By June 16, FitzGibbon’s elite team of fifty Green Tigers was at De Cew’s. A party of Caughnawaga Natives, just recently arrived from Lower Canada under the command of Dominique Ducharme, was nearby.
Seven miles away, at the mouth of Twelve Mile Creek, Major Peter de Haren commanded two hundred men of the 104th Regiment. At Twenty Mile Creek, Colonel Cecil Bisshopp waited with a larger force, and General John Vincent with the main British force was back at Forty Mile Creek. Also on patrol in the area were William Merritt’s volunteer horsemen, the Provincial Dragoons.
In total, the British and Canadians had only 1,600 men. If they had uniforms at all, they were in tatters; some men were even without shoes. But all were ready to face any invasion.
Lieutenant Colonel Boerstler, who considered Chapin “a vain and boastful liar” and possibly a disloyal one, was not impressed with the plan of attack the man laid out for him. He dismissed him, wishing him a curt “good-day.”
Captain Chapin (he called himself “Major”) went over Boerstler’s head to Brigadier General John P. Boyd, General Dearborn’s second-in-command, and the next thing Boerstler knew he was being ordered to lead five hundred men against De Cew’s house, to capture the enemy and batter the place down.
It was a hurried operation, and Boerstler was told to leave immediately for Queenston with five hundred men and two guns. It was after 11:00 p.m. on the night of June 23. They were to stop in Queenston overnight and to go on to De Cew’s early the next morning. By leaving the fort at night they’d avoid being seen by the inhabitants. Chapin would be the guide.
The mounted troops left Fort George, riding as quickly and as silently as possible to Queenston. There they ensured that all the citizens remaining in the occupied town were inside their homes where they would be prevented from sounding any alarm. Not even a candle was to be lit inside the houses.
The main body of the army would follow behind and join the cavalry at the encampment. No fires were to be allowed overnight, and the men would sleep on their guns. The success of the mission depended on catching the British by surprise. The last thing the Americans wanted was some resident slipping past the pickets they’d posted on the roads leading out of Queenston and alerting FitzGibbon as to what was about to happen.
Little did they know that, intent on doing exactly that, Laura Secord had already left.
7
The Walk to Beaver Dams
To this day, no one knows for sure exactly how, two days prior to the overnight encampment of the American troops at Queenston, Laura Secord found out about the plan to attack De Cew’s farmhouse at Beaver Dams. She never revealed that part of the story.
“It was while the Americans had possession of the frontier, that I learned of the plans of the American commander,” Laura said, rather vaguely, in a letter she wrote forty years after the Battle of Beaver Dams.
“Living on the Frontier during the whole of my life I had frequent opportunities of knowing the moves of the American forces,” she explained in 1860, in a memorial she had prepared for the visiting Prince of Wales. “I was thus enabled to obtain important information which I deemed proper to communicate to the British commander Col. FitzGibbon, then Lt. FitzGibbon, of the 49th Regt.”
Because there were American officers billeted in her home and taking their meals there, it is quite possible that Laura would sometimes overhear their conversation. On occasion, other American officers would turn up at mealtime, and Laura would have to see that they, too, were fed.
It may even have been her husband, James, who overheard a conversation between the officers. For fear of reprisal, both he and Laura kept the truth a secret for their entire lives.
We do know that Captain Chapin was in Queenston a few days before the Battle of Beaver Dams. The Buffalo Gazette, June 29, 1813, reported, “On Saturday week (19th June) the mounted men under Major Chapin passed down to Queenston.”
Chapin’s men had been involved in two altercations, and on the last, which the report states took place on June 21, one of his corps was captured by the enemy while he was asleep. It is also known that FitzGibbon’s Green Tigers skirmished with Americans at Niagara Falls on June 20, and again on June 21 at Chippawa.
There is good reason to believe that Chapin, likely furious at losing another man to FitzGibbon, stopped off at the Secords’ to talk to the officers there. He may have told them that he had a plan to deal with the dastardly FitzGibbon, and that he had convinced Brigadier General Boyd of the efficacy of his plan.
Chapin was a big man, over six feet tall, and boastful, according to Boerstler, with a voice that carried easily beyond the walls of the dining room. Chapin knew that the plan to capture FitzGibbon and destroy his outpost was being set in motion. FitzGibbon had to be gotten rid of before they could take on the British. Being the braggart he was, Chapin wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk about it; the plan was his brainchild.
Laura had explained to Bob and Fan, the family servants, that she could not disobey the officers’ requests to provide another place at the table. The servants were to put out all the food they had and were not to forget to include the liquor. While the men were eating and drinking, according to some stories, Laura is supposed to have slipped out of the house and overheard their conversation through an open window.
One source states that earlier one of the Americans had insulted Bob, and rather than have the man suffer any more abuse, Laura had waited on the table herself. If this was the case, the officers may simply have ignored her and continued their discussion as she went about clearing their plates and refilling their glasses.
Her granddaughter, Laura Secord Clarke, daughter of Laura Ann who was born to Laura and James three years after the War of 1812, gives this version of the conversation between her grandparents after they became privy to the American information, the way she remembered her grandmother telling it.
“James, somebody ought to tell Colonel FitzGibbon they are coming.”
“Well, if I crawled there on my hands and knees, I could not get there in time,” James replied.
“Suppose I go?” was Laura’s suggestion. How could she not, knowing now what she did?
“You go, with a country in so disturbed a state? I do not think any man could get through, let alone a woman.”
“You forget, James,” said Laura, “that God will take care of me.”
However it happened that the Secords learned of the enemy’s plan of a surprise attack, or which one of them heard it first, they were in possession of a crucial piece of intelligence, and both agreed that FitzGibbon must be warned.
Like many people, Laura believed that FitzGibbon and the Indians were all that was stopping the Americans from pushing right on through the peninsula. And when that happened, it would be Loyalists like themselves who paid most heavily.
The first documentary evidence of Laura’s walk was in a petition to Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland, written by James Secord and dated February 25, 1820. James was requesting a licence to operate a stone quarry on a portion of a Queenston military reserve.
It reads, “The petition of James Secord, Senior, of the Village of Queenston, Esquire Captain in the 2nd Regiment of the Lincoln Militia, was wounded in the battle of Queenston, and twice plundered of all his moveable property … that his wife embraced an opportunity of rendering some service at the risk of her life, in going thro’ the Enemies’ Lines to communicate information to a Detachment of His Majesty’s Troops at Beaver Dams in the month of June 1813 …”
Years