty men, and the most of them were decrepits, unfit for the hunting field. As sunset merged into the long white light of northern midnight, four hundred French mariners landed on the sands outside Churchill. Hearne had no alternative. He surrendered without a blow. The fort was looted of furs, the Indians driven out, and a futile attempt made to blow up the massive walls. Hearne and the other officers were carried off captives. Matonabbee, the famous Indian guide, came back from the hunt to find the wooden structures of Churchill in flame. He had thought the English were invulnerable, and his pagan pride could not brook the shame of such ignominious defeat. Withdrawing outside the shattered walls, Matonabbee blew his brains out. A few days later Port Nelson, to the south, had suffered like fate. The English officers were released by La Pérouse on reaching Europe. As for the fur company servants, they waited only till the French sails had disappeared over the sea. Then they came from hiding and rebuilt the burnt forts. Such was the last act in the great drama of contest between France and England for supremacy in the north.

For two hundred years explorers had been trying to find a northern passage between Europe and Asia by way of America, from east to west. Now that Canada has fallen into English hands; now, too, that the Russian sea-otter hunters are coasting down the west side of America towards that region which Drake discovered long ago in California, England suddenly awakens to a passion for discovery of that mythical Northwest Passage. Instead of seeking from east to west she sought from west to east, and sent her navigator round the world to search for opening along the west coast of America. To carry out the exploration there was selected as commander that young officer, James Cook, who helped to sound the St. Lawrence for Wolfe, and had since been cruising the South Seas. On his ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, was a young man whose name was to become a household word in America, Vancouver, a midshipman.

March of 1778 the Resolution and Discovery come rolling over the long swell of the sheeny Pacific towards Drake's land of New Albion, California. Suddenly, one morning, the dim sky line resolved into the clear-cut edges of high land, but by night such a roaring hurricane had burst on the ships as drove them far out from land, too far to see the opening of Juan de Fuca, leading in from Vancouver Island, though Cook called the cape there "Flattery," because he had hoped for an opening and been deluded. Clearer weather found Cook abreast a coast of sheer mountains with snowy summits jagging through the clouds in tent peaks. A narrow entrance opened into a two-horned cove. Small boats towed the ships in amid a flotilla of Indian dugouts whose occupants chanted weird welcome to the echo of the surrounding hills. Women and children were in the canoes. That signified peace. The ships were moored to trees, and the white men went ashore in that harbor to become famous as the rendezvous of Pacific fur traders, Nootka Sound, on the sea side of Vancouver Island.

Presently the waters were literally swarming with Indian canoes, and in a few days Cook's crews had received thousands of dollars' worth of sea-otter skins for such worthless baubles as tin mirrors and brass rings and bits of red calico. This was the beginning of the fur trade in sea otter with Americans and English. Some of the naked savages were observed wearing metal ornaments of European make. Cook did not think of the Russian fur traders to the north, but easily persuaded himself these objects had come from the English fur traders of Hudson Bay, and so inferred there must be a Northeast Passage. By April, Cook's ships were once more afloat, gliding among the sylvan channels of countless wooded islands up past Sitka harbor, where the Russians later built their fort, round westward beneath the towering opal dome of Mount St. Elias, which Bering had named, to the waters bordering Alaska; but, as the world knows, though the ships penetrated up the channels of many roily waters, they found no open passage. Cook comes down to the Sandwich Islands, New Year of 1779. There the vices of his white crew arouse the enmity of the pagan savages. In a riot over the theft of a rowboat, Cook and a few men are surrounded by an enraged mob. By some mistake the white sailors rowing out from shore fire on the mob surrounding Cook. Instantly a dagger rips under Cook's shoulder blade. In another second Cook and his men are literally hacked to pieces. All night the conch shells of the savages blow their war challenge through the darkness and the signal fires dance on the mountains. By dint of persuasion and threats the white men compel the natives to restore the mangled remains of the commander. Sunday, February 21, amid a silence as of death over the waters, the body of the dead explorer is committed to the deep.

The chance discovery of the sea-otter trade by Cook's crew at Nootka brings hosts of English and American adventurers to the Pacific Coast of Canada. There is Meares, the English officer from China, who builds a rabbit hutch of a barracks at Nootka and almost involves England and Spain in war because the Spaniards, having discovered this region before Cook, knock the log barracks into kindling wood and forcibly seize an English trading ship. There is Robert Gray, the Boston trader, who pushes the prow of his little ship, Columbia, up a spacious harbor south of Juan de Fuca in May of 1792 and discovers Columbia River, so giving the United States flag prior claim here. There is George Vancouver, the English commander, sent out by his government in 1791-1793 to receive Nootka formally back from the Spaniards of California and to explore every inlet from Vancouver Island to Alaska. As luck would have it, Vancouver, the Englishman, and Gray, the American, are both hovering off the mouth of the Columbia in April of 1792, but a gale drives the ships offshore, though turgid water plainly indicates the mouth of a great river somewhere near. Vancouver goes on up north. Gray, the American, comes back, and so Vancouver misses discovering the one great river that remains unmapped in America. Up Puget Sound, named after his lieutenant, up Fuca Straits, round Vancouver Island, past all those inlets like seas on the mainland of British Columbia, coasts Vancouver, rounding south again to Nootka in August. In Nootka lie the Spanish frigates from California, bristling with cannon, the red and yellow flag blowing to the wind above the palisaded fort. In solemn parade, with Maquinna, the Nootka chief, clad in a state of nature, as guest of the festive board, Don Quadra, the Spanish officer, dines and wines Vancouver; but when it comes to business, that is another matter! Vancouver understands that Spain is to surrender all sovereignty north of San Francisco. Don Quadra, with pompous bow, maintains that the international agreement was to surrender rights only north of Juan de Fuca, leaving the rest of the northwest coast free to all nations for trade. Incidentally, it may be mentioned, Don Quadra was right, but the two commanders agree to send home to their respective governments for instructions. Meanwhile Robert Gray, the American, comes rolling into port with news he has discovered Columbia River. Vancouver is skeptical and chagrined. Having failed to discover the river, he goes down coast to explore it. It may be added, he sends his men higher up the river than Gray has gone, and has England's flag of possession as solemnly planted as though Robert Gray had never entered Columbia's waters. The next two years Vancouver spends exploring every nook and inlet from Columbia River to Lynn Canal. Once and for all and forever he disproves the myth of a Northeast Passage. His work was negative, but it established English rights where America's claims ceased and Russia's began, namely between Columbia River and Sitka, or in what is now known as British Columbia.

As the beaver had lured French bushrovers from the St. Lawrence to the Rockies, so the sea otter led the way to the exploration of the Pacific Coast. Artist's brush and novelist's pen have drawn all the romance and the glamour and the adventure of the beaver hunter's life, but the sea-otter hunter's life is almost an untold tale. Pacific Coast Indians were employed by the white traders for this wildest of hunting. The sea otter is like neither otter nor beaver, though possessing habits akin to both. In size, when full-grown, it is about the length of a man. Its pelt has the ebony shimmer of seal tipped with silver. Cradled on the waves, sleeping on their backs in the sea, playful as kittens, the sea otters only come ashore when driven by fierce gales; but they must come above to breathe, for the wave wash of storm would smother them. Their favorite sleeping grounds used to be the kelp beds of the Alaskan Islands. Storm or calm, to the kelp beds rode the Indian hunters in their boats of oiled skin light as paper. If heavy surf ran, concealing sight and sound, the hunters stood along shore shouting through the surf and waiting for the wave wash to carry in the dead body; if the sea were calm, the hunters circled in bands of twenty or thirty, spearing the sea otter as it came up to breathe; but the best hunting was when hurricane gales churned sea and air to spray. Then the sea otter came to the kelp beds in herds, and through the storm over the wave-dashed reefs, like very spirits of the storm incarnate, rushed the hunters, spear in hand. It is not surprising that the sea-otter hunters perished by tens of thousands every year, or that the sea otter dwindled from a yield of 100,000 a year to a paltry 200 of the present day.

Meanwhile Nor'west traders from Montreal and Quebec, English traders from Hudson Bay, have gone up the Saskatchewan far as the Athabasca and the Rockies. What lies beyond? Whither runs this great river from Athabasca Lake? Whence comes the great river from the mountains? Will the river that flows north or the river that comes from the west, either of them lead to the Pacific Coast, where Cook's crews found wealth of sea otter? The lure of the Unknown is the lure of the siren. First you possess it, then it possesses you! Cooped up in his fort on Lake Athabasca, Alexander MacKenzie, the Nor'wester, begins wondering about those rivers, but you can't ask business men to bank on the Unknown, to write blank checks for profits on what you may not find. And the Nor'westers were all stern business men. For every penny's outlay they exacted from their wintering partners and clerks not ten but a hundredfold. And Alexander MacKenzie received no encouragement from his company to explore these unknown rivers. The project got possession of his mind. Sometimes he would pace the little log barracks of Fort Chippewyan from sunset to day dawn, trying to work out a way to explore those rivers; or, sitting before the huge hearth place, he would dream and dream till, as he wrote his cousin Roderick, "I did not know what I was doing or where I was." Finally he induced his cousin to take charge of the fort for a summer. Then, assuming all risk and outlay, he set out on his own responsibility June 3, 1789, to follow the Great River down to the Arctic Ocean. "English Chief," who often went down to Hudson Bay for the rival company, went as MacKenzie's guide, and there were also in the canoes two or three white men, some Indians as paddlers, and squaws to cook and make moccasins.

The canoes passed Peace River pouring down from the mountains; then six dangerous rapids, where many a Nor'west voyageur had perished, one of MacKenzie's canoes going smash over the falls with a squaw, who swam ashore; then rampart shores came, broader and higher than the St. Lawrence or the Hudson, the boats skimming ahead with blankets hoisted for sails through foggy days and nights of driving rain. Cramped and rain-soaked, bailing water from the canoes with huge sponges, the Indians began to whine that the way was "hard, white man, hard." Then the river lost itself in a huge lagoon, Slave Lake, named after defeated Indians who had taken refuge here; and the question was, which way to go through the fog across the marshy lake! Poking through rushes high as a man, MacKenzie found a current, and, hoisting a sail on his fishing pole, raced out to the river again on a hissing tide. Here lived the Dog Rib Indians, and they frightened MacKenzie's men cold with grewsome tales of horrors ahead, of terrible waterfalls, of a land of famine and hostile tribes. The effect was instant. MacKenzie could not obtain a guide till "English Chief" hoisted a Slave Lake Indian into the canoe on a paddle handle. Though MacKenzie himself nightly slept with the vermin-infested guide to prevent desertion, the fellow escaped one night during the confusion of a thunder-storm. Again a chance hunter was forcibly put into the canoe as guide; and the explorer pushed on for another month. North of Bear Lake, Indian warriors were seen flourishing weapons along shore, and MacKenzie's men began to remark that the land was barren of game. If they became winter bound, they would perish. MacKenzie promised his men if he did not find the sea within seven days, he would turn back. Suddenly the men lost track of day, for they had come to the region of long light. The river had widened to swamp lands. Between the 13th and 14th of July the men asleep on the sand were awakened by a flood of water lapping in on their baggage. What did it mean? For a minute they did not realize. Then they knew. It was the tide. They had found the sea. Hilarious as boys, they jumped from bed to man their canoes and chase whales.

September 12, all sails up before a driving wind, the canoes raced across Athabasca Lake to the fort landing, Roderick, his nephew, shouting a welcome. MacKenzie had laid one of the two ghosts that haunted his peace. Now he must lay the other. Where did Peace River come from? His achievement on MacKenzie River had been greeted by the other Nor'west partners with a snub. Nevertheless MacKenzie asked for leave of absence that he might go to London and study the taking of astronomic observations in order to explore that other river flowing from the mountains; and in London, though poor and obscure, he heard all about Cook's voyages and Meare's brush with the Spaniards at Nootka, and plans for Captain Vancouver to make a final exploration of the Pacific Coast. Hurrying back to the Nor'wester's fort on Peace River, he was beset by the blue devils of despondency. What if Peace River did not lead to the Pacific Ocean at all? What if he were behind some other discoverer? What if the venture proved a fool's trip leading to a blind nowhere? He was only a junior partner and could ill afford either money or time for failure.

Nevertheless, when the furs have been dispatched for Montreal, MacKenzie launches out on May 9 of 1793 with a thirty-foot birch canoe, six voyageurs, and Alexander Mackay as lieutenant, for the hinterland beyond the Rockies. This time the going was against stream,—hard paddling, but safer than with a swift current in a river with dangerous rapids. Ten days later the river has become a canyon of tumbling cascades, the mountains sheer wall on each side, with snowy peaks jagging up through the clouds. To portage baggage up such cliffs was impossible. Yet it was equally impossible to go on up the canyon, and MacKenzie's men became so terrified they refused to land. Jumping to foothold on the wall, a towrope in one hand, an ax in the other, MacKenzie cut steps in the cliff, then signaled above the roar of the rapids for the men to follow. They stripped themselves to swim if they missed footing, and obeyed, trembling in every limb. The towrope was warped round trees and the loaded canoe tracked up the cascade. At the end of that portage the men flatly refused to go on. MacKenzie ignored the mutiny and ordered the best of provisions spread for a feast. While the crew rested, he climbed the face of a rocky cliff to reconnoiter. As far as eye could see were cataracts walled by mighty precipices. The canoe could not be tracked up such waters. Mackay, who had gone prospecting a portage, reported that it would be nine miles over the mountain. MacKenzie did not tell his men what was ahead of them, but he led the way up the steep mountain, cutting trees to form an outer railing, and up this trail the canoe was hauled, towline round trees, the men swearing and sweating and blowing like whales. Three miles was the record that day, the voyageurs throwing themselves down to sleep at five in the afternoon, wrapped in their blanket coats lying close to the glacier edges. Three days it took to cross this mountain, and the end of the third day found them at the foot of another mountain. Here the river forked. MacKenzie followed the south branch, or what is now known as the Parsnip. Often at night the men would be startled by rocketing echoes like musketry firing, and they would spring to their feet to keep guard with backs to trees till morning; but presently they learned the cause of the pistol-shot reports. They were now on the Uplands among the eternal snows. The sharp splittings, the far boomings, the dull breaking thuds were frost cornices of overhanging snow crashing down in avalanches that swept the mountain slopes clear of forests.

A short portage from the Parsnip over a low ridge to a lake, and the canoe is launched on a stream flowing on the far side of the Divide, Bad River, a branch of the Fraser, though MacKenzie mistakes it for an upper tributary of the great river discovered by Gray, the Columbia. Then, before they realize it, comes the danger of going with the current on a river with rapids. The stream sweeps to a torrent, mad and unbridled. The canoe is as a chip in a maelstrom, the precipices racing past in a blur, the Indians hanging frantically to the gunnels, bawling aloud in fear, the terrified voyageurs reaching, … grasping, … snatching at trees overhanging from the banks. The next instant a rock has banged through bottom, tearing away the stern. The canoe reels in a swirl. Bang goes a rock through the bow. The birch bark flattens like a shingle. Another swirl, and, to the amazement of all, instead of the death that had seemed impending, smashed canoe, baggage, and voyageurs are dumped on the shallows of a sandy reach. One can guess the gasp of relief that went up. Nobody uttered a word for some time. One voyageur, who had grasped at a branch and been hoisted bodily from the canoe, now came limping to the disconsolate group, and had stumbled with lighted pipe in teeth across the powder that had been spread out to dry, when a terrific yell of warning brought him to his senses, and relieved the tension. MacKenzie spread out a treat for the men and sent them to gather bark for a fresh canoe. Other adventures on Bad River need not be given. This one was typical. The record was but two miles a day; and now there was no turning back. The difficulties behind were as great as any that could be before. June 15 Bad River led them westward into the Fraser, but somewhere in the canyon between modern Quesnel and Alexandria the way became impassable. Besides, the river was leading too far south. MacKenzie struck up Blackwater River to the west. Caching canoe and provisions on July 4, he marched overland. The Pacific was reached on July 22, 1793, near Bella Coola. By September, after perils too numerous to be told, MacKenzie was back at his fur post on Peace River. As his discoveries on this trip blazed the way to new hunting ground for his company, they brought both honor and wealth to MacKenzie. He was knighted by the English King for his explorations, and he retired to an estate in Scotland, where he died about 1820.

Meanwhile, Napoleon has sold Louisiana to the United States. The American explorers, Lewis and Clark, have crossed from the Missouri to the Columbia; and now John Jacob Astor, the great fur merchant of New York, in 1811 sends his fur traders overland to build a fort at the mouth of Columbia River. The Northwest Company in frantic haste dispatches explorers to follow up MacKenzie's work and take possession of the Pacific fur trade before Astor's men can reach the field. It becomes a race for the Pacific.

Simon Fraser is sent in 1806 to build posts west of the Rockies in New Caledonia, and to follow that unknown river which MacKenzie mistook for the Columbia, on down to the sea. Two years he passed building the posts, that exist to this day as Fraser planned them: Fort MacLeod at the head of Parsnip River, on a little lake set like an emerald among the mountains; Fort St. James on Stuart Lake, a reach of sheeny green waters like the Trossachs, dotted with islands and ensconced in mountains; Fraser Fort on another lake southward; Fort St. George on the main Fraser River. Then, in May of 1808, with four canoes Fraser descends the river named after him, accompanied by Stuart and Quesnel and nineteen voyageurs. This was the river where the rapids had turned MacKenzie back, canyon after canyon tumultuous with the black whirlpools and roaring like a tempest. Before essaying the worst runs of the cascades Fraser ordered a canoe lightened at the prow and manned by the five best voyageurs. It shot down the current like a stone from a catapult. "She flew from one danger to another," relates Fraser, who was watching the canoe from the bank, "till the current drove her on a rock. The men disembarked, and we had to plunge our daggers into the bank to keep from sliding into the river as we went down to their aid, our lives hanging on a thread." Like MacKenzie, Fraser was compelled to abandon canoes. Each with a pack of eighty pounds, the voyageurs set out on foot down that steep gorge where the traveler to-day can see the trail along the side of the precipice like basket work between Lilloet and Thompson River. In Fraser's day was no trail, only here and there bridges of trembling twig ladders across chasms; and over these swinging footholds the marchers had to carry their packs, the river rolling below, deep and ominous and treacherous. At Spuzzum the river turned from the south straight west. Fraser knew it was not the Columbia. His men named it after himself. Forty days was Fraser going from St. George to tide water. Early in August he was back at his fur posts of New Caledonia.

Yet another explorer did the Nor'westers send to take possession of the region beyond the mountains. David Thompson had been surveying the bounds between the United States and what is now Manitoba, when he was ordered to explore the Rockies in the region of the modern Banff. Up on Canoe River, Thompson and his men build canoes to descend the Columbia. Following the Big Bend, they go down the rolling milky tide past Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes, a region of mountains sheer on each side as walls, with wisps of mist marking the cloud line. Then a circular sweep westward through what is now Washington, pausing at Snake River to erect formal claim of possession for England, then a riffle on the current, a smell of the sea, and at 1 P.M. on July 15, 1811, Thompson glides within view of a little raw new fort, Astoria. In the race to the Pacific the Americans have gained the ground at the mouth of the Columbia just two months before Thompson came. In Astor's fort Thompson finds old friends of the Northwest Company hired over by Astor.

After war has broken out in open flame it is easy to ascribe the cause to this, that, or the other act, which put the match to the combustibles; but the real reason usually lies far behind the one act of explosion, in an accumulation of ill feeling that provided the combustibles.

So it was in the fratricidal war of 1812 between Canada and the United States. The war was criminal folly, as useless as it was unnecessary. What caused it? What accumulated the ill feeling lying ready like combustibles for the match? Let us see.

The United Empire Loyalists have, by 1812, increased to some 100,000 of Canada's population, cherishing bitter memories of ruin and confiscation and persecution because Congress failed to carry out the pledge guaranteeing protection to the losing side in the Revolution. Then, because Congress failed to carry out her guarantee, England delayed turning over the western fur posts to the United States for almost ten years; and whether true or false, the suspicion became an open charge that the hostility of the Indians to American frontiersmen was fomented by the British fur trader.

Here, then, was cause for rankling anger on both sides, and the bitterness was unwittingly increased by England's policy. It was hard for the mother country to realize that the raw new nation of the United States, child of her very flesh and blood, kindred in thought and speech, was a power to be reckoned with, on even ground, looking on the level, eye to eye; and not just a bumptious, underling nation, like a boy at the hobbledehoy age, to be hectored and chaffed and bullied and badgered and licked into shape, as a sort of protectorate appended to English interests.

I once asked an Englishman why the English press was so virulently hostile to one of the most brilliant of her rising men.

"Oh," he answered, "you must be English to understand that. We never think it hurts a boy to be well ragged when he 's at school."

Something of that spirit was in England's attitude to the new nation of the United States. England was hard pressed in life-and-death struggle with Napoleon. To recruit both army and navy, conscription was rigidly and ruthlessly enforced. Yet more! England claimed the right to impress British-born subjects in foreign ports, to seize deserters in either foreign ports or on foreign ships, and, most obnoxious of all, to search neutral vessels on the ocean highway for deserters from the British flag. It was an era of great brutality in military discipline. Desertions were frequent. Also thousands of immigrants were flocking to the new nation of the United States and taking out naturalization papers. England ignored these naturalization papers when taken out by deserters.

Let us see how the thing worked out. A passenger vessel is coming up New York harbor. An English frigate with cannon pointed swings across the course, signals the American vessel on American waters to slow up, sends a young lieutenant with some marines across to the American vessel, searches her from stem to stern, or compels the American captain to read the roster of the crew, forcibly seizes half a dozen of the American crew as British deserters, and departs, leaving the Americans gasping with wonder whether they are a free nation or a tail to the kite of English designs. It need not be explained that the offense was often aggravated by the swaggering insolence of the young officers. They considered the fury of the unprepared American crew a prime joke. In vain the government at Washington complained to the government at Westminster. England pigeonholed the complaint and went serenely on her way, searching American vessels from Canada to Brazil.

Or an English vessel has come to Hampton Roads to wood and water. An English officer thinks he recognizes among the American crews men who have deserted from English vessels. Three men defy arrest and show their naturalization papers. High words follow, broken heads and broken canes, and the English crew are glad to escape the mob by rowing out to their own vessel.

Is it surprising that the ill feeling on both sides accumulated till there lacked only the match to cause an explosion? The explosion came in 1807. H. M. S. Leopard, cruising off Norfolk in June, encounters the United States ship Chesapeake. At 3 P.M. the English ship edges down on the American, loaded to the water line with lumber, and signals a messenger will be sent across. The young English lieutenant going aboard the Chesapeake shows written orders from Admiral Berkeley of Halifax, commanding a search of the Chesapeake for six deserters. He is very courteous and pleasant about the disagreeable business: the orders are explicit; he must obey his admiral. The American commander is equally courteous. He regrets that he must refuse to obey an English admiral's orders, but his own government has given most explicit orders that American vessels must not be searched. The young Englishman returns with serious face. The ships were within pistol shot of each other, the men on the English decks all at their guns, the Americans off guard, lounging on the lumber piles. Quick as flash a cannon shot rips across the Chesapeake's bows, followed by a broadside, and another, and yet another, that riddle the American decks to kindling wood before the astonished officers can collect their senses. Six seamen are dead and twenty-three wounded when the Chesapeake strikes her colors to surrender; but the Leopard does not want a captive. She sends her lieutenant back, who musters the four hundred American seamen, picks out four men as British deserters, learns that another deserter has been killed and a sixth has jumped overboard rather than be retaken, takes his prisoners back to the Leopard, which proceeds to Halifax, where they are tried by court-martial and shot.

It isn't exactly surprising that the episode literally set the United States on fire with rage, and that the American President at once ordered all American ports closed to British war vessels. The quarrel dragged on between the two governments for five years. England saw at once that she had gone too far and violated international law. She repudiated Admiral Berkeley's order, offered to apologize and pension the heirs of the victims; but as she would not repudiate either the right of impressment or the right of search, the American government refused to receive the apology.

Other causes fanned the flame of war. The United States was now almost the only nation neutral in Napoleon's wars. To cripple English commerce, Napoleon forbids neutral nations trading at English ports. By way of retaliation England forbids neutral nations trading with French ports; and the United States strikes back by closing American ports to both nations. It means blue ruin to American trade, but the United States cannot permit herself to be ground between the upper and nether millstones of two hostile European powers. Then, sharp as a gamester playing his trump card, Napoleon revokes his embargo in 1810, which leaves England the offender against the United States. Then Governor Craig of Canada commits an error that must have delighted the heart of Napoleon, who always profited by his enemy's blunders. Well meaning, but fatally ill and easily alarmed, Craig sends one John Henry from Montreal in 1809 as spy to the United States for the double purpose of sounding public opinion on the subject of war, and of putting any Federalists in favor of withdrawing from the Union in touch with British authorities. Craig goes home to England to die. Henry fails to collect reward for his ignoble services, turns traitor, and sells the entire correspondence to the war party in the United States for $10,000. That spy business adds fuel to fire. Then there are other quarrels. A deserter from the American army is found teaching school near Cornwall in Canada. He is driven out of the little backwoods schoolhouse, pricked across the field with bayonets, out of the children's view, and shot on Canadian soil by American soldiers, an outrage almost the same in spirit as the British crew's outrage on the Chesapeake. Also, in spite of apologies, the war ships clash again. The English sloop Little Belt is cruising off Cape Henry in May of 1811, looking for a French privateer, when a sail appears over the sea. The Little Belt pursues till she sights the commodore's blue flag of the United States frigate President, then she turns about; but by this time the President has turned the tables on the little sloop, and is pursuing to find out what the former's conduct meant. Darkness settles over the two ships beating about the wind.

"What sloop is that?" shouts an officer through a speaking trumpet from the American's decks.

"What ship is that?" bawls back a voice through the darkness from the little Englander.

Then, before any one can tell who fired first (in fact, each accuses the other of firing first), the cannon are pouring hot shot into each other's hulls till thirty men have fallen on the decks of the Little Belt. Apologies follow, of course, and explanations; but that does not remedy the ill. In fact, when nations and people want to quarrel, they can always find a cause. War is declared in June of 1812 by Congress. It is war against England; but that means war against Canada, though there are not forty-five hundred soldiers from Halifax to Lake Huron. As for the American forces, they muster an army of some one hundred and fifty thousand; but their generals complain they are "an untrained mob"; and events justified the complaints.

There is nothing for Canada to do but stand up to the war of England's making and fight for hearth and home. Canada on the defensive, there is nothing for the States to do but invade; and the American generals don't relish the task with their "untrained mob."

Upper Canada or Ontario has not four hundred soldiers from Kingston to Detroit River; but Major General Isaac Brock calls for volunteers. The clang of arms, of drill, of target practice, resounds in every hamlet through Canada. At Kingston, at Toronto, at Fort George (Niagara), at Erie where Niagara River comes from the lake, at Amherstburg, southeast of Detroit, are stationed garrisons to repel invasion, with hastily erected cannon and mortar commanding approach from the American side. And invasion comes soon enough. The declaration of war became known in Canada about the 20th of June. By July 3 General Hull of Michigan is at Detroit with two thousand five hundred men preparing to sweep western Ontario. July 3 an English schooner captures Hull's provision boat coming up Detroit River, but Hull crosses with his army on July 12 to Sandwich, opposite Detroit, and issues proclamation calling on the people to throw off the yoke of English rule. How such an invitation fell on United Empire Loyalist ears may be guessed. Meanwhile comes word that the Northwest Company's voyageurs, with four hundred Indians, have captured Michilimackinac without a blow. The fall of Michilimackinac, the failure of the Canadians to rally to his flag, the loss of his provision boat, dampen Hull's ardor so that on August 8 he moves back with his troops to Detroit. Eight days later comes Brock from Niagara with five hundred Loyalists and one thousand Indians under the great chief Tecumseh to join Procter's garrison of six hundred at Amherstburg. The Canadians have come by open boat up Lake Erie from Niagara through furious rains; but they are fighting for their homes, and with eager enthusiasm follow Brock on up Detroit River to Sandwich, opposite the American fort. Indians come by night and lie in ambush south of Detroit to protect the Canadians while they cross the river. Then the cannon on the Canadian side begin a humming of bombs overhead. While the bombs play over the stream at Sandwich, Brock rushes thirteen hundred men across the river south of Detroit, and before midday of August 16 is marching his men through the woods to assault the fort, when he is met by an officer carrying out the white flag of surrender. While Brock was crossing the river, something had happened inside the fort at Detroit. It was one of those curious cases of blind panic when only the iron grip of a strong man can hold demoralized forces in hand. The American officers had sat down to breakfast in the mess room at day dawn, when a bomb plunged through the roof killing four on the spot and spattering the walls with the blood of the mangled bodies. Disgraceful stories are told of Hull's conduct. Ashy with fright and trembling, he dashed from the room, and, before the other officers knew what he was about, had offered to surrender his army, twenty-five hundred arms, thirty-three cannon, an armed brig, and the whole state of Michigan. The case is probably more an example of nervous hysterics than treason, though the other American officers broke their swords with rage and chagrin, declaring they had been sold for a price. It was but the first of the many times the lesson was taught in this war, that however well intentioned a volunteer's courage may be, it takes a seasoned man to make war. Ten minutes later, a boy had climbed the flagstaff and hung out the English flag over Detroit. Of the captured American army Brock permitted the volunteer privates to go home on parole. The regulars, including Hull, were carried back prisoners on the boats to Niagara, to be forwarded to Montreal. At Montreal, Hull was given back to the Americans in exchange for thirty British prisoners. He was sentenced by court-martial to be shot for treason and cowardice, but the sentence was commuted.

At Niagara River, where the main troops of Ontario were centered, Brock's victory was greeted with simply a madness of joy. From the first it had been plain that the principal fighting in Ontario would take place at Niagara, and along the river Brock had concentrated some sixteen hundred volunteer troops, raw farm hands most of them, with a goodly proportion of descendants from the United Empire Loyalists, who had furbished out their fathers' swords. But the army was in rags and tatters; many men had no shoes; before Brock captured the guns at Detroit there had not been muskets to go round the men, and there were not cannon enough to mount the batteries cast up along Niagara River facing the American defenses. As the boats came down Lake Erie and disembarked the American prisoners on August 24, at Fort Erie on the Canadian side, opposite Black Rock and Buffalo, wild yells of jubilation rent the air. By nightfall every camp on the Canadian side for the whole forty miles of Niagara River's course echoed to shout and counter shout, and a wild refrain which some poet of the haversack had composed on the spot:

We 'll subdue the mighty Democrats and pull their dwellings down,
And have the States inhabited with subjects of the Crown.

Take a survey of the Niagara region. South is Lake Erie, north is Lake Ontario, between them Niagara River flowing almost straight north through a steep dark gorge hewn out of the solid rock by the living waters of all the Upper Lakes, crushed and cramped, carving a turbulent way through this narrow canyon. Midway in the river's course the blue waters begin to race. The race becomes a dizzy madness of blurred, whirling, raging waters. Then there is the leap, the plunge, the shattering anger of inland seas hurling their strength over the sheer precipice in resistless force. Then the foaming whirlpool below, and the shadowy gorge, and the undercurrent eddying away in the swift-flowing waters of the river coming out on Lake Ontario. On one side are the Canadian forts, on the other the American, slab-walled all of them, with scarcely a stone foundation except in bastions used as powder magazines. Fort Erie on the Canadian side faces Buffalo and Black Rock on the American side. Where the old French voyageurs used to portage past the Falls, about halfway on the Canadian side south of the precipice, is the village of Chippewa. Here Brock has stationed a garrison with cannon. Then halfway between the Falls and Lake Ontario are high cliffs known as Queenston Heights, in plain view of the American town of Lewiston on the other side. Cannon line the river cliffs on both sides here. All about Lewiston the fields are literally white with the tents of General Van Rensselaer's army, now grown from twenty-five hundred to almost eight thousand. On the Canadian side cannon had been mounted on the cliffs known as Queenston Heights. Possibly because the two hundred men would make poor showing in tents, Brock has his soldiers here take quarters in the farmhouses. For the rest it is such a rural scene as one may witness any midsummer,—rolling yellow wheat fields surrounded by the zigzag rail fences, with square farmhouses of stone and the fields invariably backed by the uncleared bush land. Six miles farther down the river, where the waters join Lake Ontario, is the English post, Fort George, near the old capital, Newark, and just opposite the American fort of Niagara. With the exception of the Grand Island region on the river, it may be said that both armies are in full view of each other. Sometimes, when to the tramp—tramp—tramp of the sentry's tread a loud "All's well" echoes across the river from Lewiston to the Canadian side, some wag at Queenston will take up the cry through the dark and bawl back, "All's well here too"; and all night long the two sentries bawl back and forward to each other through the dark. Sometimes, too, though strictest orders are issued against such ruffian warfare by both Van Rensselaer and Brock, the sentries chance shots at each other through the dark. Drums beat reveillé at four in the morning, and the rub-a-dub-dub of Queenston Heights is echoed by rat-tat-too of Lewiston, though river mist hides the armies from each other in the morning. Iron baskets filled with oiled bark are used as telegraph signals, and one may guess how, when the light flared up of a night on the Canadian heights, scouts carried word to the officers on the American side. One may guess, too, the effect on Van Rensselaer's big untrained army, when, with the sun aglint on scarlet uniform, they saw their fellow-countrymen of Detroit marched prisoners between British lines along the heights of Queenston opposite Lewiston. Rage, depression, shame, knew no bounds; and the army was unable to vent anger in heroic attack, for England had repealed her embargo laws, and when Brock came back from Detroit he found that an armistice had been arranged, and both sides had been ordered to suspend hostilities till instructions came from the governments. The truce, it may be added, was only an excuse to enable both sides to complete preparations for the war. In a few weeks ball and bomb were again singing their shrill songs in mid-air.