Part 15

Young Captain Clarke Gamble, of the latter wing, felt sure his directions “to proceed until beyond the tavern, wheel to the right and take it while the column attacked in front,” had been complied with; he did so turn, and felt his way through several clearings, examining every building and shelter himself. He reached a grove of second-growth pine and other wood when the sound of the first gun, trained on the doomed tavern, greeted him. The company had now reached the high rail fence which bounded Montgomery’s property on that side, fencing a field full of stumps, one of them very large. The young captain climbed the dividing line, calling on his men to follow. They were in time to see rebels in front and right and left of them running from the house just struck, some of them stopping to discharge their rifles at the men so singularly well displayed for their benefit upon the fence. From three or four between the rails the fire was returned, but the shots on each side fell harmless. A man then ran from Yonge Street, and as he passed the large stump, squatted behind it, took what seemed to be a very deliberate aim at Captain Gamble, his eyes and a line of forehead all that could be seen between the stump and the top of his cap. One of Gamble’s company, a coloured man named Boosie, sprang forward, saying, “Shall I shoot him, captain!” Without waiting for a reply he did so, reloaded, and called out to a fellow-soldier, young Gowan, a student-at-law, to bear him out that he “had shot that rebel.” Judge McLean, hearing shots from his position nearer the tavern, came up with another company at the double quick, his heightened colour, flashing eye and cool, erect bearing becoming him better in his soldier dress than even in his robes of office. “Oh, Gamble, that’s you, is it? All right,” was all he permitted himself, and disappeared. Between the time of looking into the barrel of the rifle pointed at him from behind the stump, and the crack of Boosie’s musket, which told of a life taken on his account, the seconds seemed long to the captain. He reformed his company, and on passing the dead man, Ludwig Wideman, the thrifty Boosie said, “Can I take his rifle, captain?” took it, and continued his victorious march to the inn with a gun on each shoulder, the proudest and happiest man, white or black, in the force--“not even exceeded by Sir Francis himself.” In the centre of the dead man’s forehead was a pink record of Boosie’s good aim. To the captain’s surprise he recognized in Wideman a client who had but lately been in his office and from whom he had parted with a firm shake of the hand. It is more than likely that when Wideman was taking his aim he had recognized Captain Gamble, and in the hesitation following had given the minute which lost him his own life and saved his legal adviser’s. The proud negro constituted himself his captain’s body-guard for the rest of that day. “I believe we must leave the killing out when all is done;” and this, according to Dent, was the “death roll” of Montgomery’s or Gallows Hill battle.

The full force was too much for the insurgents. The whole affair was of not more than a half hour’s duration, and after some perfunctory firing, a number of the “embattled farmers” standing about inactively and wishing themselves anywhere but at Thermopylæ, the outcome was confusion to the one side and a well followed-up victory on the other. The wounded were tenderly picked up and carried off in carts to the hospital; and Sir Francis, followed by the flower of his army, went in pursuit of his flying subjects, to give his second word of command. Before he could do so, Judge Jones, by now as full of “over-zeal” as FitzGibbon himself, with a comrade who was noted as a splendid officer and was known as handsome Charlie Heath, was trying to ride in at the open door of the tavern. MacNab, thinking Jones was some prominent rebel, promptly gave the word to “shoot me that man.” But some one in the ranks, not so zealous, cried, “Don’t fire, it’s Judge Jones,” and so saved the Judge’s life.

Two prisoners were now brought before his Excellency, who sat upon his horse by the raised platform at the inn door. By his account, they were arrantly frightened and gazed at the adjacent trees wondering which ones they might be sent to decorate. But the dramatic Sir Francis was fond of strong contrasts, he was a masterhand at light and shade. These two were all that remained of Mackenzie’s army. So, after a little homily, he pardoned them “in their sovereign’s name.” The unhappy men nearly fainted, unable at once to take advantage of their freedom.

The Governor next deemed it expedient to mark by some stern “act of vengeance the important victory which had been achieved.” He forthwith took a leaf out of his enemy’s book of tactics, and burned what his detractors call the “houses of private citizens,” what he calls the place “long the rendezvous of the disaffected;” the floors of one “stained with the blood of Colonel Moodie,” “the fortress” from which Her Majesty’s subjects had been fired upon.

He gave the order to fire the premises. “The heaps of dirty straw on which he (Mackenzie) and his gang had been sleeping” acted as good kindling; the furniture of the house, piled with it, soon set fire to the great structure of timber and planks. The deep black smoke poured from the windows, and the “long red tongues sometimes darted horizontally, as if revengefully to consume those who had created them, then flared high above the roof.” The heat was intense, but to those “gallant spirits that immediately surrounded it,” seated on their horses, was a “subject of joy and triumph, and ... a lurid telegraph which intimated to many an aching heart in Toronto the joyful intelligence that the yeomen and farmers of Upper Canada had triumphed over their perfidious enemy ‘responsible government.’” But it was only scotched.

Sir Francis, by way of balancing aching hearts in Toronto with a few in the country, now carried the fire-brand farther afield. He commanded a detachment of forty men to ride up Yonge Street to fire the house of a farmer who was most objectionable to him. On the way they met Colonel FitzGibbon, Captain Halkett and others, returning after a fruitless pursuit of Mackenzie. The order did not please FitzGibbon, but he was forced to let them pass. Presently, Captain Strachan, eldest son of the Archdeacon, came in headlong haste to countermand the order; Sir Francis had had a qualm. It passed; and reining in his horse, the Governor sent for the Colonel himself, and reissued his directions. “Already,” writes the latter, “I had seen with displeasure the smoke arising from the burning of Montgomery’s house, which had been set on fire after I had advanced in pursuit of Mackenzie, and I desired to expostulate with his Excellency, but he quickly placed his right hand on my bridle arm, and said, ‘Hear me. Let Gibson’s house be burned immediately, and let the militia be kept here until it is done,’ exactly repeating his order; and then he set spurs to his horse, and galloped towards town.” “It was now late in the afternoon,” continues FitzGibbon, “and the house was nearly four miles distant. I then commanded Lieut.-Colonel Duggan to take command of a party which I wheeled out of the column and countermarched, and see the house burned; when he entreated me not to insist on his doing so, for that he had to pass along Yonge Street almost daily, and he probably would on some future day be shot from behind a fence. I said, ‘If you will not obey orders you had better go home, sir.’ Again he spoke, and I then ordered him to go home; but he continued to express his reasons for objecting, and I said, ‘Well, I will see the duty done myself,’ and I did so, for I had no other officer of high rank near me to whom I could safely entrust the performance of that duty; and with the party I advanced and had the house and barns burned at sunset.” Mrs. Gibson, the farmer’s wife, and her four young children, found shelter in the house of a neighbour, and from there she beheld the soldiers riding about with her precious poultry and porkers slung across their saddle bows, the walls of her happy home going up in smoke and flame to the rosy sunset sky above them, not knowing where her husband was. She was destined not to see him until she joined him in Rochester, to which town he, with so many others, escaped.

In his despatch which related his heroism Sir Francis tempered his own acts with words likely to cast odium, where any might arise, on the militia. “The militia advanced in pursuit of the rebels about four miles, till they reached the house of one of the principal ringleaders, Mr. Gibson; which residence it would have been impossible to save, and it was consequently burned to the ground.”

Sir Francis would have done better to stand by his acts or to have had the prudence to recall and destroy all his former writings before transcribing anew, since by his writings is he most condemned.

Meanwhile, more prisoners had been taken, and he was in time to see and exhort them, and also to see that proper care was taken of the wounded, insurgent as well as his own followers. They were placed in carts and taken to the hospital, and the body of Wideman given to his cousin for interment. Some of the Loyalists were galloping about, seated behind the living decorations of their saddle bows, and others bore the flags taken out of Montgomery’s burning house. One of these, a large red one, had on one side, “Victoria 1st and Reform,” and on the other, “Bidwell and the Glorious Minority, 1837 and a Good Beginning.”[3] It was supposed that this had been intended to take the place of the flag flying from Government House staff, which was not always the same one, for the latter was thriftily managed to reverse the proverb and temper the flag to the wind; large, when it hung motionless in the burning heat of summer, or was a flag poudré by drifting snows, and reduced to a British Jack no larger than a lady’s pockethandkerchief when there was a high blow. There were several others in the rebel group; one decorated with stars, another with stripes, and yet another of plain white, which was useless, since Sir Francis had supplied that article of signal.

Among the men admonished were some as loyal as the soldiers who arrested them, but the advance guard had assumed that all they met were rebels, and deprived them of liberty accordingly. One was a youth named William Macdougall, who, after the manner of boys, left his uncle’s farm-house, where he happened to be making a visit, so that he might see whatever was going on. The uncle tried to break through Sir Francis’ exordium with explanations, but that flow, like Iser running rapidly, was not easily stopped. Sir Francis was sorry to see such a respectable youth in such company, and directed uncle and nephew to return to their allegiance. This drew forth a spirited reply, and the Governor rode away.

Sir Francis tells of a woman whose screams came from the direction of the militia, where he quickly sought her. His intended kindness only hastened the catastrophe. “For some reason or other, probably, poor thing, because her husband, or brother, or son had just fled with the rebels, she was in a state of violent excitement, and she was addressing herself to me, and I was looking her straight in the face and listening to her with the utmost desire to understand, if possible, what she was very incoherently complaining of, when all of a sudden she gave a piercing scream. I saw her mind break, her reason burst, and no sooner were they thus relieved from the high pressure which had been giving them such excruciating pain than her countenance relaxed; then, beaming with frantic delight, her uplifted arms flew round her head, her feet jumped with joy, and she thus remained dancing before me--a raving maniac.” He had this sight, and the sinister blessing invoked on his head by Mrs. Gibson, to further cheer him.

He fought his battle, came home, and by four o’clock published his proclamation wherein, after giving much information on the definition of traitor and loyalist and bidding them leave punishment to the law, he offered a reward of £1000 to anyone who would apprehend and deliver William Lyon Mackenzie up to justice, and £500 each for Lount, Gibson, Jesse Lloyd and Silas Fletcher, with a free pardon to the one who should so deliver his man, provided he had not been guilty of murder or arson.

If the last should be punished by law, Sir Francis became outlaw by his own proclamation.

But Mackenzie, leaving behind him his carpet-bag of papers--calculated to assist in the hanging of many persons--was by that time seeking safety in flight. The “rolls of revolt,” and certain criminatory documents found with them, gave the address of every insurgent and incriminated many persons hitherto unsuspected.

“So unwilling was Mackenzie,” says one eye-witness, “to leave the field of battle, and so hot the chase after him, that he distanced the enemy’s horsemen only thirty or forty yards by his superior knowledge of the country, and reached Colonel Lount and his friends on the retreat just in time to save his neck.” He not only saved his own neck, but left behind him a directory in that padlocked carpet-bag to expedite the search for those whom he had deserted. Small wonder that many women cursed him as the cause of all their domestic unhappiness.

Standing by the belt of wood occupied by his own men, he heard the word pass that the day was lost. He ran across a ploughed field, encountering by the way a friend who inquired how things were going, and Mackenzie’s blanched face gave a direct denial to his hurried “all right.” At the side-line where young Macdougall happened to be when on his way to the seat of war, his footsteps hastened by the sound of cannonading, a horse stood saddled and bridled, evidently left there as a precaution for someone. Women and children, terrified enough at what they saw, more so at what they feared, were hurrying northward, filling the air with their cries. While Macdougall was trying to explain away their fears he saw a little man rush down a lane, mount and ride swiftly away. There was blood on the man’s hand, doubtless his own from a wound he had given himself on the Friday night, when trying to extract one of Sheriff Jarvis’ pistol bullets from the toe of a comrade. He had been so nervous that his shaking hand made him gash himself, and the cutting out had to be done by Judah Lundy. Probably the wound in the hand had reopened when he was scrambling over the intervening fences and bushes.

“Oh, God of my country! they turn now to fly-- Hark, the eagle of Liberty screams in the sky,”

says Mackenzie’s muse in one place, and before this,

“Yes, onward they come, like the mountain’s wild flood, And the lion’s dark talons are dappled in blood.”

Again he says, “I am proud of my descent from a rebel race, who held borrowed chieftains, a scrip nobility, rag money and national debt in abomination.”

He himself was now the one flying, and the lion’s talons left off dappling in blood to try to get him within their clutches, while he showed the truth of the third quotation by returning to first principles and displaying another Highland indication--petticoats. Earlier in the day a lady on her way through Toronto to Cornwall had been in the stage when he stopped it to intercept the news of Duncombe’s rising, and to seize the general contents of the mail-bags. With a pistol at her head he had possessed himself of her portmanteau, and in the contents was enabled later to disguise himself. He was described in Sir Francis’ reward for his apprehension as a “short man, wears a sandy-coloured wig, has small twinkling eyes that can look no man in the face....” At the Golden Lion, about ten miles above the city, he overtook Colonel Anthony Van Egmond, and they agreed to make at once for the Niagara frontier. But the colonel was taken and only Mackenzie escaped. In those mail bags he had been made a sorry dupe by Mr. Isaac Buchanan, who anticipated that they would be so robbed. The mail contained two decoy letters from him, representing matters in the beleaguered city in a most flourishing condition, letters which were read by Mackenzie and no doubt helped to bring about the desired result.

The encouraging terms of the proclamation made many scour the country at breakneck speed, and it is a marvel that any escape should have taken place; Mackenzie’s own recital of it sounds like the tale of the magic ring. The word was given to save themselves, and in a twinkling the woods were full of the flying and the hiding; the beacon, intended for loyalist eyes in Toronto as one of victory, told all was lost to the rebels. The hunting parties did not return empty handed. Many respectable yeomen, some Reformers but not rebels, others neither of these, were unceremoniously taken from their farms and work. These rebels by coercion, and those who had been fugitives, were bound to a strong central rope and paraded along the highway amid the hootings and jeerings of the loyal, in all to the number of sixty. To keep them company there was a party, equally mixed, who arrived in Toronto the same day from the north, with the five hundred men who reached there too late for battle. The latter were reinforced by one hundred Indians, all in paint and native splendour, but burning with as much zeal as any Briton.

The records of the whole affair show that the disaffected were always of one colour, while the African and the native were unhesitatingly and to a man for the Queen.

The last-mentioned party, in their march, could see the flames from Montgomery’s and thought the city was on fire. They were met by many flying northward from there, who in a twinkling changed their politics and their route and returned to town among the guards over those unhappy ones who had been made look like a string of trout. Powder was taken from stores; cake-baking and bacon-frying were made the business of every house passed; they carried the usual medley of gun, pike and rusty sword; and each man, to distinguish him from his fellow-man who was prisoner, wore a pink ribbon on his arm.

Naturally, there was renewed sensation when the guards and prisoners marched to the gaol; sensation greater still when Dr. Morrison and three others, who were exceptionally important, were added, their march preceded by a loaded cannon pointed towards them. A concourse of citizens, anxious to see the whole event, followed. Happily a farmer, detained in town by the impressment of his horses and waggon in Government service, and who knew the city well, left the crowd and reached the northern gate of the market in time to perceive a gunner, with a lighted portfire in his hand, standing by a cannon which was loaded with grape. Thinking the approaching crowd was a body of rebels the gunner was about to apply his light, when the farmer, with great presence of mind, stopped him. Had the piece been fired more lives would have been thus sacrificed than were lost during the whole winter.

One of the prisoners was now lying in hospital at the point of death from a grape-shot wound, and a small detachment under Captain Gamble was detailed to take a party of other prisoners from the gaol, to be led before him for recognition. Among them was Colonel Van Egmond. The dying man lay on his bed propped up with pillows, his mangled shoulder and arm slightly covered, his ghastly face telling his moments were numbered. It was night-time, and lights were held at the head and foot of the bed as his fellows were slowly marched before him. Some he knew, replied to questions, and mentioned them by name. When Van Egmond’s turn came, he must have intentionally touched the man’s foot for when the usual question was put, he said: “Why do you push my foot, Colonel Van Egmond? I am a dying man; I cannot die with a lie in my mouth. You were with us, and were to have commanded us at Montgomery’s tavern, but you did not arrive in time.”

It was a weird scene. The man died that night, and was followed by the Colonel himself, whose years could not endure the dampness and many other horrors of his cell, where the temperature was arctic. Inflammatory rheumatism and a complication of maladies brought him to a cot in the same hospital, where, with some of his unhappy companions, he closed his life.

* * * * *

The farce of rebellion, so far as Toronto was concerned, had been played; but the tragedy was to follow. Of the two men who had pitted themselves against each other, and who have left page upon page of their mutual opinions--let there be gall enough in the ink, though thou write with a goose pen, no matter--one was completely victorious, one completely vanquished. The progress of the first was attended with enthusiastic cheers; that of the other by hunger, cold, fatigue, and by much sympathy, which meant death to those showing it. Christmas Day of ’37, the year “of one thousand eight hundred and freeze-to-death,” saw the apostles of the “sacred dogma of equality” of either province, fugitive; and even Sir Francis himself recorded of the season, “I cannot deny that the winter of the past year was politically as well as physically severer than I expected.” “Several times,” he says, “while my mind was warmly occupied in writing my despatches, I found my pen full of a lump of stuff that appeared to be honey, but which proved to be frozen ink.” Sir Francis flatters the Canadian climate. Beautiful, vivifying, transforming as it is, it had no power to turn the gall in that compound to honey. He looked upon himself as the eminent man who makes enemies of all the bad men whose schemes he would not countenance; others looked upon him as having done more to alienate those whom he was sent to govern than any other person or set of persons. “If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-bred Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth who would dare insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him Francis Bond Head.”

When Sir Francis first arrived he was informed that his chief duty was to sit very still in a large scarlet chair and keep his hat on. The first was easy, but the second was repugnant to his feelings; and thinking the dignity of the head would lose nothing by being divided from the hat, he meditated holding the latter between his white gloved hands. His English attendants agreed with him in this idea of courtesy. But he quailed beneath the reproof of a wordless stare from a Canadian who thought this a bid to democracy; “What,” said the look, “what! to purchase five minutes’ loathsome popularity will you barter one of the few remaining prerogatives of the British crown?” And so he wore his hat.

Of deceptive stature, the governor’s presence did not tally with his militia register. He owed much to a wonderful personal magnetism; old and young alike loved him--when they did not hate him. Seated in that chair he is described by an eye-witness on his first appearance in it: “Although too small to fill it, his shoulders and the poise of his head did much to counterbalance the lack of nether proportions; his feet, unable to reach the floor, were not allowed to dangle, but were thrust out stiffly in front and kept in that position, apparently without effort, during the opening. One of two Americans, in the space near him reserved for visitors, plucked his friend’s sleeve. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is a man of determination, and will gain his point.’

“‘Why do you say so,’ said the other. ‘Because no other kind of man could or would hold his feet like that.’”