South tip of Lake Michigan eastward to the Maumee River is part of Upper Canada, the BNA/USA border west of Lake Michigan is the 45th parallel (aka halfway up Green Bay off Lake Michigan) to the Mississippi. Upper Canada ends for now on the North shore of Lake Superior at the same place it did in OTL, since it's thought possible that lands west of that might be organized into their own colony once adequately settled, for administrative purposes you see...
So Canada is noticeably larger than OTL already. Then we have the reckoning of 1812-1816... but I'm seriously considering letting the Allens actually invade Canada from Vermont now. They're so similar in oligarchic operating principles to the Smith/Shepard family that they would basically be anathema to each other, and I do not think a USA that could accept the Jay Treaty would be willing to fight Britain just because one of their most troublesome states went rogue, declared independence, and then attacked the British but got defeated in return.
I'm not sure they'd want Vermont back... in which case the Canadians would absolutely take it over. This would then cause the New Englanders, already against the war from the beginning, to split off during the massive beating of 1812-1816.
That would be great for Canada when it eventually takes them in almost 200 years later against American aggression, but would screw the USA over so hard Canada might not even actually have the impetus needed to unite.
I'm not sure they'd want Vermont back... in which case the Canadians would absolutely take it over. This would then cause the New Englanders, already against the war from the beginning, to split off during the massive beating of 1812-1816.
1) On SV, you can select a part of the text, and it'll give you the option of "+ Quote | Reply" so you can multi-quote within a single initial post you're replying to.
2) You've just given me an epiphany on how to handle the situation. Yes, with even more pressure from the South to go to war... well, I pushed the Jay Treaty through but maybe it would be implausible given West and East Florida are still both British and great places for escaped slaves to flee to.
1) On SV, you can select a part of the text, and it'll give you the option of "+ Quote | Reply" so you can multi-quote within a single initial post you're replying to.
2) You've just given me an epiphany on how to handle the situation. Yes, with even more pressure from the South to go to war... well, I pushed the Jay Treaty through but maybe it would be implausible given West and East Florida are still both British and great places for escaped slaves to flee to.
1) I know you can multi quote I thought of 2 after I had made the post and I decided not to edit the post. 2) I also thought of something else The Fenian Brotherhood & Fenian raids into Canada
1) I know you can multi quote I thought of 2 after I had made the post and I decided not to edit the post. 2) I also thought of something else The Fenian Brotherhood & Fenian raids into Canada
1) Good to know
2) The main thing is the fact that your revelation made me change all the threadmarks.
On the subject of the Irish
It should be noted that Irish separatism really became an insatiable burning obsession for the Irish due to the Potato Famine of 1845-1852, which will start in the mid-1840s with the regulatorily impotent new Queen Victoria in charge (sorry, if I wanted to wank BRITAIN I'd have Charlotte surviving and make a Kingdom of Canada instead of a Dominion, but THIS. IS. CANADA. basically a Western British Empire affair so no, Charlotte will remain under-educated and thus willful... and eventually get herself killed by believing in the "doctors" of the time). Previous famines (i.e. 1782-1783) in Ireland weren't nearly as bad since the British shut down food exports from Ireland and thus basically force the landlords to feed the populace. But in Victoria's time Laissez-faire (AKA "this is fine" meme style economic damage control) was in fashion.
Canada as per most of its history, would be busily trying to attract immigrants by any means possible, and have a much larger initial population to absorb immigrants with than OTL 1844-1847. Meanwhile, the US is more xenophobic than OTL after the trouncing a generation ago and less Catholic-tolerant.
The SI HQ thought process in the 1840s is pretty simple: Prince Edward Island has a serious absentee landlord problem and a lot of its inhabitants are stuck farming some very marginal land while paying heavy rents to British landlords. Their main crop is the potato, and our Native friends in Indiania have been reporting severe potato crop failures in 1843 and 1844. When this reaches Europe, and it surely will with faster and faster ships these days and raw (and thus unsterilized) potatoes being carried as food, we can expect a lot of very hungry peasants who will absolutely leap at the prospect of at least 40 acres and a mule. The British Isles would be the ideal source as most people there speak English well enough, but France is acceptable, and we have a decently sized German community already (demobilized King's German Legion troops and their war brides from the Napoleonic Wars)...
...Given these notes stored at SI HQ, there arose much later some very rude conspiracy theories claiming they started the European Potato Failure of the 1840s.
I'm not quite sure if I should have a Round Two between US and Canada at some point, but if it happens it will be in the early 1850s while the Americans are high on victory over Mexico and convinced the Canadians had just brought in large numbers of extremely anti-British folks in the form of the Irish. Well, it looks like SOMEONE is looking to lose a chunk of Georgia to East Florida, and the hundreds of thousands of former slaves, driven-out Natives, mulattos, and British there... (Because I really can't take any more off, especially in the North, without making Canada clearly much more powerful than the USA come 2001 and World War Six.)
I'm not quite sure if I should have a Round Two between US and Canada at some point, but if it happens it will be in the early 1850s while the Americans are high on victory over Mexico and convinced the Canadians had just brought in large numbers of extremely anti-British folks in the form of the Irish.
I just learnt something very important by searching up the history of the Jeep and tracing its production back to Bantam, Willys and Ford.
Willys was founded in Toledo, Ohio, USA. In this timeline that's Maumee, Michigan, Canada.
And Henry Ford was born in Michigan and made Detroit prosperous.
TTL I yanked the carpet of assembly line invention from under Ford and gave it to two "blacks" (by American standards), made him no longer an American national hero, and "Fordism" is going to just be taking "Shepardism" a little further, which warrants SI propaganda trumpeting his name everywhere (to try to reduce labour-management conflicts and create markets). But I think I'm still going to have him start up one of the big car companies, mostly exporting to the US since Canadians are shaping up to be the First Bicycle Kingdom TTL (China will be the Second Bicycle Kingdom) as things are either too far apart and need trains (or later on a flight) or close enough that a bike is easier than a car to find parking for and is less easy to steal, terrorize, etc. (kind of hard to hide a bomb in a bicycle without it being really obvious), and replacing horseshit with the nauseating stench of early IC engines isn't exactly a big improvement.
...So given SI HQ is going to be mainly oriented toward tracked vehicles for military purposes, it seems possible that Henry Ford is going to pull up outside the Toronto HQ sometime in the early to mid-1930s in a soybean-based-plastic-shelled 4-wheel-drive car running on grain ethanol (doesn't knock like gasoline does, and alcohol is the Canadian gasoline additive of choice as American TEL is considered too toxic)--Oi, plant-based plastics and fuels are OTL interests of Ford's!--and submit the general design to his childhood heroes for consideration for possible deployment in Europe--he would be rich and connected enough to see Canada arming for the next war--where roads were good (true) and tanks had made trench warfare obsolete so roadbed breakup would not be too serious (not as true as he thinks).
It would certainly makes jeeps still a Ford thing. It would require VERY weak Butterfly Effect though, and be Henry Ford almost In Name Only...
TTL I yanked the carpet of assembly line invention from under Ford and gave it to two "blacks" (by American standards), made him no longer an American national hero, and "Fordism" is going to just be taking "Shepardism" a little further, which warrants SI propaganda trumpeting his name everywhere (to try to reduce labour-management conflicts and create markets). But I think I'm still going to have him start up one of the big car companies, mostly exporting to the US since Canadians are shaping up to be the First Bicycle Kingdom TTL (China will be the Second Bicycle Kingdom) and replacing horseshit with the nauseating stench of early IC engines isn't exactly as big of an improvement.
Still, Ford's credited with creating the Moving Assembly Line.
The assembly slope/rotation method depicted earlier is a way to get around the lack of a suitable engine (steam at this point in time) to drive a large enough conveyor belt. Smaller conveyor belts have already been invented TTL.
Conveyor Belt - Kate ("black", technically Mulatto)
Wooden Cargo Bicycle - Joseph (3/4-white Mulatto)
Assembly Slope/Carousel - Ellen
And later (as in, the story isn't there yet):
Wooden Cargo Tricycle - Joseph
Chain Drive Bicycle/Tricycle - Kate
Metal pipe Bicycle/Tricycle - Joseph (because if you introduce a metal point of failure like the chain, well might as well have the frame be metal too to cut down on weight and bulk.
A lot of the "genius" of the family comes from things like not feeding the kids opium to put them to sleep, not letting kids or pregnant women drink alcohol, etc.
A/N: For the record, anyone arguing the Shepards were socially radical-progressive should generally be considered delusional for very good reasons. They're EFFICIENT, which is not to be confused with "totally tsundere", toward treatment of the labour pool. Ugh, every time someone says that in their hearing, it's like telling them they half-assed Operation Sunset and the later wars.
Oh, and Simcoe's statement about equality is OTL.
OTL/TTL Populations at end of 1791: Upper Canada 14K/32K, Lower Canada 160K/180K (20K/30K Anglophone).
France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands after executing Louis XVI very early in 1793. Then they declared war on Spain during a series of setbacks in and around what would later be Belgium. Due to these setbacks, political unrest and purges began occurring in the Republic, as squabbling parties turned on one another. Universal conscription was introduced that summer, and the "Reign of Terror" or "The Terror" began shortly thereafter.
Just about the most interesting outside news of the year not associated with the French Revolution was Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie reaching the Pacific, though this news only reached Toronto years after the fact. He was first known person to complete a transcontinental crossing across northern North America, many years before the Americans would manage such a feat. Certainly, there were other important events such as the Second Partition of Poland, the opening of the Louvre, and a number of coastal descents (some quite large) by the Royal Navy to pick up French counter-Revolutionaries, but compared to mapping a path of potential future expansion that was relatively minor. These rescued folks were highly enthusiastic about monarchies and thus should help bolster Lower Canada's determination to resist should the Americans use Britain's distraction. The comparable enthusiasm toward Catholicism was highly undesirable as they were more likely to distrust SI leadership, particularly with the current faction leader bearing children out of wedlock. However, if they were put in North America then British North America might perhaps look more troublesome a prize to the United States, and they would be sure to fight hard. SI HQ would stay quiet in their regular correspondence with Governor-General Carleton on that topic unless he informed them of things himself, and merely quietly welcome the immigrants.
It wasn't much, only a few hundred people a year starting in 1793, mostly women and children, with the men enlisted in the British military, but they were still very useful and thus made very welcome in the Canadas. What got the Canadas collectively grinding their teeth was the need to import a good handful of Catholic clergymen from France to properly harangue the Lower Canadians about the values of loyalty to the British Crown. This was also intended to encourage settling further north away from the St. Lawrence, as the Church had previously blocked settling further outside their control and their flocks were too docile or cowed to push the matter. These and other events helped shape SI HQ's opinion of theocratic power, irrespective of exactly which religion, for the rest of their history.
Meanwhile, the Royal Navy seized all the French assets in the Caribbean except Haiti, where they let the slave revolt run loose. The French could have fun taking it back themselves after the war, bah! Everywhere overseas the Royal Navy was pummelling the French colonial empire, but the Levee en Masse the French enacted enabled them to field more of their population than the other powers and beat them back on land through a mix of brilliant generalship and fanaticism.
The French First Republic abolished slavery in February 1794, after Upper Canada made the world's first steps toward abolition of that odious monument to human hubris (or as later termed, the Arrogance of Men). A month and some later, the US Congress prohibited American ships from selling slaves to any country but the US, perhaps in coordination with the French? Then they laid a 60-day embargo on all shipping to and from Britain for some reason, and started building the first ships of the United States Navy. This appeared to signal that war was imminent, and if the Americans were going to try to turn the Legion of the United States on Lower Canada by a Champlain Corridor push… they would need to move the force in secret from Ohio to the Champlain Corridor and then march up it in winter. Defence Scheme Blue was amended between Simcoe and Ellen Shepard in early 1794 to account for the existence of such an elite American formation of regulars.
The suggestion was sent by ski courier to Lord Dorchester (Guy Carleton) of the suggested shift from defensive stance to proactive defence. Dorchester left some words in several of his diary entries contemplating the matter, and in his biographies was reported to have spent his spare time for several weeks hunched over a map table, conscripting his wife to give advice if he missed potential movements. Dorchester was sure the Upper Canadians were grossly over-reporting their potential rate of advance as light infantry, even given the "undisclosed means" they alluded to in the letter proposing Defence Scheme Blue. After all, a 4 to 5 miles per hour road march averaged over day and night and ready to fight at the end no matter how long the march was? If it wasn't for the prosperity of Toronto, Lakehead, Niagara Falls, Maumee and their surrounding settlements, Carleton would have found the claim insulting. As was, it still seemed absurdly optimistic, but he could shrug it off as an ideal conditions sort of thing.
Antoine Lavoisier's execution in May of 1794, once the news reached Toronto, set the tone of SI opinions toward France for the foreseeable future. Learning the author of Rights of Woman (Olympe de Gouges) had been executed the previous year did not help. If it were not for the need to appear tolerant enough to appease Lower Canada, crucial to withstanding American aggression… Well, at least the French being extracted were firmly aligned against the Terror regardless of their reasons. However, when Revolutionary France was defeated—and it surely would be eventually with how badly outnumbered it was in manpower and industrial potential—any future immigration from there should be carefully vetted until the temperament of the average Frenchman became less intolerable (Note 1). Only scientists and inventors should be easily let in, the rest should be examined carefully first.
The first use of an aircraft in battle came in late June when the French defeated the Austrians and their allies with the help of an observation balloon at the Battle of Fleurus. This led to the permanent loss of the Austrian Netherlands and the destruction of the Dutch Republic. The French in theory ended their Reign of Terror just over a month after this battle, and for the rest of the year there were a few sporadic battles which the French generally won. But those are best covered in books dedicated to the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars.
XX
Upper Canada and Periphery, 1793-1794
By early 1793 in Upper Canada, Simcoe had finally settled in and started surveying for some ambitious road-building projects. These were Yonge Street up to Lake Simcoe, Dundas Street from Toronto westward to London, Upper Canada, after discussing the road with the Haudenosaunee at the Grand River, and the Kingston Road eastward to, well, Kingston, connecting some of the paths and trails that already existed in as straight a fashion as possible, as a matter of colonial defence. The Kingston Road would be given the highest priority, as agreed between him and Ellen Shepard, who was contracted to do the job of surveying and clearing said road. Well, it was nice that they'd encouraged settlement along the shoreline then. The locals should appreciate having extra firewood or timbers cut down for them.
Simcoe had also gotten used to mingling with blacks and mulattos, and was looking around for a decent excuse to demand immediate action against slavery. Apparently, the Smiths had shot themselves in the foot on this front, since even most of the "slaves" in Upper Canada were less than extremely enthusiastic about abolition unless movement of slaves over borders was outlawed at the same time. A common bit of sarcasm in the Smith and Shepard "slave-de-la-jure" communities at this time was that the eagerness of the family to abolish slavery almost seemed vaguely insulting of their productivity at times (Note 2). Everyone on the abolitionist side was looking for a high-profile case when a slave would be sold over the border to the Americans while loudly resisting.
Chloe Cooley had been purchased from Benjamin Hardison, who lived at Fort Erie, a few months ago by Adam Vrooman. Vrooman arranged a sale to an American across the Niagara River on March 14, 1793 against her will out of fear that Simcoe would push his abolitionist agenda and make the slave worthless soon. To make the sale, he beat her, tied her up and forced her into a small boat, with the aid of two other men, and rowed across the river while she screamed. Peter Martin, a Black Loyalist, brought William Grisely, a white man who had also witnessed the abduction, to make a report to the Executive Council of Upper Canada. Others saw the incident but took no action, though a number testified as witnesses when Simcoe investigated the matter after Vrooman was briefly arrested under charges of disturbing the peace. Though some Native woodsmen were hired to try to track down Cooley for retrieval from across the river, they were unsuccessful and her fate after being sold to the Americans remains unknown (Note 3).
The colony was over one-quarter black, at least heavily brown, or mulatto, with a similar proportion of blacks in the middle class or better economic strata even if they were slaves on paper. Ellen Shepard immediately inserted herself into the role of rallying together a movement howling that letting Canadian girls be apparently kidnapped across the river was intolerable. Simcoe gave some time for the rumours to spread and more and more communities to demand action, to make it appear as if he hadn't been waiting for an excuse to push his original abolitionist plans further. This was wholly perfunctory as the large majority of freemen holding enough property to vote in Upper Canada did not own slaves and the large majority of slaves were under Smith/Shepard (i.e. absurdly—some say obscenely given the miscegenation—abolitionist) ownership. Then he gave Royal Assent to the Act Against Slavery, the full name of which was "An Act to Prevent the Furthering of Slavery and to Limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude (also known as the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada)" on July 1, 1793.
This was the first anti-slavery law in the British Empire outside Britain, passed despite a theoretical slight majority of the Legislative Assembly (the wealthiest members of the colony) owning or with relatives who owned slaves. That majority was seen as a bit of a joke in the colony given one of those members had been a slave himself—Joseph Smith was pale enough to sometimes take people off-guard by claiming mulatto ancestry instead of Hispanic—along with some other caveats. So the abolitionist power bloc was enough of a supermajority that the formal vote was filled with an air of mild amusement. It outlawed the crossing of slaves into or out of the province's borders, as the Cooley case allowed him to insert the anti-export clause. Slave sales were still allowed within the province, and there were defined three categories of persons. Adults (those over 21) held in slavery at the time of enactment would be freed on July 1, 1808, unless freed by manumission before that. Slave children aged eleven or over (i.e. to 21, the age of majority) as of July 1, 1793 who had been born to slave mothers were to be freed at age 25 and children younger than that were to be freed with their mothers. Former-masters were encouraged to employ them afterward. Persons born to free blacks would "of course" be free from birth. These categories were a concession to those members of the Assembly who raised reasonable complaints that too abrupt a shift would cause severe economic disruption in the colony.
The "slave-de-la-jour" community excitedly brought out prepared celebratory items, claiming that July 1 should be celebrated in Upper Canada as Liberation Day. Ellen Shepard talked them down from spending too much energy in a rush that year after a short time of loud public speaking periodically interrupted by cheering and applause to agreeing to first celebrate Liberation Day in 1808, when there would be "not 'not one more slave', but not one slave!" in Upper Canada. She was thoroughly unamused to find most of the hastily prepared banners and furious waving of her Red Maple Leaf on White company symbol resuming about half an hour after the public agreement. Her ex-slave in-laws had added some writing to the signs to change it from "Liberation Day" to "Pre-Liberation Day". Beginning right then and there, "Pre-Liberation Day" was celebrated throughout Upper Canada each year until 1808. Some of these banners eventually made their way into museums, and visiting them and the site of the First Headquarters is a common pilgrimage among descendants of slaves in Canada.
Ellen's response to the quick editing of the banners and such were to loudly state "You do know if we have to work on quickly throwing together more entertainment for these festivities, and the clean-up afterwards, I won't be able to get much paperwork done and free more than a few of you today, right?" There was a collective ripple of laughter in the crowd before eager hands reached out to pull her in among the group of joyous people celebrating this grand historic occasion.
There was some grumbling among the white populace over the sudden swelling over the next few months of the SI voting bloc from a few hundred people who met the property requirements to vote to many thousands. The general agreement among those who weren't aligned with the Smiths and Shepard was that they would definitely hold Simcoe to his word if the whites tried to prevent blacks from voting under the same property ownership requirements as whites. The lieutenant-governor upon arrival and seeing the very mixed and colourful welcoming ceremony had stated "The moment I assume the Government of Upper Canada under no modification will I assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy between natives of Africa, America, or Europe." Given such remarks, there was no reason to believe that personal honour would not play a part in Simcoe's decision-making. Unintentionally satisfying Governor-General (and Lord Dorchester) Guy Carleton's honour with respect to Black Loyalists had gotten that particular dynasty hugely favourable land lease terms, so Simcoe could easily excuse collaborating with them to push his agenda. Who would be using who was far from obvious.
Besides, there was some small comfort with how expensive actually paying all those de jure slaves over the years as if they were workers (even with room and board deductions) had surely been, and the costs of paying better than normal wages overall. Most of the other aristocrats/oligarchs of the region sportingly (not too many teeth were ground down to the gums) acknowledged the family's dominance of Upper Canadian affairs as the consequences of good investments, being first on the spot, and having a healthy amount of luck. Complaining too much would just push the still-growing (even after the Smiths/Shepards freed all their "slaves") community of free blacks toward aligning even more with the Red Maple Leaf on White symbol of their champions. At least at present it was only a "large majority" of those many thousands of blacks and mixed-pedigree mulattos in the colony who were willing to almost blindly follow the SI lead on any given issue, instead of just about every damned one. About those mulattos… Out on the frontier, there were many more young men than women, so racial purists would be horrified shitless by what people would marry out there (Note 4).
Emily Smith is often accused of encouraging miscegenation (interracial breeding) by the slight surplus of young female slaves she got from her siblings back in the early 1770s. It certainly did seem slightly suspicious given the measures Shepard Implements went to multiple times over the next hundred years to secure marriageable-age young women for their frontier populace. Opinions vary on whether her noting her siblings just didn't want to send boys, who would grow up to be stronger physical labourers, was convenient camouflage or not.
Even before the break-up of river ice in early 1794, news came of American actions against Britain, after Britain had captured some American merchantmen carrying goods from the French West Indies (what little remained of them). The Americans had been angry for the last decade for various reasons and sensed an opportunity to wring concessions from Britain while it was locked in a struggle with France. War seemed imminent, and so the British resumed tolerating arms sales at Maumee to the Natives.
As for the supposed American "grievances" they claimed led to tensions escalating this far…
The Americans had refused to actually compensate the evicted Loyalists for their property as specified in the 1783 Peace of Paris. Therefore, Britain had continued to occupy Fort Niagara and Fort Ontario (later Oswego, New York) to remind the Americans that they should really stop violating the Treaty so blatantly the second they got what they wanted out of Britain. The boundary with Canada was vague in some places and the Americans wanted to redraw the maps (to grab more land). The Americans also wanted to cut off arms sales to the Natives despite all the sales occurring on Canadian territory and the principles of sovereignty. They also wanted to end the impressment of "American" sailors and wanted compensation for the circa 200 merchant ships confiscated for trading with France since the War of the First Coalition began, and for the British West Indies to be reopened to American trade.
These demands were all quite nonsensical and unreasonable, but understandable as a matter of Americans looking out for their own national interest. The Royal Navy desertion rate was high enough that without being allowed to recapture the sailors from trying to defect to American ships, they could not continue the war. And if the Americans would not follow the 1783 treaty properly then they should not be surprised that Britain was upset by the flagrant violation of the stupidly generous terms given to the US at that time. As for the West Indies trade… well perhaps the Americans should not embargo the British if they did not want their merchantmen barred from the BRITISH West Indies?
Then there was by far the most ludicrous of the American claims. The American South demanded compensation for Loyalist-owned slaves who were taken to Canada, the Floridas, or the West Indies by their masters. Apparently, to the Southerners, someone taking their own property with them when moving to a new home meant those who were upset at not being allowed to loot their leavings should be compensated? Well, it was quite obvious why the Americans actually made demands about the British West Indies trade… they must be completely incapable of intelligent thought!
Sadly, the Americans were able to score a major victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, scattering Native forces which had made the mistake of attempting to confront them in a field battle. Irregular troops such as the Natives could only have a good chance to defeat disciplined line infantry when exploiting ambush and other force multipliers, not in open battle like this! The Natives were forced to flee over the border, and the Americans razed quite a lot of nearby Native cropland, including a short incursion into Canada over the ill-defined and porous border. Due to instructions to appease the Americans, Simcoe did not object, as the border was just a line on the map with no clear delineation. News of this defeat of the Northwest Confederacy brought about the signing of the Jay Treaty later in 1794.
In the Jay Treaty, several lesser issues were sent to arbitration, one of the first uses of that concept in modern diplomacy. Most of these issues were resolved favouring the United States over the following years, most likely as Britain was occupied fighting France and thus did not press its points much. Britain paid a large amount for damages to American shipping, and received a relatively small sum for unpaid pre-1775 debts. The British also agreed to vacate Fort au Fer and Fort Dutchman's Point on Lake Champlain, Fort Oswegatchie on the St. Lawrence (briefly Ogdensburg, New York), Fort Niagara and Fort Ontario (later Oswego, New York). Most-favoured-nation trade status was exchanged, and the Americans agreed to obey British anti-French maritime policies in exchange for Britain acknowledging the Mississippi as an international waterway and limited rights to trade in the British West Indies. A joint boundary commission was also set up to establish the boundary in the northeast (which mostly favoured the Americans) between Massachusetts (later Maine), Quebec and New Brunswick.
John Jay, the American negotiator, was strongly against slavery, so he dropped the issue of compensation for slaves. This angered Southern slaveholders and made him a target of attacks by Jeffersonians. Jay was also unable to negotiate an end to the impressment of "American" sailors. It seemed the treaty wasn't entirely a matter of Britain giving things up, so in the 20th century (once they forgot their previous wars with Canada), Americans would declare that anytime after 1810 they would have chosen to go to war instead of accept such terms.
The Jay Treaty declared the right of free movement across the border of Natives, American citizens and Canadian subjects. Since the treaty was intended to be in effect for ten years, that meant Canada had at least about ten years to prepare for full-scale war if the Americans actually cared about their diplomatic reputation. Hearing about the signing of the Jay Treaty was when SI opinions about importations of French rebels took a drastic swerve toward support. Ellen wrote a pleading letter to Governor-General Carleton inquiring if the Royal Navy could pick up larger numbers of French rebels and dissidents and send them to Upper Canada in the next ten years.
Carleton also believed the Americans to be an aggressive threat which would use the treaty's years to prepare for a quick push on the Canadas, most likely toward Montreal by the Champlain Corridor. He replied that he would do what he could to expand Upper Canada's population as quickly and as anti-republican as possible, and later did some work advocating for such policies after his retirement to England, from 1796 to his death in late 1808. Still, the influx of rescued French into Upper Canada never managed to reach even three hundred people a year at the absolute peak. These were mostly women, children and elderly men as the fighting-age adult males joined the British Army in exchange for getting their families out, so the low number of arrivals wasn't much of a disappointment. Even the vastness of SI resources (by regional standards) would really have preferred not to often send their own work gangs to help the new immigrants with their farm labour and clearing their land grants on the company's own budget. Well, at least lumber and firewood were cheap due to clearing the Kingston Road, and from there on to Montreal, over the next few years. The road wasn't as wide as they would like when war came, but it was usable, and that was enough.
Thankfully, the rescued French were quite grateful for all this help, and their children assimilated well with the Anglophone-dominated communities Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe "happened" to place them in. It took a lot of effort to hide the way they were not as concentrated as they could have been, especially while keeping them within the action radii of the work gangs should they choose a land grant and trying to start a farm right away over taking up a manufacturing job in Toronto until the war with France was over. The immigrants were pieced out among Anglophone communities which had some folks with command of French. Simcoe and Ellen claimed that this was to give support to the newcomers by established communities, instead of having whole hamlets made of families with a near total lack of military age men fit for farm work.
The elders arriving were inducted to the existing groups of elders, to provide child-care services to working mothers and also to earn more money to support the younger family members while the military age men were fighting. Out on the frontier, there wasn't nearly enough manpower to not throw even more of the burden of a society's manual labour requirements onto women. So, the children had to be handled mostly by the grandparents and great-grandparents of the community.
Housewives did a huge amount of work in this era and piling even more work on them could have drastic effects on their health and reproductive output. Before the advent of the sewing machine, just mending a middle-class family's clothes took housewives many hours per week or several days devoted per month, even with a hired seamstress helping! Therefore, work hours at the factories were much shorter than normal (a single eight-hour work shift, with security and maintenance folks working three shifts of eight hours each) to leave the women with some semblance of adequate time to take care of household maintenance. In subsequent years ex post facto justification would be spat in the general direction of "the workers are going to get fat and lazy" complaints. They were contemptible things given the SI studies on worker output and/or product quality trends over time for different shift lengths. The workers simply enjoyed the unusual situation of benefitting from their bosses having a pissing contest with societal expectations.
The Catholic priests present kept their opinions mostly to themselves about the working mothers. A lot of the youngsters willing to come upriver were quite grateful to the Red Maple Leaf on White for their often-elderly parents being offered jobs to earn more money to support their households. Other Shepard Implements policies such as offering discounts on hiring out work gangs to assist refugee households without available men were also widely admired. In that light, with the children still getting proper care in the spirit of a community of grandparents and great-grandparents raising them together, getting the mothers working didn't seem so bad to the settlers. The priests were therefore mostly smart enough not to try issuing orders people would be too prone to ignoring, though in many cases some persuasion had to be applied. One of the good things about the highly defined Catholic hierarchy was that either getting an overwhelming number of the lower ranks onboard with a policy, or getting the upper ranks and some of the lower ranks, was usually enough to convince them to behave appropriately.
Even the few that grumbled did as their superiors, peers and sometimes family members "advised" and kept their stances quite soft. "Yes, father, I understand that you enjoy looking after the children, and yes, sister, I understand that you like bringing in more money for the family to afford sending my oldest nephew to a good school. May I go now?" is probably an exaggeration of some family meetings that must have occurred among the clergy members or others who weren't appreciative, but probably not by too much.
Kana Shepard was born in the early hours of Christmas Day, 1794, which gave Ellen two potential heiresses and her first winter child after having two June babies. Being a third child and second daughter herself, she was rather obligated to wait until the candidates were all grown and she was more than tired enough before actually choosing an heiress and retiring from factional leadership. Walker was not much amused at the name's obvious reference to his most common alias, but at least it didn't sound nearly as provocatively militant as Ellen's first idea of "Cannae".
XX
Archivists' Notes, Chapter 14:
1. You probably know the history of the First and Second World Wars well enough to know that this is a bad joke.
2. "Slave-de-la-jure" was a horrifying bad pun with some youngster's terrible French, intended to come out roughly something like "slave of the day" i.e. "slave of the times" symbolizing them only being technical slaves for protection against slave catchers. By this point after decades of good treatment and promotion of interracial marriages (Amy and Cato, and encouraging of a few other such relationships, where the prospective partner would be legally freed just before the wedding was to be held), they trusted the Smith/Shepard family to continue employing them and paying better than others would pay blacks even after freeing them. Somehow the term had a decent following among the slave community, most likely as a form of dark humour despite their belief that the Smiths/Shepards really did intend to free them as soon as it was safe to do so.
3. There are some odious rumour-mongering would-be slavers who accuse SI HQ of staging the whole affair. Then again, there are fools who seriously believe the Sun rises in the west, so we are not quite sure if this is malice or ignorance.
4. We should not need to explain to you exactly what SI HQ's opinion of the Mormons became after Brigham Young's statements from Journal of Discourses, vol. 10, p. 110 became known to us, namely "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so."
XX
A/N: Back from my latest suspension, which has given me a lot of time to consider the meaning of "cultural genocide". Yeah, sure, SI HQ is positively gleeful that the Mesoamerican religions with their human sacrifices are DEAD, and like the idea of wiping out cannibals ("If they see us as food, then they are existential threats"), but I don't actually need to check if SI Archives has cultural genocide advocacy.
I realized after some contemplation that I'm 100% guaranteed to portray the following as just, righteous and glorious: mass executions/imprisonments of societal leaders, large dragnet round-ups of people of certain cultural beliefs, destruction of monuments and works of art, burning of books, millions of people shoved into re-education camps, many trainloads of ordinary people sent to brief stays at extermination camps, etc. If anyone here has problems with denazification, this timeline is not for you.
In our history, denazification was done targeting about 65 million Germans (about 45 million West Germans) making it easily the largest single-targeted-group feat of cultural genocide in post-1940 western history. Desegregation and abolishing Jim Crow laws targeted white supremacists in the United States, a single group which I estimate comprise not less than 30-40 million of the 139.9 million population in 1945. That makes it the second largest single-targeted-group feat of cultural genocide in post-1940 western history. Even if you expand this to multiple-target-group efforts, it's only once you include "Soviet civilians" (which will not apply in this storyline) that the Holocaust manages to beat out denazification.
Out of cultural genocide events that generally reached their goals, Denazification and Civil Rights are by FAR the largest in recent western history. The various Maoist efforts in China of course kicks them both to the curb, and I'm calling those as "reached goals" because they DID manage to eliminate opium addiction i.e. ending the "sick man of Asia" problem, and in "women can hold up half the sky" which went a long, long way in freeing Chinese women from the Asian female stereotype (i.e. doormat). Deng's "Reformation and Opening Up" was also essentially cultural genocide by the over-sensitive definitions we use these days, but since Western history is what steered the world from at LEAST 1800 to 2020, Denazification and Civil Rights are far better known in the West.
On a less serious note, I had to check when Red Alert 2 was set and thus had to move World War Four up from 1981-1985 (replacing the first Reagan term) to a bit earlier, replacing Jimmy Carter's term with a different Democrat. It's still not all the way to 1972 (RA2 canon) i.e. Nixon's time, but it's something. Well, at least the Reaganomics fetish will make sense if he has eight years of post-war boom to run amok instead of four… I for one think stomping on Reaganomics a lot is basically cultural genocide, so this might get a bit difficult once the Morning War rolls around.
A/N: In the 19th century, the family is going to be full of geniuses compared to the average. Why? Because Walker (as far as they can tell, he's the family's patron saint/being-not-to-annoy) strictly forbids a whole slew of substances for the family, including opium syrup for babies, more-than-sampling amounts of alcohol (if you want to sell alcoholic products… knowledge is needed), etc. Also, he's an "alternative medicine practitioner" who almost never prescribes laudanum (opium extract) or a host of other substances and treatments (such as bleeding).
When some dimwit white guy, probably an American provocateur, inevitably appears to try muddling the waters in Canada on slavery being a complete evil, SI HQ is going to come down on them like a falling mountain. Nuance is likely too complicated for the masses to withstand after all.
XX
Chapter 3-15: War Warning
Global Events Affecting SI Interests, 1795-1796
The Macartney Embassy of 1792-1794 to China returned to England in 1794, and their published accounts reached SI HQ in early 1795. The Qianlong Emperor's famous reply to the request for more open trade relations was "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce."
Ellen's commentary at the family meeting to discuss the account, after everyone had read it and had time to contemplate it a bit, began with "It appears Britain will be the first major power to go to war with China. Our diplomats appear to not quite grasp that 'when in Rome, do as the Romans do' applies when establishing contact, and often even when dictating to an occupied populace. If kow-towing to the Chinese emperor could help placate them enough for the desired trade, then to put personal pride ahead of our national interest and annoy them by being obstinate is nigh treasonous. Demanding a nation's servants yield up tangible things of theirs for the sake of the nation is one thing, but if they cannot even give mere gestures from hubris… how are they serving the nation? Anyhow, Britain is likely to use some perceived insult as an excuse to attack China at some point in the future to get better trade deals."
Amy took a moment to arrange her notes, before holding up the Chinese Emperor's quote, writ rather large for emphasis "It appears that Britain has quite a good chance of prevailing if this disdain for outsider goods is any indication. If the Chinese were equal or better to what they knew of the outside world in various forms of development, they would not be so concerned and should welcome the silver and gold brought in… unless they are concerned about inflation. But that would require very centralized and effective management of trade, which is impossible at present, so they would only be able to counter or at least slow down inflation by spending silver for some foreign goods. And China's too old to not understand inflation."
Ellen nodded "Indeed, there are Chinese settled all over the East Indies, yet the Chinese do not send trade fleets to sell their much-demanded goods to other nations for gold and silver, which they use in the present day as money, much as we do. A curious thing… if they demand tribute from nearby powers, then if they are so powerful to be utterly unconcerned about others, they should demonstrate their power to more distant nations too and compel them to regularly send tribute. They are most likely not, as some ambitious rogue governor would have pulled a Cortez on nearby territories long ago, or their tributary neighbours would have gone on conquering sprees against powers further out by learning from China. By that reasoning, China right now is someone who shuts their eyes and ears to the world… which usually ends in walking into things or being run into by something that couldn't or wouldn't dodge aside, like a boar, a bull, a bear…"
"Why only animals that start with B?"
Ellen groaned at the bad joke "Really, Amy… anyhow, according to what we know China completely lacks interest in foreign goods except perhaps furs, which they wouldn't be buying directly from Canada anyhow and are laughably inappropriate for the climate in the south of the country where the imports actually enter, so there is not much demand. With how awful they likely are at maritime commerce due to their isolationist policies, it would not be cheap to ship up to their capital or regions where furs might actually be in demand. The conclusion is that we would benefit little if at all from investing in commerce with China at this point, due to the middlemen taking their own cuts of the profit." She looked around the table, and now one objected.
That decision proclaimed and agreed upon, the spring news packet discussion then moved onto the worrying news of the proclamation of the Batavian Republic, Napoleon's puppet state replacing the Dutch Republic. There was also the capture of the frozen-in Dutch Fleet at Den Helder to consider for the potential threat to Royal Navy dominance.
Later in the year, news would come of Prussia making peace with France and Sweden recognizing the French Republic as the first European monarchy to do so. These were very worrying, but if the reports of the Royal Navy handing some good beatings to the French were true then not a fatal blow to the war effort against the French fanatics. The would-be Louis XVII died, leaving his claim to Louis XVIII, though that news arrived much later in Upper Canada than the news of the Americans finally ratifying the Jay Treaty. In fact the news arrived in Toronto at about the same time as the official ratification exchanges of the Jay Treaty in early 1796. Soon after, the Second Treaty of Basel in theory ceded the eastern Spanish two-thirds of Hispaniola to France, and the Treaty of Greenville ended the "Northwest Indian War" or Ohio War.
In late 1795, such that news did not reach Canada until spring 1796, the British occupied the Cape Colony. The United States signed the Treaty of Madrid with Spain on Mississippi commerce, after getting Britain to agree to free commerce along the river in the Jay Treaty. In that year, Napoleon Bonaparte made a name for himself as an army commander in Italy. In that year, Spain lifted restrictions against neutrals trading with its colonies, acknowledging its inability to supply the colonies with goods, markets, or protection. In that year, annual British iron production reached 130,000 tons.
But by far the most important event in that year of 1796 was Edward Jenner's demonstration of the cowpox inoculation method of smallpox immunity, and his efforts to popularize this process which he called vaccination. Europe was forced to learn the Ottoman practice of variolation by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, a smallpox survivor, when she returned from Istanbul in 1721 with the embassy surgeon Charles Maitland. Maitland had inoculated Montague's then-5-year-old son in 1718, and her 4-year-old daughter was inoculated in 1721 in the presence of royal court physicians. Portraits of Montague and Maitland were among those heroic figures of history who Ellen Shepard paid respects to every New Year's. However, variolation still had a few percent fatality rate, an order of magnitude lower than natural infection and laughably small compared to the near-total infant mortality rate of smallpox, but still something. Cowpox was much less risky.
Before Edward Jenner, others had conferred immunity to smallpox before via cowpox inoculation, such as Benjamin Jetsy, of Yetminster, Dorset, England, and Jobst Bose of Gottingen, Germany. But Jenner took measures to publicize the method, to bring it to mankind at large. Though full publication and such would take several more years, by 1800 cowpox inoculation was quite popular in Britain and was spreading overseas. And so, Jenner's portrait would eventually join the list of heroes the Shepard family paid respects to.
Something else the Smith/Shepard family only learnt about in 1796 was that women's fashion among the rich in France had in the past two decades dropped to absurd levels. While showing the shoulders was still considered risqué, which was rather absurd if one went with a tube-shaped top laced or buttoned at the top and below the bust, the fashions had apparently reached a point last decade where a portrait by Joseph Duplessis of Princess Marie-Louise Thérèse of Savoy-Carignan (who was killed in 1792) clearly showed her right nipple with her left hidden by lace. If this was to withstand the French summer heat that would be one thing, but given the absurdly puffed-out hairstyle in the painting, not to mention the standard dresses and petticoats, that was not the case. It was clearly just an announcement that the woman in question would be prone to losing all her clothes with a shrug and thus did not have to do any labour, let alone manual labour.
Though necklines reached some questionable depths in the colonies, to the point where one might as well dispense with the shoulder straps and merely lace up above the breasts (which came much later in fashion), they were never quite as impractical. Colonial women were, after all, good for things other than sitting around as ornaments. However, Colonial women also tended to show wealth by affordance of fabrics, such as fichu—square or triangular neck scarves tucked into the front of the gown. It should be noted that too many layers of this, bum rolls, layered petticoats and panniers were considered vulgar, and artistic nudes were considered far less lewd in this era than mocking parodies with excessive clothing.
After all, everyone was born naked and will leave the world with nothing to their name, and therefore naked, so all concepts of lewdness in between could be reasonably described as personal sensitivities. Sure, these tended to stem from habits dictated by practicality (e.g. climate) but ideas on "proper attire" were often just showing off wealth and control by authorities (often religious). The story of American missionaries who sought to force the Hawaiian natives to wear American clothing, before they were all booted off by the British authorities, is for another century…
XX
British North America and Periphery, 1795-1796
Most of the events in Upper Canada in 1795 were reacting to news from outside, as well as encouraging growth. This included much hard work on the east-west road along the north side of Lake Ontario, the Kingston Road, which was now reasonably usable as a dirt road but could still use a lot of work. Then there was learning via newspaper that the population of Lower Canada was expected to surpass an estimated 250,000 as of the end of 1795, which was a surprise.
This was apparently due to large influxes of French royalist refugees in the past few years following a few major descents to rescue French rebels during the War in the Vendee and afterward. Unfortunately, often the Channel Fleet and their associated merchantmen showed up somewhat belatedly. For example, at Granville, of 25,000 fighting men and their tens of thousands of camp followers, only 5,000 fighting men and most of the women and children were successfully evacuated while under fire from shore artillery, with the rest standing and fighting to the bitter end to protect the evacuation. Then there were the repeated descents carrying off thousands of young women from the Vendean coast who were terrified of the colonnes infernales (infernal columns i.e. extermination squads) of general Louis Marie Turreau, troops which were under orders to target women especially for "having borne anti-revolutionary offspring".
It should be known that there were several cases of selfish cowardly clergy who would flee instead of stand and fight in defence of their people. For example, at Granville, a priest who had lost his footing on a boat grabbed hold of a pregnant woman holding a bundled-up child in her arms, and practically threw them overboard to regain his own footing. The woman and child drowned as no boats were able to get to them in time. The captain and crew of the ship the boat was heading for saw this happen, and said priest was invited to the captain's quarters for some rest since the others on the boat apparently hadn't paid enough attention to have him shot and thrown overboard, or even reported. Perhaps they had not seen the crime happening near the back of the boat clearly, but more likely they were simply too cowed into submission to call out and punish a criminal clergyman, a traitor to his faith.
Two guards were posted outside the doors of the Captain's quarters, but tragically did not notice that said priest was consumed by guilt upon having time to think of what he had done. After repeatedly punching himself in the face and elsewhere, the man got his hands on the captain's pistol and shot himself in the back of the head. During this time, the captain was conversing with one of the guards outside his door about how his eldest daughter had recently become pregnant with her second child and how his wife was expecting again.
The criminal was then buried at sea. The captain of the ship was so angry at the failure to take proper care of the guest that he punched his own desk enough times and with enough force that his knuckles broke and some some blood got on the desk. The story spread quickly enough among the sailors that on later descents, women and children were prioritized and any man trying to shove ahead in line was to be forced to the back at bayonet-point regardless of station. This was as far as the Royal Navy could order their seamen and captains in avoiding offending any evacuated royalist clergy too much and still be obeyed. The Admiralty would not even have bothered issuing such orders if they hadn't been instructed that anti-Revolutionary Catholic clergymen would hopefully be useful in Canada in firming up Lower Canada's loyalty to the crown.
Why neither Carleton nor Simcoe found the influx worth mentioning in their writing beyond the groups of French rebels who are willing to immigrate to Upper Canada shipments was curious given their friendly relations with SI HQ. Perhaps they had merely forgotten, or perhaps Carleton was dealing with the shortage of young marriageable women in Lower Canada and didn't want to have to turn down requests to send some upriver. Or perhaps it was strongly implied that to have even two hundred willing to go to Upper Canada where French and Catholicism were small minorities, there had to be many thousands of immigrants to Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. From what they could gather reasonably quickly, it seemed Carleton was considerate enough and enough of a good friend to promote settlement of the Ottawa River, the Eastern Townships, and the Gaspe Peninsula instead of pushing most of the influx upriver.
Their discretion was appreciated, since SI HQ wasn't obligated by knowledge of resource availability to ask for more unmarried young women. It would be financially irritating to have to help even more refugees meet their land clearance requirements for a few years before marriages could be arranged to local men… For those in later eras who balk at that term, we know not why Canadians seem to have picked up the American aversion to arranged marriages, since all it meant was that the partners did not meet completely by their own choices. Amy Smith's marriage for example was an arranged marriage of the consensual type, introduced and befriending her sister-in-law's cousin thanks to her brother Cato finding the man likable and brilliant. Forced marriages are an unpleasant subset, and many arranged marriages don't even realize they are arranged. For example, first meeting a future spouse at a party at a family friend's home where both parties were invited would technically be "arranged"!
The discretion of the governor-general and lieutenant governor was also appreciated due to their distaste for accursed control-freak Catholic priests. Those… beings… had prevented expansion of settlement in Lower Canada beyond easily controlled river valleys and thus constrained growth to a point where SI HQ had to live in existential terror of the Americans. A small smattering of them coming up over time at the request of more adventurous younger sons moving out to the frontier and adapting to their local reality with minor grumbles was one thing and could be accommodated with much swallowing back down of vomitus. A lump influx would be highly unwelcome in a clash of authority, as they might fail to assimilate adequately to keep their damned mouths shut about Upper Canada being de facto run by a woman. Said woman having children out of wedlock in protest of wives not being permitted to own property or make contracts would probably set their heads on fire from moral outrage… sadly not literally. They would be a lot more welcome if such an Act of God in response to excessive whining was literal, as those too foolish to obey the laws of nature (i.e. continuing to make a stand to be run over by authority) would rapidly be removed.
Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe left Upper Canada in July, 1796 due to ill health, appointing Peter Russell as his temporary replacement. Simcoe almost forgot to make extra copies of his official documents, but his wife taking Emily Smith on a visit of Government House led to the former faction leader noting a distinct lack of nearly as much paperwork as should have been present. The result was Simcoe, his family members, Russell, Emily, and Ellen working through the night copying down the files and checking them.
Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester, also left the Canadas that month to retire, leaving behind his second surviving (fourth overall, as his eldest brothers had died in battle in 1793 and 1794) son William Carleton (born 1778). Dorchester had been extremely upset at the news of his eldest sons' deaths, and since William was old enough now to live independently if need be he asked his son to stay in Canada. William was about the same age as Mary Smith (Emily's last child, born 1779), and the youngsters were on friendly terms, hopefully that would tie him down. With how the Smiths had all their children surviving infancy, hopefully getting in on whatever techniques or knowledge they used would safeguard against potential extinction of the Dorchester title or Carleton name in these wars with Revolutionary France.
William Carleton, who had had a near-fatal brush with smallpox in 1780 (his younger brother Lancelot had died of it), was amenable to his father's request to stay in Canada, relatively out of harm's way. He would go on to be one of the great advocates for cowpox inoculation in Canada once he heard of the techniques. It took a few years, some wartime experience, and news of his younger brother Charles being killed in action on HMS Phoebe in 1799 (aged 13), but eventually he and Mary decided that a relationship would suit both of them. Perhaps this prospect of a marriage of reasonably close de facto rank was part of why Carleton was so helpful throughout these years…
Guy Carleton wrote to Ellen Shepard just before his retirement that Ira Allen, from a family in Vermont who had tried to pull something like the Smiths had done, had apparently gone to Europe early in 1796 according to his sources. Carleton noted that Allen was highly unlikely to get a good reception for his ideas of a canal exporting raw materials downriver from Lake Champlain through Lower Canada, as it would directly compete with Canadian products without anyone really benefitting except giving the Americans more export revenue. Given the trouble the Royal Navy had been giving the French efforts to wipe out their rebels, Carleton suspected Allen might try to rouse up some aid from the French. If he was able to obtain military aid to press the matter one way or another, whether by seizing the Richelieu River access he needed by force, or by leading Vermont in defection to Lower Canada, it would be sure to undermine or break up the peace established by the Jay Treaty.
The Allen family had been more speculative and aggressively ambitious than the Smiths' quiet back-country development, not to mention started off with a far less absurdly huge amount of land. They had been running into various difficulties in the past few years as their political dominance of Vermont was drawing to a close due to their aggressive economic policies and not being nearly as good at retaining loyalty once people became independent of their patronage. If Vermont had been part of British North America, then the Allens could have established a back-country sphere of influence well enough. Since they had put themselves in the middle and played both sides in the American Revolution instead of declaring for the side that was actually in their business interests, the Treaty of Paris in 1783 excluded them from British North America. Such was the danger of trying to establish a back-country business empire while stuck between two warring powers, namely failing the important "back-country" criteria.
In that light, Ellen asked her in-laws to work out a solution to the problem of overly high rear wheel loading on his "two-wheelers". Kate and Joseph had recently spent some time working out how to make the simplest possible presses for fuel briquettes. The publicity stunt a while back of delivering charcoal to new French refugee households who hadn't had the time to store quite enough firewood for the winter had been wildly popular, but had been quite costly and an emergency measure to make sure no one froze to death. Scrap wood and sawdust, however, should be quite usable as fuel if they could be shaped together. However, there weren't any steam presses available on the frontier, and most available mechanical presses tended to be overly complex to be easily replicated for mass production. This project had been recently completed, and the two were mostly idle waiting for inspiration, so Ellen assigned them a new project (as opposed to the usual suggestions).
In theory the present standard model of "two-wheeler" was engineered to carry up to about 600 pounds distributed into the containers around the front wheel, the cargo deck, and the seat. There was in theory about 150 pounds theoretical safety margin in the math as wood was not as consistent a material as might be preferred, and metal was far too expensive out on the frontier with no known iron extraction close enough to make it easy to mass produce. Standard acceptance trials for the "600-pounder" involved covering a furlong (220 yards or about 200 meters/metres) on a flat dirt road with 690 pounds distributed evenly over the deck, seat/central frame, and the front cargo bins, followed by inspection for damage. For reliability purposes however this was highly, HIGHLY recommended against. The early heavy 700-pound load vehicles had been phased out for reliability reasons, as the cargo deck was too large and encouraged overloading of the rear axle, in favour of a standard vehicle carrying 600 pounds. The lighter variant carrying 400 pounds had also generally faded out as the new design was no longer as bulky as the old "700-pounder" and made a lighter, more compact variant unnecessary.
In practice the standard "two-wheeler" could only carry one man on the back and one man on the seat in military use in winter clothing and only if there wasn't much snow on the ground. Most men in this era weighed about 150 pounds, and the Militia kits were somewhere around 30-40 pounds depending on season, so in theory, the vehicle could fit two men in the back and one man on the seat in summer, with all of their kit and the pusher's kit piled around the front baskets, but theory and reality were very different things. Heavy winter equipment, or better yet the reliability concerns of long marches, increased back wheel loading to the point where only one man could sit on the back platform safely.
For reliability and logistics on long road marches, they could only have three men per vehicle. However, the men would still be able to spend up to one-third of the time on the march sleeping on the cargo deck and a bit more time dozing in the seat while strapped to the back of the seat, which should be more than enough to function adequately. If any British Regulars were to be brought along for the march, then they would only allow three men per vehicle irrespective of personal weight and distance of march. A British rifleman's kit was between twice and 2.5 times the weight of what Shepard Implements demanded of its militia troops, up to about 80 pounds, much of which was usually worn and not particularly removable.
Joseph would conduct several studies before throwing his hands up in late 1796 and deciding to pull out some of his very early documents. We should point out that his early "two-wheelers" were somewhat longer than later "velocipede" bicycles to accommodate a pusher. Sitting on the rather low seat and pushing with one's legs was thought to be impractical unless one particularly wanted one's groin crushed or to only be able to use the lower legs efficiently. A higher seat would not be a single piece with the back deck and was expected to be structurally weaker, thus the conundrum. His conclusion would be to concede that maintaining a narrow wheel base was impossible, followed by widening and dropping the cargo deck and making the vehicle three-wheeled while still comfortable enough when pushing. "Three-wheelers" would come too late to be deployed in sufficient volume for the Vermont War, were rather more taxing for a single man to move for long durations, and were much harder to assemble safely by ramp without steam engines to drive a conveyor belt. However, expanding the wheel base allowed the vehicles to be, in theory, rated for 1000 pounds (acceptance trials distributed 1100 pounds over the frame), which meant they could carry a two-wheeler and crew for repairs on the move if need be.
Joseph had many reasons for not wanting to add an actual axle early on. Encountering bumps or pits in the road with an axle resulted in the vehicle twisting to one side, unlike with a "two-wheeler" which could either easily go around or ride over the obstacle without nearly so much major deviation of the front or back as a typical two-wheeled single-axle hand cart. By dint of three contact points with the ground, the front one of which did not slide sideways very easily, the "three-wheeler" was much better than a hand cart, but it was absolutely horrid compared to a "two-wheeler" in handling rough terrain or narrow roads.
On the other hand, unlike the very first production run of "two-wheelers", which were before an avalanche of complaints about cargos being difficult to get downhill controllably from more inland farms, "three-wheelers" would start with brakes and be very responsive to them. On two-wheelers there was only the rear wheel to brake by, while a three-wheeler had two out of three wheels for brakes to work on. The leather brake pads wore down over time, but hey, it was a lot better than nothing given the many slopes of Canada. The pulley-and-lever system had been part of "two-wheeler" construction on the handlebars since the second production run, and was part of all the mass-produced vehicles. It would be adapted to the three-wheelers too.
These "three-wheelers" would enable four British Regulars to be assigned to each vehicle, presuming 80-pound kits and 170-pound men, with about a man's weight in safety margin from the rated capacity. Together with "two-wheelers" they would be crucial to Upper Canada's economy for many decades. Later improvements included when Kate finally worked out the nuances of making a continuous chain drive work without unacceptable amounts of wear. Incidentally, that probably explained why the Americans did not adopt the technology for quite a long time. Horse carts, hand carts, and later railways seemed more than adequate to them and there was presumably no need felt to adopt the mad tinkering of "negros let run too wild" (Note 1). Alternatively, they chose some other excuse for self-deluding wilful blindness, but so be it, that was great for Canada. Eventually, the terms of "bicycle" and "tricycle" would catch on for the vehicles in Europe, and British North America duly took up these terms since they meant exactly the same as the old terms anyhow. While very capable and inventive, Joseph and Kate Smith were… perhaps not particularly brilliant with naming.
While the in-laws were working on reducing the number of vehicles needed per unit of troops, or at least in allowing repairs on the march or gathering up of men from vehicles too broken down to be repaired, Ellen started organizing increased militia drilling in late 1796, after the harvest and before the snows came. If the Americans were going to use the Jay Treaty to deceive Britain into false security, then Canada needed to be prepared to fight for its existence. It was regrettable that Britain had not helped supply the Natives with enough weapons to keep the Ohio War going for longer, if the Americans were planning a betrayal so early.
Obviously, SI HQ did not quite understand that the Americans were at that time not actually centralized enough to pull off any such betrayal with any chance of secrecy whatsoever. SI HQ also perhaps listened to the Natives who had been forced to flee to the "Canada West" region of Upper Canada a bit too much and allowed their own family's troubles with the Americans to affect their strategic planning. They rather overestimated how willing the Americans were to scuttle their international reputation for short-term gain.
XX
Archivists' Notes, Chapter 15:
1. The wording was a lot less polite than this.
XX
A/N: The legal fig leaf of that captain is a joke, I know. But I think it is reasonable for a family man who already greatly dislikes Catholic priests to find such an incident legitimate reason to give one justice and get him the hell off his boat.
And those vehicles are nicknamed by their load capacity, much like WWI/WWII trucks.
A/N: From 1791 to 1811 OTL, the Upper Canada population went from 10,000 to 77,000 (nearly 11% growth per year). It is my hopes that with a bigger Upper Canada including OTL Michigan (thus attracting more immigrants and with more families there for longer which means more children per family per time), 32,000 to 55,000 (estimated) from the end of 1791 to mid-1797 is not implausible. If it had been the same growth rate as OTL we'd be looking at 53K by end-1796, but it could be massaged to be a bit higher with more and better land available, better infrastructure… and a reputation for unusually good health outcomes.
This chapter has been helped by zoufii of SB for two editing cycles (updated).
XX
Act 4: Defence Scheme Green
Chapter 4-16: Maple Leaf and Olive Branch
Global Affairs of Interest to SI HQ, Early-Mid 1797
In the spring of 1797, Toronto received notice that Napoleon had defeated the Italian states and the Holy Roman Empire early that year, conquering Venice and ending the 1,100-year independence of the Serene Republic of Venice. The Venetian Ghetto was thrown open and the Jews emancipated (Note 1). Napoleon's later policies would have the same pattern of tolerance toward Jews, though this was later often argued as attempting to assimilate the Jews and remove them as a group, due to some of his letters speaking of "Jewish activities". Historians should notice that he specified money-lending as a problem, that other rulers who prosecuted nasty creditors are generally seen as wise and caring, and that he still liberated them from de facto imprisonment!
In the same news packet, the British government finally registered that King Kamehameha of Hawaii had sworn vassalage to Britain when visited by George Vancouver in 1794. This was quite a head-scratcher as it had been over a year since Vancouver's return to Britain in September 1795, and Hawaii ought to be and ideal Central Pacific base for the Royal Navy. The British government planned to send a resident and some associated staff in order to improve relations with the Hawaiians, but could do little more until the end of these wars with the French. It might take a while to do even that, as the (First) Coalition had done rather poorly.
However, all this was not even worth a wooden shilling to Torontonians compared to a warning that armed conflict could be imminent in British North America. The American ship Olive Branch, carrying an uncertain number of French muskets (estimated to be not less than 12,000) and cannon (not less than 15), had been chartered by Ira Allen of Vermont and sailed for Canada on November 11, 1796. The Royal Navy had failed to intercept her, but the British government claimed to the leaders of British North America that Allen had obtained 20,000 muskets and bayonets, plus 24 four-pounder guns, from the French. The discrepancy between those numbers and the Navy's cargo estimates was because the ship in question seemed too small to accommodate all the weapons Allen was believed to have bought.
The news was carried by ship to Halifax, then on to Quebec by horse and ski, and from there on upriver to Toronto. Ellen Shepard and her family members agreed that Ira Allen of Vermont was very likely plotting an invasion of Lower Canada, and further discussed the provisions for a defensive plan with acting lieutenant-governor Peter Russell. If Vermont actually managed to muster even half of the men the number of muskets purchased suggested, the British Army would be unable to deploy enough men to Lower Canada in the near future to repel the invasion.
The British Army regarded the conclusion of a Vermonter Invasion as too unlikely to gamble on with the great problem of the French much closer to home. Surely the Americans would not simply stand idle and let one of their states run roughshod over their diplomatic reputation, the Jay Treaty having been ratified just last year? It seemed to the Canadians that any potential campaign would be wholly up to the existing garrisons and whatever the Canadas and the Maritime colonies could muster to defend themselves.
War was coming.
XX
Upper Canada, February 1797
Ellen Shepard was for once very glad that the Canadian winter was naturally long and cold as she trudged across the front of the pockmarked snowy barrier, counting the holes. It differed from the European tradition of using a long fabric strip as a target when conducting regimental-size drills, but winter snow was free and cloth wasn't. It was also much easier to retrieve fired musket balls from the snowy piles for reuse or recycling.
Then she went back over to the hut that served as the office and armory for the shooting range, where Walker was waiting. She eventually managed to dig out her notes on battles in the American Revolution. "Would someone care to tell me" she muttered through her scarf after looking through some of the papers, "why firing into the snow target yields about fifty percent hit rate at two hundred yards and seventy-five percent at hundred-fifty, but in most actual battles, neither side broke after a single volley? Yes, there's the space between soldiers and multiple hits to single men, but even then, two good volleys should kill about half the unit and militia troops have broken from far, far less…"
"It seems you need to train the men better, or they are simply unused to shooting in winter with gloves on. Trials in Europe with Brown Bess muskets usually show about seventy-five percent hits at 175 yards, though this did not account for the spacing between troops in the enemy line."
"Huh, that's interesting… and makes the real battles even odder."
Walker then went to the fundamentals after providing important reference points. "In the times before civilization, it was very hard to stare a man, especially one capable of running away, in the eyes as you club him to death. To try to kill a man who is clearly beaten but can still move and see you act against him will spur him to fight to the death, which endangers your own life too. It is why animals, when not fighting for their lives, generally engage in ritual combat instead of actually goring each other. When the opponents are cornered and kept under pressure, the beasts in men's hearts will fight to the bitter end. Yes, I know that in melee, ancient armies could accumulate huge kill counts, but in melee it is very obvious when someone is trying to kill you, thus you must fight back. However, when standing a long way out of their reach with a weapon that seems inaccurate… men can make excuses for their instincts."
Ellen pursed her lips, then said, "You're saying most soldiers these days think of muskets as really big intimidation devices, rather than killing implements, as it distances them from perceptions of immediate mortal danger."
Walker shrugged, to tell her to keep thinking aloud and to reason it out herself.
Ellen sighed. "Hmm… reminds me of that old quote, I think it was something like 'Of every hundred men, six shouldn't even be there, ninety are to pad the numbers, three are real fighters, but that last one, he will make or break the battle.'"
The corner of Walker's mouth twitched a little for some reason, but he did not interrupt. Perhaps she had gotten the words wrong? Well, the spirit of the words was more important, and if she'd erred there, he would have made a more noticeable gesture.
Ellen continued thinking aloud: "Well, to motivate the men, we've ensured all the non-whites know that should the Americans prevail, they will take away everything from our troops and enslave their families. And the whites are told that the Americans will create excuses to claim some drop or two of non-white blood in them and drag them off too. That should give them sufficient reason to pull the trigger. But if it is instinct that freezes their fingers… that's harder to overcome. It has to be drilled out of them, and clearly we can't use live targets…"
Walker gave her the time to figure something out herself. After she explained her initial idea and he affirmed it, he noted that she had taken liberties with Heraclitus's words.
XX
Spring, 1797
Ellen soon realized her original idea of pop-up wooden targets was too costly and complex. She substituted for that idea with man-shaped bundles of straw (occasionally patched after enough damage) placed at a bit over a hundred yards. They seemed adequate for conditioning soldiers to shoot at human-shaped targets in the distance. This was improved a month later after Kate visited the range and did some shooting to maintain basic competence.
When confronted with her sister-in-law's suggestion for more sophisticated targets on the training range, Ellen realized she may have spent too much time learning theory. She should have paid more attention to training out in the woods dealing with practical reality of frontier warfare, which was very often woodland skirmishing and sudden encounters, requiring abruptly appearing and disappearing targets. Obviously, such skirmishing had caveats. In winter when uniform colours all disappeared under heavy overcoats, forming up or otherwise sufficiently organizing the battle lines was rather important for not shooting allies. However, invading or fighting in Canada in winter was… questionable. Considering these factors, Ellen agreed after Kate explained her proposed improvements.
The upgrade used ropes and pulleys to move the targets up and down behind a dirt embankment. The trench the ropes were operated through behind the embankment also offered full cover for the targets when they were supposed to be concealed. This was a mix of Ellen's initial overly complex wooden pop-up idea and the current straw men.
Still, instinct only fully ruled panicked men. Men could reason, could look around and see how their cause fared. Morale had been the most common determinant of battles since time immemorial, and was crucial on a tactical and strategic level, though less so on the logistical level. Part of morale was the need of men to know why they fought. For the non-whites, the threat of return to slavery sufficed, but for the whites, a great deal of societal engineering was needed.
The immigrants from Europe were first exposed to black men in controlled circumstances. For those who arrived late in the year, the blacks were often first remembered marching implacably on snowshoes towing sleds, delivering much-needed goods in the winter, digging paths between homes, and in general behaving as honest, hardworking folk who were well respected in their communities. Many of the former slaves Emily and later Ellen once owned were trained and installed as skilled providers of most of the essential services such as blacksmithing, carpentry, and milling. Fortunately, the black population, with a series of clandestine home visits to exhort them, were taking to heart the necessity of making white neighbours see them as fellow British settlers. This was thought necessary to ensure mustering of enough manpower to defend against American invasion, to ensure men saw each other as respected neighbours and friends, so that they could see each other as brothers in arms. It would also be a useful separator from the Americans' in ways and cultural identity.
The militiamen had a large proportion of blacks, mulattos, and Catholic immigrants from downriver. They were told that if the Americans came and won, then they or their relatives' lands would be taken, as the Americans weren't as tolerant or kindly toward their fellow man as British North America had learnt to be. The non-whites knew slavery as practiced in the Southern States, the most likely places slave-catchers would try to sell them to, would be nothing like the legal fiction that covered up Emily and Ellen's loyalty-buying ways. The entrance ritual of the SI militia was a gentle reminder of this. In theory, it was voluntary and only for anyone who had not been a slave in their life. In practice, every militiaman took part.
XX
Late April, 1797
Ellen looked down at her watch, then up at the clear spring sky. It seemed everyone would have a clear view of the ceremony and it wouldn't be interrupted by rain. She stepped up to the platform deployed on the north end of the assembly field for this Sunday's ceremonies, pulling down the brim of her helmet to ward off the glare of the morning sun from the southeast. The brown helmet was of indeterminate material as a gift from her teacher, after she started requiring brown rimmed cloth hats for combat and white hats for summer marches. Then she began the graduation speech.
"It heartens me to see the brave men of Canada stand ready to defend their homes and homelands. We have come far since the days when my father and brother landed with a few dozen others here in Toronto and began carving out our home from the lands you see around you with their own hands, following rough plans my mother and I drew up. We have come far from the days when we would have had to roll over and obey in case of American or French invasion. We have come far from the days when my family had to use nominal slavery to ensure legal protection for our people against potential slave-catchers 'accidentally' crossing the land border west of Detroit, or kidnappings disguised as selling of slaves."
"We have heard over the years that the Americans have abolished slavery in many states. Yet in the south, where the owners are foulest and the slaves most abused, there is still a growing hunger for more slaves. We know that there are slave-catchers wandering about in the North seeking excuses to grab blacks. We know that the chaos of war is an excellent time to seize loot, and that includes people. We also know that the Americans would not be pleased with blacks and Catholics having the same land grants and rights as everyone else. Our Catholic brothers, neighbours and countrymen from downriver remember the events of 1775, when the Americans occupied Montreal." She gestured to the east.
"The Americans conducted a witch-hunt and arrested many locals who were disbanded militia just trying to get on with life, then they shut down the Catholic churches over Christmas. It is no surprise! When a mortally wounded man from their so-called Boston Massacre forgave the soldiers in a deathbed statement to his surgeon, the supposed great American leader Sam Adams rejected the statement in court when he was supposed to defend the soldiers, merely for the man being Catholic. As for that Boston 'Massacre'… it began when one solider was knocked to the ground unconscious by a thrown rock from the mob, after hours of shouted abuse and hurled objects. He awakened a few moments later and fired into the crowd. I spit at the idea that wounded soldiers and other officers of the law should not be allowed to fight for their lives against rioters. Even cornered rats have the right to defend themselves!" She did not actually spit, for it would be unsanitary.
"And that's what the Americans think we will be if they decided to come and take what is ours, what must STAY ours. They think we are cornered rats to be toyed with at their leisure. They said before and still say now that taking Canada would be but a matter of marching. I look upon you today, and see that they are a gaggle of fools who are welcome to come here thinking that… after we build enough madhouses for them, which might take a while." She shrugged and gave a moment for the wave of snorts and chuckles to pass.
"We are fortunate that we have the Jay Treaty, ratified last year for a ten-year peace on paper. However, we were warned last year by Governor-General Carleton that some adventurers may try something supposedly without American government sanction. That is why our training was stepped up over the last winter. After that training, we are holding this graduation ceremony today, because I look upon you now and see men I can trust to be as good as regulars!" Ellen waved her fist to appropriate cheering from the crowd.
Then she gestured over beside the platform, where the men further back could see steam rising but little else, despite the assembly ground being on a gentle slope with the stage at the bottom. "You may have noticed the cauldron boiling the whips. They are all part of the voluntary part of the graduation ceremony. We have measures taken to prevent any infection in this ceremony, including preventing the mixing of blood from wounds which can transmit disease. That is one of the very sensible reasons modern-day cultures do not drink raw blood, the cultures that did didn't survive! So, we will aim not to draw blood, but we will boil the whips to clean them regardless. Whip handlers, show them what awaits if some slave-catcher happens to decide they have even a drop of negro blood in them and makes them disappear from the captive rosters."
The crowd of militiamen collectively leaned backwards slightly (mostly just a motion of the head) as the five men standing to Ellen's right on the platform took off their jackets as they turned their backs, revealing they were naked from the waist up under the jackets. The men ranged from very dark-skinned and obviously African, to pale, blonde and blue-eyed, but each one's back was a grotesque patchwork of whip scars.
Ellen walked past the men, hand extended to brush against each man's scars "You can see that the Southern slavers do not actually care what your skin colour is, as long as they can find an excuse to turn your life into their money. This holds too for their accursed slave-catchers. The Americans claim they want freedom…" She snorted "they mean they want the freedom to rob us of house and home, of land and living! Those of you who decide that they prefer no reminder of the lash, remember that even those of us who did nothing more than treat blacks, and perhaps Catholics, as decent neighbours are in grave danger from the baseless accusations and foul excuses for violence the Americans could employ. Those who choose to avoid the minor physical pain of five lashes, are welcome to pass here to this side of the podium for a different reminder of American barbarism." Ellen pointed at Jeremy, who smiled and waved blindly in the general direction of the crowd.
"My grandfather volunteered to come out today to get to know the faces of those men who prefer to avoid physical conflict. He will have to touch your face to remember it, because sitting out the American Revolution apparently made him a Loyalist. They took the liberty of celebrating the end of the war by dragging him and my grandmother out of their home, looting the household of all its valuables including the servants, and then tarring and feathering them with their eyes held open. Grandpa survived his wounds… Grandma did not. He volunteered today to remind himself and hopefully to show you what it means to not stand up and fight so long as you can stand. If you choose that path, men, make sure you look him in the eyes as he memorizes your face before giving you your armband!" Technically that was impossible as Jeremy only had empty eye holes where his burnt-blind and infected eyeballs had to be removed to salvage his survival.
Ellen began unbuttoning her own coat. "As a commander, I should not ask my men to do anything I would not do. Though the men are to come up in groups of five and take five mild lashes each, I will be first, and I will take five from each of the whip handlers. That is a minimum, for I would take as many as it takes to convince me they are not going easy on me… what are you doing?" Ellen really hoped that the talks she'd had with the five whip handlers beforehand meant this was the staged performance she had coaxed them into agreeing to instead of the genuine mutiny it could have been if she hadn't spoken to them beforehand. The five men who were leaving off the back of the stage stopped in place at her "noticing" them.
"Ma'am, I cannot strike a wo—" The second-darkest-skinned whip handler protested.
"DO NOT FINISH THAT SENTENCE! You know what the so-called 'rules of war' are for a city taken by storm. You should know how soldiers behave after taking a settlement even if it has simply surrendered." Ellen left the podium to walk toward where the men were standing still just behind the stage, voice rising again as she proceeded, shedding the coat to reveal a short-sleeved shirt underneath she had worn specifically for this occasion. "I might be a woman but before that I am Canadian (Note 2). Before I am a woman, I am someone who will stand and fight for my homeland. Before I am a woman, I am a commander. If our homes fall, am I not harmed? If our homeland is desecrated, am I not raped? If the enemy prevails, do I not fall?"
She pulled out her pocket knife and inflicted a shallow cut along her left palm before clenching her fist "If I am cut…" She raised the fist to let the small amount of blood ooze slowly down along her forearm as she looked at the crimson trail with an air of boredom. "do I not bleed?"
Ellen continued speaking quite loudly since she wasn't facing the crowd directly at present, and crouched down at the rear of the stage to speak to the men more personally. "And you… do you believe your mother, your sisters, your wife, and your children would be spared if the slave-catchers decide to bribe the guards of the prisoners to obtain some 'goods'? Do you know why I did not provide you men with hoods with eye holes, for anonymity? Because hoods and masks are for two types of men, those who wish to conceal themselves in some way, and cowards. Many of the former are also the latter, and I would have all present know that you are not cowards."
She turned her head toward the crowd "Know that these men understand that some orders must be followed even if they do not seem honorable, such as lying in wait to ambush a foe, or striking me on my command today!" She turned back to the five suitably chastised-looking men "Now get back up here and let us truly begin the ceremonies."
The arranged order of whip handlers was agreed to be second palest to begin with, and the most white-looking at the end to avoid ending on an inappropriate note of a non-white man striking a white woman. Unfortunately, it seemed the rehearsal at her home a week ago hadn't convinced the men to actually strike properly after Ellen unbuttoned her shirt, bundled it in her lap, and knelt facing the crowd of militiamen (Note 3).
Whoosh…
Ellen snorted. "Kana could hit harder than that!" Given the girl was less than two and a half years old this was rather rude.
WHOOSH!
"I'm not hearing the cracking of a proper whip stroke! Well, I suppose if you're worried about drawing blood with that boil-cleaned whip… let's count those together as one hit. Still, I think Beth could hit harder than that if she really tried."
Ellen maintained a calm façade for the rest of the process, though each of the men actually had to hit her at least six times since they all started off not hitting hard enough to really register. The darker-skinned ones were particularly bad about this, and loudly grumbled about hitting the woman who'd given them "good lives". Still, they owed her their respect and in this case obedience, so they ultimately did their jobs as they were instructed. The used whips were hung up on a rack to go in the cauldron, and they obtained fresh, sufficiently cooled whips from another rack.
Once they were finished, she turned around to show the men the bright red welts, then threw the shirt and jacket back on as she turned to face them. She kept her serious expression on over annoyance that the whip handlers had been so skittish and thus had taken longer than she'd have liked. She buttoned her clothes up and began speaking to the crowd again "Of course, we do not have time for everyone to take so long, so it will be a mere five lashes, administered without drawing blood and with a cleaned whip for each person, to ensure no one contracts the clap or something similarly unpleasant from blood-to-blood contact. Those who prefer not to take the lash are welcome to go to my grandfather instead for their militia armbands. I will bestow the militia armbands upon those who do take the lash. Please line up here and now if you prefer my grandfather." She pointed to that side of the area in front of the stage, to her left and their right.
No one moved. No one wanted to seem cowardly in the face of a mere five whip strokes that weren't even to draw blood. It was nothing by the standards of the day. Perhaps not even worthy of being called "lashes".
Ellen smiled inwardly, nodding to the crowd and raising her voice "Very well then. First row, advance single file starting at my right, your left." She pointed to make sure they knew which men were being addressed. "Second row, line up starting from the right, after the end of the first row passes you!"
Then she turned around to the bins of militia armbands—a few thousand armbands were all that could be afforded on the militia budget for now. Huh, it seemed since everyone was agreeable to the ceremony, Walker had decided to send the kids out after she finished setting an example for the men. It seemed Abel, Beth and Kana were to help Ellen and Jeremy hand out the armbands. A suitable gesture, to have a woman, her children, and the oldest person in the community, probably the oldest in Upper Canada, hand out the armbands to the men who had volunteered to defend their homeland. These men deserved to be saluted by the old, the young, and the womenfolk, and all three of those groups would be represented. And there were five of them, just as there were five whip handlers. Good.
Kana and Beth fussed over the first few militiamen they gave armbands to patting their heads. Then they looked at how Abel was playing a dodging game instead and started imitating him. The men apparently found this very amusing.
XX
Mary Smith and her de-facto-fiancé William Carleton were slated to lead the graduation ceremony the next time it was held, scheduled tentatively for mid-July, to silence grumblers as Ellen had done this time. Men at this point in history were still very easy to shame into action like Ellen did in the first militia graduation ceremony. Observing how superbly effective it had been at the cost of only a few minor bruises and a quickly healed cut on her palm, Ellen also began to prod at the pride of the men in her area influence in other ways.
Out on the frontier, every homesteading woman needed to know how to handle a gun. Even for urban-dwelling girls and women in a frontier region like Upper Canada, gunnery was still a good skill in case she ended up moving to the countryside at some point. To ensure knowledge in these necessary skills, Ellen had organized many years ago—when Toronto grew large enough that some city women didn't actually have or need these skills in everyday life—what amounted to a Sunday club for women to practice handling muskets at the range. They were also taught some other basic militia skills such as digging trenches, clearing brush, and some basic woodcraft. These were useful skills in normal homesteading life, especially if the men were away for some time, so the men of the community didn't see anything wrong with their wives and daughters taking some hours on some Sundays for this.
The club was also useful for socializing and learning about neighbours' work ethics, which reflected on the qualities of their children. Most of the craftsmen in the Western Lake Ontario Area were black or at least mulatto, which was a racial barrier for a lot of the newer white immigrants. However, craftsmen brought in at least a respectable family income, which made them less unpalatable. The local elites seemed favourably inclined to the non-white community for their loyalty and hard work from the first years of the settlement to this day. Therefore, it would be best to keep one's mind open and mouth shut, making any judgements only after observing for oneself. Out on the frontier the pool of marriage candidates was rather limited, especially the number of available women, so a son marrying a negro woman of decent character… well, it wasn't so terrible. And if a mulatto (or even negro) man was well-to-do and of good character (the mother's character was a good indication of the son's), then that wouldn't be the worst for a daughter either.
This club was originally unnamed besides often being called something along the lines of "the women's Sunday musketry thing" or similar. Then Ellen realized that besides teaching basic frontier skills and promoting interracial tolerance among women—the men were much easier to reach through the public sphere, via regular contact with non-white tradesmen and workers—it could also be wielded as an instrument to prompt more men to sign up for the militia.
The organization was labelled the "Upper Canada Home Defenders" in May 1797, when Ellen began closing the moral vice on the men who hadn't volunteered. A few of the white women were very disturbed when some of the ex-slaves who were in the club declared they would be happy to volunteer to supplement the militia on garrison duties to enable more men to march for the front should hostilities break out. This became known to the husbands and sons of the women by said women making note of this at home and by the rumour mill. Men who had not volunteered, but knew they were well capable of volunteering, were thus confronted with the idea that they could find themselves sitting idle at home while the wives and older daughters of their friends and fellow countrymen grimly marched off to risk life and limb for home and homeland. Such a prospect was unacceptable to any man (of those times) who wasn't utterly certain he was working in an essential war industry.
Many historians marvelled at how Ellen Shepard took so long to start seriously exploiting people's pride and ego on a large scale. Sure, the setups were hideously obvious, but it would surely have been more efficient to start exploiting them earlier so the militia could be trained even more? Well, the obviousness was why they only pulled this card out in a time of crisis, the men understood full well that this was her act of throwing down the gauntlet in desperate times. It would only breed resentment if overused, but in a time where the survival of the entire group was at stake, every man worthy of manhood had to stand up and fight for their homes and families. The men of Upper Canada accepted this fact and policed themselves and other men voluntarily as a result.
Five years ago, at the end of 1791, Upper Canada had a population of about 32,000 people by the best estimates available. Now in 1797, it had probably reached a bit over 55,000, due to high immigration and a great deal of natural growth, in part due to freakishly low infant mortality in the Toronto area. However, Ellen knew the militia should not, in theory, be able to rally even a tenth of that to their banner. Many people simply lived too far afield for recruiting drives to reach, or could not spare men from the household for an extended time, let alone withstand the losses. However, the main reason by far was that the population age structure simply did not have as many fighting age males (Age 15 and up) as they'd like. Also, immigrants from the United States had made up a significant portion of the immigration in recent years. Though they had accepted swearing oaths to the British Crown, they still required some garrison forces to ensure no troubles, and most of them weren't happy to fight alongside blacks. For some, it was likely an excuse for not wanting to risk their lives, for others, well…
Hopefully calling up the "Defenders" to arrange some assistance for garrisons would shame those men into rallying to the banner when the call to arms came, be it for Defence Scheme Blue or Defence Scheme Green. The alternative of weighing down local garrison militiamen with a mob of gossips (and perhaps nagging wives) for nothing was too awful to contemplate. Even Ellen Shepard found herself with a minor mental breakdown in June 1797 following a "Defenders" drill session due to the problems of the organization.
XX
June 1797
Ellen slumped onto the cot in her less-than-decorated office and rubbed at her face with both hands. She left her hands in place as her teeth chattered together in anger at how the most recent drill session had gone, due to social tensions after the "Defenders" had been labelled under that name. She did not notice Acting Lieutenant-Governor Peter Russell taking a stiff drink in the office directly across the street from hers to try to de-traumatize himself after deciding to spend this fine Sunday afternoon dropping by to see how the women were doing in training.
A few minutes later, as Russell shuddered, poured, and knocked back a second drink, the bald man named Walker entered the office in Government House and started speaking with Russell. Ellen did not notice this. Walker left a few moments later. Russell put the bottle away, flailed his limbs around to energize himself, and sat at his desk to get back to the paperwork.
Ten minutes after entering her office, Ellen had not moved from the cot when Walker stuck his head in through her doorway. "Female social dynamics getting to you?" He pulled up the chair on the door side of her desk and seated himself.
Ellen didn't look at him, or even bother moving her hands from over her eyes. "Yes. Please explain."
"Very well… men are, and always have been, expendable in defence of the tribe as a whole, so long as there are enough replacements remaining to keep everything working. I told you this already, how a society can lose half its men every generation and keep functioning, so long as the population is large enough that the remaining men can keep things working."
Ellen hummed "Yes, you also showed me how low resources and the need for cooperative childcare mobilized most formerly hopeless men to compete with each other to provide labour to society in exchange for the opportunity to breed, and generated systems dominated by enforced monogamy…"
"Due to the tasks men were engaged in before civilization—and I mean dangerous tasks requiring teamwork, such as hunting large and dangerous animals—and due to the uncertainty of paternity regardless of how much the overwhelming majority of men might try, men generally are very good at glossing over minor differences within their tribal grouping to face the big bad unknown out in the dark." Walker said.
Ellen hummed agreement.
Walker continued, "Women are certain in maternity, which makes for much clearer ingroups and outgroups. And that is why whenever there is a long-term gathering of more than two women, it is highly likely, with the chance approaching one as the number of women passes five, for clearly delineated groups to be formed at any given moment, even if temporary and among a crowd of friends."
Ellen brushed her hands down her face. "That would explain why they're almost like a… ugh… like a knitting circle most of the time. The general efficiency level is sickening now that we've seemingly given them a task they consider not in their domain. At least it should motivate the more reluctant men moving when we call them up…" Hurrah for optimism, she supposed as she forced that bit out.
"Indeed, the impulsive youths won't be able to stand the insult to their manhood if they don't mobilize after seeing the neighbouring farms empty out but for the elderly and children. Thankfully, the harvesting season for potatoes is very long, so the crops should be fine."
"Hmm…" Ellen nodded, before her eyes shot wide open. "Ah! Speaking of impulsive young men, that's another problem I'll have to deal with: keeping syphilis, clap, and other diseases from the men after battles…"
"Why not have them deal with their needs themselves, with their own hands?" Walker seemed to be holding back laughter as he curled his hand in in front of his lap as if grabbing something, then moved it back and forth.
Ellen flushed at the implications despite having seen that particular part of the man's body quite often enough. "But the Christian denominations generally forbid self-pleasure… Ah, we are denying them the 'relief' I keep hearing about whenever I interrogate soldiers about why they visit whores. We are thus mobilizing young men to race each other for the sake of earning opportunities to relieve themselves sexually. But letting them go to whores, who are overwhelmingly likely to be disease-ridden, is far too dangerous out here. We can't afford the attrition rate of young men and later the wives of now-established men that venereal diseases would inflict. I'll have to think of an excuse to verbally whip the men into line… and win battles first to have the moral authority to have my orders followed."
Walker grinned. "That's the spirit! I used my skills—" Ellen couldn't help but give a derisive snort as his abilities certainly seemed rather more mystical than that. The astoundingly low infant mortality in Toronto, his countermeasures to typical urban problems such as cholera, and a whole host of other things certainly indicated he had some manner of knowledge the rest of the world did not, or supernatural abilities… or both. "—to keep a lid on venereal disease and most other diseases in our region, but there just isn't enough time to treat all the men to be highly resistant to venereal diseases for the duration of the campaign or longer. They might not stay in our region long enough for my less invasive treatments to take effect, and it would be inconvenient to travel excessively"
Ah, she had gotten him to outright admit more of his influence than his actions taken through educating her! "Our region's reputation for health and infant survival should have helped raise the immigration rate… thank you."
Walker waved dismissively. "I've taken what measures I could against disease for the troops, so just make sure to maintain hygiene, water, and food discipline like I taught you."
"Certainly." He got up and left, leaving Ellen to contemplate the newest test of competence her teacher had set her. Going head to head with religious ranting against masturbation was likely the hardest thing that he had tasked her to so far, unless… she smiled, yes, appealing to a more fundamental moral standpoint could work when the time came and she had gained the moral authority to order the men to… relieve themselves. "There is no greater love than to lay down your life for your fellow man." She whispered to herself in realization. Yes, this could work…
XX
In 1797, on two days' notice, out of the 55,000 inhabitants of Upper Canada, the Red Maple Leaf on White could rally together an estimated 2000 militia to march with about 300 British regulars from the "Smith Grant" (or "Western Lake Ontario Area") and eastward. Assuming it was Defence Scheme Green (Vermont) instead of Blue (US), then with four days' notice they could assembly about 4000 men total, counting heavy reinforcements from Detroit. The maximum possible mobilization should yield about 5000 men in total and required a full week's notice. However, this maximum mobilization was to date untested and calculated from reports on local mobilization drills.
However, anything over 3000 men would severely strain the logistical capacity available. For a prepared march, market villages (towns by English standards of a market, but often without a dedicated church) were visited by vanguard units riding ahead. They were to be instructed and paid to prepare enough bread (or baked potatoes cooled to a safe temperature) with whatever fillings they could for the men at such-and-such date. This was impossible to do in timely fashion in all but the largest of settlements if more than 3000 men were to march through.
At least the potatoes farmers had been strongly encouraged to plant this year were theoretically harvestable at almost any time during and even after the campaign season if necessary, so that constraint on militia availability was very loose indeed. They were also extremely hard to loot and it was well known in Europe that the humble potato was the saviour of the peasant when the armies came marching.
Jane, the third daughter of Emily and younger sister of Ellen, was deployed to the Shepard Implements office in Detroit. Maumee was too close to the potential front line in the event of Defence Scheme Blue, and having her surprised and captured there would be very bad. She was to coordinate the militia forces of the region often known in common parlance as "Canada West". In the event of Defence Scheme Green, Jane was to rally the troops available on one day's notice to march for Lakehead.
If Jane marched, her older twin Ian would stay in Detroit to rally as many additional men as possible, before marching for Lakehead five or six days after Jane. This should be enough time that all the men who would come would have arrived already.
If the men had taken the possibility of war seriously as instructed over the winter of 1796-1797, they should have made arrangements with their neighbours to share two-wheelers while many of the vehicles essential to the economy were away on campaign. Even so, the manufactory at Toronto and the workshops at Maumee and Niagara Falls were instructed to increase production to the highest practicable rate without compromises in quality, to build up a stock of vehicles to replace wartime losses and to meet the expected post-war surge of orders. In particular, the people downriver would hopefully come to accept how useful the things were. Preparations were also made over the winter for adding another assembly line to the main complex in Toronto.
The Acting Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, Peter Russell, had been invited on one training march with the SI Militia (technically the "Toronto Region Militia") in the autumn of 1796. Since Robert Prescott, the new governor-general and commander of British forces in North America, spent much of his time outside Canada, Russell instructed Ellen after that excursion to inform Russell himself immediately upon any military emergency, for quick and decisive action. Due to the relative military power of British North America and what the Americans could potentially bring to bear, Russel had to accept SI HQ's claims of the militia's strategic mobility. He notified the British Army garrison commanders in Upper Canada that standing orders from his office were to mobilize with the militia in the event of military crisis, and approved both Defence Schemes Blue and Green.
After the spring planting, the militia were put through rigorous training. Shooting man-shaped targets and long sustained marches with their vehicles were the main focus, and shovel-work on fieldworks was also practiced. Although personal experience with two-wheelers was ubiquitous in Upper Canada, sustained high speed marches on the jog were far less common in civilian life and were trained regardless.
XX
Archivists' Notes, Chapter 16:
1. "Ghetto" is a term likely descended from the Gothic "gatwo" for "street" or borghetto, the diminutive of "borgo", making it "little town"
2. This had become the accepted term for someone of the Canadas since 1791, adopted from the French Canadiens downriver.
3. In this time period, the only reliable means of feeding babies was breastfeeding. Breastfeeding in public was perfectly acceptable and common, and many period portraits which were not artistic nudes showed female nipples. As mentioned in previous chapters, impractical French dresses regularly had the neckline below the bust in the late 18th century. A woman taking off her shirt to make a point to the men would be unusual in that time, but was hardly as taboo as it would be a few decades later.
XX
A/N: At this point the family has the following members deployable for major operations (Emily and John are in remarkably good health for their age and can still campaign if needed):
Emily Smith (1733-) + John Smith
Amy Smith (1756-) + Joseph Smith (1757-)
Cato Smith (1759-) + Kate Smith (1759-)
Ellen Smith (1763-)
Greg Smith (1765-)
Ian Smith (1767-) (older twin)
Jane Smith (1767-) (younger twin)
Kyle Smith (1776-)
Mary Smith (1779-)
A/N: The median marathon finishing time in 2016 calculates to 9:59 per mile for men and 10:58 per mile for women, continuously sustained for over four hours (as a side note, on average, women outdo men in ultramarathons). I trust then that demanding six miles per hour for one hour at a time when men were all used to hard manual labour is possible even on dirt roads.
The Vermont population in 1790 was 85,425, in 1800 it was 154,465. I'm assuming an estimate of about 130 thousand in 1797.
XX
Chapter 4-17: Ellen's March
Canada, August 7, 1797
Now that her last child Mary was a grown woman, Emily Smith's days were spent as Ellen's secretary—in theory. In practice, Emily remained in charge of many affairs. Walker's insistence that breastfeeding was best for maternal recovery after childbirth, and other habits such as not sitting for long periods of time during pregnancy, meant Ellen had to take a great deal of time off work for each of her children, so her mother was still shouldering much of the burden for now. Emily also served as an additional layer of security. After all, what better bulwark against would-be assassins existed than one's own mother (Note 1)? And who better to help sort out the paperwork of the company than its foundress?
That afternoon, August 7th, the mother and daughter were reviewing some of the paperwork that Emily did not usually handle, and how things had changed since the theoretical transfer of leadership to Ellen. Ellen noticed Walker pass her office without a glance in her direction. This was unusual, as it seemed whenever he was at the headquarters, he would be interacting with her or spending his time with the children in their playroom downstairs. A few minutes later, she noticed him through her window, poking his head into the aviary on the front lawn of Government House.
The aviary handled the hastiest of messages for both the de jure leaders of Upper Canada and the de facto leaders of a significant chunk of the province. In 1791, before Simcoe arrived, the facility had been moved to across the road from the front lawn of SI HQ, while Government House was under construction. The move was a symbol of handing over communication—and therefore control of the realm—to the lieutenant-governor, though Simcoe had surpassed all expectations in pleasantness of character and the gesture proved unnecessary.
Walker began walking back to Ellen's building, slower than usual and with a minute frown of his brow. "They are coming." Ellen concluded from his behaviour.
Emily had noted Ellen's momentary distraction, but had continued reading. Now she glanced up at her daughter, then looked out the window to see Walker crossing the lawn while Ellen was reviewing the paperwork with her. "Why would Uncle Walker not be merely testing you?" Emily knew not what he was, surely not quite human with how he seemed untouched by time, but by his deeds Emily knew him well enough. Though he was a good enough person, she had learnt he was very prone to handing out sudden tests and lessons.
Ellen pursed her lips, then said "The Canadas are in a state of War Warning. Whether the French, Vermonters or Americans will actually make a move is unknown, but at so decisive a time as this, I do not believe he would test us. It would cost him too much legitimacy. I think he would not be so preoccupied this evening if he did not believe a notice of invasion should have reached us today."
Emily raised her eyebrows "He did have a habit of knowing things he should not possibly have learnt of in time, given the available speed of communications. But perhaps, if you had expected the enemy with enough precision that you can be so sure now, you should consider putting out a notice to increase readiness level to being ready on a single day's warning?"
Ellen grimaced "The economy would suffer from that, and for dubious gains at best. The enemy can only move so quickly after all. I also thought they might come a little later in the season, perhaps late August or early September. The winds vary a lot, and being noticed too early could mean serious British reinforcements. I'd hoped we could get the harvest in before we had to mobilize, or that the French might either put it off to next year or give up on a whim of the revolutionary government, but I do not think Walker would give us a false alarm at a time like this…"
"So, your prediction is solely based on Walker's actions today." Emily prodded.
Ellen shrugged "He alerted me, but the timing is reasonable. It is early enough in the campaign season for a decent siege and hopefully to prevent, if not harvesting, then certainly bringing in the crops to city granaries, even if we had planted short-season crops instead of potatoes. It is also late enough that no help should be able to arrive from Europe before the winter. Considering that, the French fleet should most likely have been sighted sometime on the fifth or so. Pigeons would reach us today, on the seventh."
Emily regarded Ellen for a moment, her lips eventually quirking up into a grimace "Ah, if Father had let Walker teach me his ways…" She had many meanings by those words, if the brief wandering of eyes over her daughter's still-youthful face was any indication. After a moment, she sighed, no point in such regrets now. "So, the bells then?"
The town bell, mounted in the bell tower on Government House, was a larger bell with a deeper tone than any of the church bells. If tolled ten or more times, it would signal for all the church bells within reach to toll continuously as rapidly as possible for three or more minutes, to signal invasion. There were other signals used in normal times for special events, but the main purpose of the bell whenever there was a war warning was to signal for mobilization.
Ellen shook her head "It is too late in the day to rally from the outer settlements safely. Marching through the night is one thing but men trickling in overnight are too vulnerable to wild animals and accidents. That means… tolling our bell twice to signal a muster drill for tomorrow… then we will toll the bells for invasion whenever we receive actual word." Technically, a single toll when a war warning was active signalled a muster drill, but just in case someone missed one of the rings, the real guideline was any number of tolls less than four.
Emily humphed "Call a muster drill after you confirm with him." If this was a test of jumpiness, well, Emily had dealt with a few of those in her time learning from the man as an adult. How she'd performed on those tests… varied.
Ellen acceded, for it would be no great delay anyhow. "Certainly, Mother. I will go now."
She found Walker in a cheery mood downstairs with the children and her father. As she approached, Abel and Beth kept their distance since they could recognize when their mother was troubled, but Kana gleefully ran over to be picked up. Ellen scooped the girl up and looked her teacher in the eyes. "Is it time?"
He grimaced for a moment, then replied, "It should have been."
Ellen turned to face her father. "Father, call a two-day-span muster drill for tomorrow morning." That meant the outer settlements would be moving out first, to minimize disruption overall. "The bell for the initial notice and riders for subsequent notice, please. Ask the Lieutenant Governor to notify all ships in harbour that they are to delay sailing for the next two days to participate in the mobilization drill."
"Ah." John Smith said simply before he left his grandchildren with their parents.
Ellen blinked in surprise at her father's departing back before the door closed. She had expected further questions.
Walker chuckled. "The lack of 'please' in the initial order told him that this was the real thing."
Ellen sighed "Well, now I have to explain to the kids…" She sat down and beckoned Abel and Beth over, seating Kana on her lap. For her, this would be the hardest part of going on campaign.
XX
Canada, August 8, 1797
The aviary worker burst into the building with the afternoon sun spilling in behind him, shouting, "Emergency pigeon from Kingston!"
Collectively, everyone reoriented toward the yell. With the war warning active from late July to late September, there had been a general sense of tension around SI HQ these past few weeks. Almost everyone spent a moment longer than they perhaps should have staring at him before moving.
The guards almost bowled the aviary worker over as they snatched the letter from him and inspected it, then rushed over to Emily. The aging woman had raced down the stairs upon hearing the shouted words from her office, which was essentially a very large antechamber to Ellen's office. She broke the wax seal and unrolled the small paper, scanning the contents before making the decisions her daughter would surely have made in her place, signing the prepared paper slips for Detroit, Maumee and Niagara Falls with "Activate Defence Scheme Green" on them and running out to the aviary. Jane and Ian would know her signature well enough, and they were the ones that mattered most.
After Emily sent off the pigeons, she went up to Ellen's office at a more sedate pace. Showing the note to her wasn't so time-critical when the troops were already mustering. The note read "French fleet sighted N of Magdalen Islands Aug 5 morn by fishing boat, est. 3500-4000 men transported."
Ellen had already laid out the relevant maps and was considering them. Her response was "You've ordered the pigeons sent west, right?"
Emily gestured toward the window with her chin. "Did that before bringing this up. I also gave Cato and Joseph notice to ride east and prepare the villages and towns to support your march. Some of the clerks ran to fetch them as soon as the message came and they were quick to arrive. Are you sure about setting out at dawn on the tenth, instead of tomorrow?"
Ellen grimaced "Marching tomorrow is probably too soon. The settlements along the way are unlikely to be able to prepare so quickly and the muster may be too few. Give the pigeons a few more minutes to make distance. Then toll the bell. I will send a pigeon to Montreal in the morning." The flight to Montreal was too long for a pigeon to cover in the remaining daylight. "I need to go inspect the three-wheelers and ensure emergency supplies are loaded up. Enjoy the—"
"You know paperwork is never enjoyable unless it's full of bad comedies… but perhaps my opinion is affected by having to raise you and your siblings at the same time."
Ellen snorted, thinking of how her mother had given the job to her with a smirk back in the day. "Hah, that's true. It wasn't tiring at all before Abel was born, but now, with the growth of both family and power over time… ugh." She shook her head. "Well, I hope we can get two thousand men in by the tenth." She paused for a moment "I wonder why the message was so late…"
"Probably the pigeon from the Magdalen Islands failed to make it to Charlottetown, if there was one at all." Emily said. "The others would have sent multiple pigeons on to ensure delivery, but I'm not sure the outpost on the Magdalen Islands even has an aviary."
Sure enough, a few minutes later, another pigeon arrived with the same message. And another later in the day.
XX
There were a number of assumptions behind Defence Scheme Green. In 1797, sailing across the Atlantic between Europe and the Canadas took anywhere from six to fourteen weeks coming west and rather less going east due to the Westerlies. The available campaign season was limited by this temporal unreliability. That meant the French would have to plan to arrive sometime in August or later to prevent British reinforcements form showing up in time. However, commencing a siege in October when the granaries and stores were freshly filled would be insane, so the window for potential conflict with Vermont and the French was quite narrow.
The Defence Scheme also assumed that the Americans would merely sit back and watch Vermont act. This seemed rational, as it would be rather problematic for the Americans' future diplomatic endeavours if they tore up the ten-year Jay Treaty only one year after ratifying it. As such, the sensible response was to sit out the fight, then simply sweep in and snatch up the pieces. They would likely take a month or two preparing to subdue the rebellious state, and then launch a late-autumn campaign to seize the area the Vermonters had taken. They could then ask for some territorial concessions from Britain in exchange for returning the region to Britain, such as a border adjustment to the northeast between Massachusetts and New Brunswick. The alternative to Britain giving concessions would be armed unpleasantness. That would be too dangerous for Britain to risk, with British North America presently sorely depleted of garrison forces and the Coalition faring poorly against the French.
Defence Scheme Green estimated that of about 130 thousand population, the Vermonters could muster up about 15 thousand fighting men for a few weeks of campaigning according to their approximate age structure. Up to about 12 thousand of this number was expected to be able to march north and reach the primary battlefields of Quebec and Montreal, with the remainder securing their supply lines. Given that French troops would be landing at Quebec City, it was estimated that about seven thousand Vermonters would head for Quebec and about five thousand may be deployed to threaten or perhaps storm Montreal, to prevent reinforcements from reaching Quebec.
It should be possible for the Upper Canada troops to defeat at least double their number of Vermonters if they either caught the invaders crossing the St. Lawrence or smashed into the invaders' flank or rear as they were storming Montreal. Therefore, based on an initial estimate of about five thousand Vermonters heading for Montreal, a total of two thousand militia plus three or four hundred regulars were recommended for the initial march.
Defence Scheme Green called for several waves of troops to march east. First would be all the men who could be mustered on two days' notice from Toronto's vicinity and all settlements to the east along the road to Montreal. The ships were to rally at Lakehead after Ellen was reminded of the prevailing winds over the lake. Sailing with more troops and supplies from Toronto to Kingston would take only a day, but sailing back west to Lakehead to pick up troops would be an unacceptable delay given the prevailing west and southwest winds. Troops marching from Detroit and beyond had to be ferried across the Detroit River, then cover some 180 miles of dirt road that had been hacked out in the past few years to reach Lakehead. The best the western troops could do was marching in the early morning of the 10th with the last stragglers of the initial muster being brought across the river to the village of Sandwich (later Windsor) at dawn. They would be expected to reach Lakehead in the afternoon of the 11th, and sail before sunset for about forty hours or so, reaching Kingston in the afternoon of the 13th. This would be unacceptably late for the first engagements at Montreal, and the entire army marching together would strain the logistics of resupplying at towns en route.
Defence Scheme Green defined the most optimistic scenario for the Canadians as expecting a Vermonter marching pace of twenty miles a day. This pace was based on the Seven Years' War where the French Army averaged as little as 12 miles a day, and the Prussian Army somewhere between 17.5 and 18 miles per day over 44 days. During the American Revolution, the American army appeared to average about 15 miles a day and the British about 20 miles a day. However, Prince Henri of Prussia had managed ninety miles in three days in the Seven Years' War, so the optimistic scenario was set at twenty miles a day for the enemy.
The distance from the Vermont border to the St. Lawrence via Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu in straight lines was just about 40 miles. If they rallied at the town of St Albans for the march, it would be 50 miles. Extra considerations in crossing the Richelieu River safely, such as doing it a little upriver from Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, would add a couple more miles. Considering mustering time, after receiving word of the French arriving at Quebec, and if they had word of the predicted arrival time of the fleet, the Vermonters should take an absolute minimum of three days to reach the St. Lawrence near Montreal, and a fourth day to attempt to scrounge up enough boats to force the river on the fifth day.
For the river to be forced so early required a failure of the Montreal garrison to confiscate as many of the boats as possible from the south bank. However, the terrible state of the defences and small garrison meant confiscating sufficient boats would be very difficult… Therefore, Governor-General Robert Prescott, who found Defence Scheme Green in the files Carleton left him and approved of it, had authorized a general plan of only confiscating boats large enough to carry cannon easily from the south shore and leave the rest. If the Vermonters crossed the border just one day after Prescott sent the message upriver, the garrison should confiscate more boats to impede them and cost them about two days to gather up enough boats to launch a thousand men across at once, instead of one day. At least, that was the plan.
Quickly defeating the Vermonter force one way or another was necessary so that the Canadians could march downriver to the decisive battle at Quebec. For this, they would leave enough boats as bait for the Vermonters to attempt to force a crossing, assuming the Vermonters crossing the border wasn't the first sign of invasion. If the Vermonters decided the crossing was impossible, it was feared they would concentrate all their forces at Quebec City. That would be far too large an army to plausibly defeat. Montreal, with its weak garrison and proximity to the Vermonter supply lines, must therefore be presented as a target of opportunity that they would have to be fools to not at least make an attempt at. And that should split the Vermonter forces into manageable portions.
As for the French ships, to transport enough troops and weapons to matter, they would be sailing "en flute," with many guns disembarked to make room for troops, and therefore they could be bottled up in the St. Lawrence by the Royal Navy sortieing from Halifax. However, pushing the French Navy out would be very difficult until the landed troops were defeated. Holding Quebec would force the French ships downriver, or they would become iced in with the winter and be easily captured. This would be ironic, as the Dutch fleet had been captured helpless at harbour some winters ago by French cavalry literally walking on water… very solid water.
There was a good question involved there though. How were the French ships planning to leave North America? Even if the entire mainland fell, there was still Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, and St. John's Island (later Prince Edward Island) where the Royal Navy could easily bottle the French ships up. It seemed the French were gambling that they would win the war in Europe and their fleet could sail home afterward.
After all the grand political considerations which made defence possible, the plan depended on the Upper Canada Militia having the strategic mobility they promised. Lieutenant-governor Peter Russell and SI HQ were therefore relieved that the last rain had been on the night of the eighth, and the dirt road east was very solid after a day of drying up from the modest precipitation. With the roads firm, they would have the mobility, given how it tended to rain only about once a week in most of Upper Canada.
XX
August 10-12, 1797
The grassy assembly field was lit by an unusual number of torches. Indeed, all of Toronto was lit up by an unusual number of lights in the early morning of August 10th, 1797. Men filled the streets of the small city, many still rubbing the sleep from their eyes as they streamed out of the homes gracious enough to have housed them overnight. Those from out of town proceeded first, giving the locals some moments to linger for their goodbyes, but by four in the morning, as the church bells slowly tolled the hour, the men had congregated in the assembly field east of Toronto in the gradually lightening nautical twilight (Note 2).
1253 wheels, 618 frames, and 1852 men stood in the assembly, many having come all the way from Lakehead and even points beyond. Ellen stood at the north end of the assembly ground, looking out over the crowd. She would have preferred there be more men, but given the sparse regional population and how the troops from the Niagara Peninsula would rally not at Toronto but at Lakehead as part of the reinforcements, it couldn't be helped.
As the church bells stopped tolling, Ellen inhaled deeply and began bellowing over the crowd "Today, we march for Montreal!" The low chatter of the men ended immediately. Even the wildlife nearby quieted briefly at the sudden loud noise. "Today, we make a stand against the Vermonters exercising their Americanness!" The Americans were a very convenient Other to build a cultural identity in contrast to. It would be laughable to outright hate them as Ellen, and most of the people here for that matter, still had plenty of relatives in the United States, but she would be a fool not to use them as a unifier of British North America. This invasion helped frame them as looming hostiles, as Ellen had planted rumours that the whole Vermont rebellion was a façade the Americans were hiding behind for a land grab. "We make a stand against their 'freedom' to come take our land, their 'freedom' to take our homes, and their 'freedom' to take everything that is ours! Today, we march to defend our right to be free from their barbarism. Any boy who wishes to go home and hide, fantasizing that the looting and burning hordes will pass him and his by, is free to walk past me and go home right now. I will give you some moments to step out of line and leave."
No one moved. The chirping of summer crickets and droning of other wildlife had resumed as the creatures of the night had checked for nearby predators and become satisfied there was no danger.
Ellen's overdone dramatic silence was broken by a loud slap as a man squashed a mosquito against his face. Most of the assembly field turned silently to look at him in varying degrees of incredulity, while he stared forward, pretending his near-reflexive movement hadn't made a sound nor left a bloody smear on his cheek.
"HA!" Ellen let out a bark of laughter to break the oppressive atmosphere. "I see that everyone obeyed orders to do their business before assembling and thus no one cares to make a bad joke. I also see that first blood of this campaign has been drawn without undue harm." The man, loudly excused by his commander for the disturbance, began rubbing the blood off his face. There was a round of snorting and chuckling before Ellen raised her voice again "Very well, mount up, everyone! We march two abreast for Kingston, and then on to Montreal! Keep pace with me!" Ellen turned and guided her three-wheeler out of the field, to be followed by a long tail of men as she proceeded at a brisk walk. It was still too dark to go any faster. They would pick up the pace soon, but not now…
Two-wheelers marched abreast and three-wheelers in single file, walking east with ten feet separating each row. This was the minimum spacing at which a walk could be considered safe, where if a vehicle broke down and suddenly ground to a halt the following vehicles could react. Because the road was wider than the column for marching comfort and to navigate corners and curves better, bypassing a disabled two-wheeler until it was repaired or a repair vehicle reached it and picked it up would be well doable even if they could not get off the road. An immovable two-wheeler was grossly unlikely, as the men could dismount and physically lift their vehicle out of the way if need be. The last vehicles were five of the seventeen three-wheelers, with the rest interspersed with the column as mobile repair platforms. Mary Smith commanded those vehicles in the rearguard, carrying additional supplies, spare parts, and some spare vehicles.
With the summer conditions, the troops were wearing only their light-coloured marching clothes. Their uniforms, kits, supplies and weapons were stowed securely in the front bins and rear side racks of the two-wheelers, under the occupied cargo decks, or on the large mostly-enclosed cargo deck of three-wheelers. The supplies were mostly water by weight, with most of the rest being salted meat, as the men would surely sweat a lot.
Ellen hoped she was walking quickly enough, since without a torch, it was too dark to easily read the speed gauge Walker had installed on her vehicle to help her keep up a standard nighttime pace of three miles an hour. As far as she could surmise, the speed gauge was likely some sort of ingenious spring-loaded mechanism that could count how many times an emplaced nub on the axle passed it in the last little while. By some means, the information was then transmitted through a wire up to the display on the handle bars of her vehicle, where it was converted into the smooth torque of an indicator pointer instead of a constant series of blips (Note 3).
As the morning twilight became bright enough to navigate the land reliably by eye, Ellen checked her watch, and saw it was about 4:25 AM. By her memory of the sunrise and sunset times for the cities in the operational area, this was about right for official civil twilight at Toronto's latitude for this time of year. With a shout of "KEEP PACE WITH ME, FULL MARCH!" over her shoulder she broke into a jog. The command was relayed down the line and successive rows of vehicles picked up the pace, using the vehicles ahead of them as a cue for their pacing. She watched the needle of the speed gauge settle around six miles an hour, as the men settled into twenty-foot spacing per row.
Despite pushing a vehicle with two other men onboard, the troops were under much less strain than typical foot soldiers of that era. Ordinary soldiers had to carry their equipment and several days' supplies on their backs, loading them down with sixty to eighty pounds of material and making each step a fight against gravity. The Canadians only needed overcome the rolling resistance of their vehicles.
Rolling resistance acted against objects rolling over a surface. For wheeled vehicles, this included the friction of axles and other components, as well as the deformation of the wheels and roadway in contact with one another. Like friction, rolling resistance is given as a multiplier applied to the normal force (on flat ground, the weight) to find the actual force resisting motion.
A 19th century stagecoach on a dirt road had a rolling resistance multiplier of about 0.0385 to 0.0730, with the latter being a road covered in soft snow. The wheels on stagecoaches were rather larger, which made for less resistance than the two-wheeler or three-wheeler had, so the rolling resistance of the troops' vehicles was estimated at about 0.08. Based on a typical vehicle total weight of about 500 pounds (including the vehicle, two riders, three men's equipment, and supplies, mostly water) each pusher had to push about 40 pounds of lateral force on flat ground. Three-wheelers, which were assigned the largest, strongest crewmen except for Ellen and Mary, were slightly heavier, perhaps requiring 50 pounds of lateral force when loaded down with spare vehicles. This modest demand for lateral force meant the pace should be sustainable even on the relatively limited uphill slopes, as the road had to be navigable by stagecoach, restricting its overall steepness. In practice, the rolling resistance was lower and the pace was no problem.
At 5:00 AM by Ellen's watch, she called—quietly this time and passed down the line—for a brief break, so the men could drink from their canteens and relieve themselves. This was also the time for a shift change to crewman two. Crewman one would now take up the role of sitter, to keep awareness of the surroundings, to hold torches if required, and to get off and help on the more difficult uphill stretches if the pace called for it.
It was in this that the obvious benefits of marching along a road relatively close to a lake manifested, as the road followed the land contours well enough and steep grades were few and far in between. They were generally preceded by the pusher having to apply the brakes during a downhill stretch into a valley. These brakes prevented any need to use the detours built into the road for wagon traffic on those steep slopes, as the Kingston Road was built with shortcuts navigable with a hand cart, and the by far predominant type of hand cart used for long road journeys in this region was the Shepard Implements two-wheeler. Each third crewman continued the role of decker, straddling the cargo deck, feet securely resting on the racks under the decks, with a belt lashing him to the headboard dividing the seat and deck, and with their arms resting in the sitter's lap to prevent falling off as they attempted to rest.
It was far from comfortable, but someone who could sleep in a horse wagon on the move would be able to get a reasonable amount of rest with two bedrolls under his rear on the deck. The third bedroll of the crew was between the seat and the sitter. In theory a sitter could shift his posture forward to a standing straddle instead of a seated straddle, and push along the ground with his feet and lower legs, but that was lacking in motive force compared to a man pushing at the handlebars, and would defeat the purpose of the doctrine, which was to maximize the amount of rest troops could get on the march and thus attain the highest possible sustained pace.
The convoy resumed moving a couple minutes after 5:00 AM at Ellen's call and quickly regained the pace of about six miles an hour. The next break was called at 6:00 AM, and the first crewmen, including Ellen, took up the role of pusher again.
In the region informally known as the Western Lake Ontario Area, streams were generally bridged. However, as the convoy went beyond Pickering, only rivers too deep to reliably ford were bridged along the Kingston Road, and the streams had to be forded (Note 4). Each fording soaked the shoes and socks of the pushers, so they stripped off their shoes and socks at the end of their shift, hanging them on the cargo racks to dry in the summer heat, pinned in place by gravity and spring clamps. Dry pairs of woolen socks and marching shoes were donned after their feet were aired out for a few minutes. The men had been taught about skin disease, and how even discounting that, wet footwear was simply inefficient on the march. The heat of summer dried wet footwear mercifully quickly, while fords deep enough to result in a serious length of wet pants were seen as more of a relief from the heat and excuse to splash themselves wet all over than a health hazard due to their rarity—all the actual rivers deeper than about a foot and a half had been bridged already.
It was also at Pickering that the convoy really began to grow. The long chain of men in light colours was very easy to follow whether at night or in daylight, and it grew at each settlement they passed, as some vehicles joined the convoy with local men answering the call to arms. The first full vehicle crew of each group joined the front of the column as local guides, but the rest joined the rear just ahead of Mary's group. If the number of volunteers wasn't divisible by three, then individual extra men would ride along as cargo in Mary's group, while pairs would alternate pusher and sitter duty until a full crew of three could be formed by adding another newcomer. This resulted in a gradual accumulation of surplus vehicles carried along by the convoy.
Doctrine said two-man crews would march with the army until the second decker rotation after their arrival. If by coincidence the crew was still not filled out by another man by then, they could ride as cargo on the three-wheelers at the rear for some rest. Lone extras would just have to ride along and wait until other new arrivals showed up or someone or something had a major malfunction. Fortunately, the pale clothing, salt intake, water availability, splashing from cool streams and frequent rest meant the men did not suffer from heat exhaustion. Unfortunately, this meant occasionally a man had to sit out for hours before a village they passed had a number of recruits not divisible by three, where new crews could be formed. There weren't that many settlements along the lakeshore at that point in time.
There were a handful of vehicular breakdowns along the way, and in some of these, single extra men proved helpful in steadying the vehicles on the mobile repair platforms during the repairs conducted by the three-wheeler crew. The decker of a three-wheeler could actually lie down on the cargo deck to rest if he so wished, but if there was a breakdown, well, he best be ready to work with the sitter of that shift on repairs. The vehicle crew usually replaced the broken-down vehicle with a spare after transferring their equipment and supplies from alongside the three-wheeler deck, if it was daytime. If the breakdown was at night, their pusher would have to help push the three-wheeler while the four other crew members worked together on the repairs in the cargo deck. The need to safely hold torches for working light meant rather more manpower was needed for a night-time repair.
No three-wheeler broke down, which was fortunate, for that would have required several men to hold the frame steady on its side across another three-wheeler's deck and seat while conducting repairs on the march. When there was nothing else to do, some of the younger and more eager newcomers actually volunteered to substitute for someone who looked like they needed a bit more rest, since the rearguard three-wheelers were heavier than most of the other vehicles. This volunteering would have been astonishing if not for how almost all of the offers had to be thanked and firmly rejected by Mary before she redirected them to another of the vehicles in her rearguard group of three-wheelers. Men would not offer help to other men unless they asked and were clearly not up to the task alone, but just a sweaty shirt and the deep, hard breathing of exertion were enough to have them offering to take on a woman's burden.
The crewmen rotated pusher duty each hour, with the decker rotating every four hours. Crewman one, then two, one, two, one, three, one, three, two, three, two, three… that crew rotation repeated itself every twelve hours. In theory they could have gone longer at night, but the shifts remained a single hour each. It was important to give the men as much rest as possible, and that meant getting two of the three crewmembers to sleep a few hours relatively uninterrupted in the night. They had trained for this, and crewman three, the pusher on duty through the night, was picked out of those men best able to nod off during the day. They would have both of their four-hour decker cycles during daylight hours, so being able to sleep in daylight was essential.
Men who were not pushing ate something as sitters, after each shift change, or during the breaks, though sleeping deckers would miss out on several of these "grab a bite" moments. Joseph and Cato's vanguard had instructed market towns (villages by size) along the way to prepare much of the food for the march, allowing the dried rations brought along to be mostly hoarded for emergency use. For the most part, the towns provided small lumps of bread or baked potatoes, usually sliced open with some salt and perhaps butter shoved in the gap, but sometimes there would be thin slices or bits of some sort of meat, cheese, or other food. In one unusual case, the troops received mashed squash wrapped in a thin bread crust. The troops picked the food up at each of these slow-downs using their relatively clean handkerchiefs and, after each time they received such hospitality, washed the food down with boiled water also picked up at the towns.
Ellen paid for the supplies at each town, which was part of why she led with a three-wheeler, to carry the funds expected to be used on the way to Kingston. This was in the days before fiat money and common usage of paper currencies (outside China), so money was heavy. Additional funds would be transferred from Mary's contingent during the longer mess-kit-worthy stops at the major towns and cities. Ellen's personal vehicle carried a bright Red Maple Leaf on White pennant flying off a pole lashed just behind the seat, and with the same symbols painted on each side. There was always business to be done, after all, and for Shepard Implements to be properly advertised and respected, prompt payments for supplies, discipline among the troops, and other dignified propriety were required.
As night fell, the pace slowed to about three miles an hour. The full moon was but three days past and the slight wisps of clouds during the day had shifted to a clear night, providing more than enough light to navigate comfortably without the need for torches after the first few hours before the moon rose. However, there were still quite a number of torches and loaded muskets in the column (for safety, torchbearers were not allowed to carry loaded muskets, and no one's muskets were cocked) in case of wild animal attacks. The night was when the first full vehicle crew among each batch of new arrivals joining the head of the column proved most useful. Ellen and most of her vanguard had travelled the Kingston Road enough times in the past to avoid obvious blunders, but the locals were still more familiar with the nuances of the terrain, especially in the eight and a half hours of night and relative darkness.
The eastern horizon grew lighter soon enough with the coming dawn of the 11th of August, and at 4:20 by Ellen's watch the convoy picked up the pace again. At 10:30 local time on the 11th, the convoy reached Kingston, a march of about 150 miles by road, covering about 115 miles in their first twenty-four hours of marching and the remaining distance in the renewed daylight. There, the 1934 men (and two women) were joined by a numerically fortuitous 299 assorted militia and regulars. There were no incomplete crews, so for now, no man would need suffer the indignity of being cargo on the three-wheelers at the back of the column.
The lunch lines were already prepared for the troops with great cauldrons of meat and potato stew, and the locals had already eaten. The soldiers fresh off the march immediately descended on the food, while their officers were called aside for a quick meeting. They were to speak with the local regulars, who were much less experienced with their vehicles and associated doctrines, then join the meal lines at or near the end. Waiting until last was intended to encourage the morale of the men by showing that the officers prioritized the army above themselves. The new men joining the column required only a quick briefing, as they generally had some experience with the vehicles, so the march had only to wait for the men to wolf down their food, wash their mess kits, and take some minutes to digest before proceeding onward. Many of the men took the time to briefly nap in the warmth of the summer sun.
Ellen found the time discrepancy between local solar noon and her watch's claims to be interesting, as it implied her watch was exceedingly precise. That was but a passing thought, something for after this conflict, perhaps, since she had proven that travel could already be done quickly enough for time standardization to be considered.
The extra vehicles carried with the convoy helped equip the regulars, as quite a number of spare vehicles had been aboard the three-wheelers to begin with, and more had been added from villages with less than full crews, but these were insufficient. Therefore, the inventory stock at the local Shepard Implements warehouse-store was raided. Thankfully, enough locals from the Kingston region brought their own vehicles or borrowed vehicles from neighbours that the inventory was not depleted. Even so, many spare vehicles would need to be brought downriver to Montreal with the troops to follow from Detroit, to efficiently surge east to Quebec City in the second stage of the campaign, after Montreal was defended. Pigeons to Toronto and Lakehead warning that the inventories should be brought along should take care of that problem. The immigrant boarding house next door to the warehouse-store in Montreal should be rather empty at this time of year, as men waiting for their land grant applications to be processed were hired out to the region's farms. Extra vehicles could be stashed there, with the military footing the bill.
At 11:30 local time, the column set out for the next hundred miles to New Johnstown (later Cornwall). The road ahead was more heavily travelled due to the dangerous rapids on the river, compared to the Kingston Road, which saw far less traffic due to the relative ease of shipping across Lake Ontario.
There had been a thin veil of cloud cover for most of the daylight hours in the past few days, but the sun had still dried out the worn dirt road. Though lacking the cadence of more disciplined troops, the jogging of over a thousand feet still threw up notable amounts of dust. Ellen noticed this problem when she looked back when off pusher duty. Behind her, the rear echelons had slowed down and become strung out along the generally downhill road amid much coughing and mumbled curses, though contrary to dramatic re-enactments, they were still well visible through the dust. The men were ordered to tie their armbands over their mouths and noses as a filter and the rear echelons were able to tighten up ranks somewhat.
Due to lack of elastic materials, the armbands were long cotton-cloth ribbons which were usually tied about the upper arm. Because one size had to fit everyone in all situations, even over thick winter clothing, the oversized ribbons were long enough to be secure around the face. Originally Ellen had wanted to use plain white ribbons to save on costs, but after purchasing the cloth she realized it would be too visible in summer, and a blood-stained bandage could be mistaken for the insignia. Her solution was to dye the rectangular cloth strips mostly brown, with the Red Maple Leaf stamped onto a undyed white square in the middle (Note 5).
Despite adequately filtering out the dust, the spacing of the ranks was still greater than the first leg of the trip because the road was mostly downhill and sometimes remarkably steep, requiring a firm application of the brakes. On the other hand, due to fewer uphill stretches than the Kingston Road, the troops could move faster overall.
Through the day and night, the column marched along the generally riverside road. On August 12th, the forward elements reached New Johnstown at about 9:30 AM local time. Ellen's watch wasn't quite agreeing with local time due to the differing longitude, so "about 9:30 AM" was what went in the records. She'd noticed the time difference at Kingston, but only at New Johnstown did she scribble down a war diary note to, at some point, consider timekeeping standardization. This was most likely because she needed to distract herself momentarily from bad news.
As she led the column into New Johnstown, a relatively dusky-skinned man joined them. "Bad news from the front."
Ellen sighed. "Report, Joseph."
Her brother-in-law complied. "The Vermonters crossed the border early on the ninth, and reached the St. Lawrence late on the eleventh. We got the report by pigeon yesterday evening."
Ellen inhaled with a hiss of irritation "They must have spies with pigeons at Quebec or Montreal. They've moved noticeably faster than expected. They should be scouting and gathering their own boats from the south shore today and could force a crossing as early as tomorrow morning…" She trailed off, then turned to the other side of things "How about our crossing of the Ottawa?"
Ah, his sister-in-law was always sharp enough to be amusing to bait with information… that was the thought behind Joseph's grin "For these past couple days, I've been organizing boats to cross the Ottawa River with. Cato rode on ahead to bolster the spirits of the Montreal garrison with physical proof of incoming reinforcements and to try to organize things over there." The further east one went, the less familiar they were with Shepard Implements' doctrines. West of Pickering, just about every family owned at least one two-wheeler as essentially a hand cart, and they were common enough in Kingston, but they were rare this far east.
Ellen nodded, then pulled over to the side as the column reached the town square where the food had been prepared for them. "MEN! EAT QUICKLY! WE MARCH IN AN HOUR!" She called to the column as they streamed into the square.
The riders dismounted after the pushers found a place to set down the parking prop of the vehicle. The sitters and deckers then hurriedly washed their hands with soap, as mandated by doctrine before eating anything that actually required the use of mess kits, and gathered their food before returning to the vehicle, leaving the pusher to then wash and obtain his own food. Any man who finished eating traipsed over to the prepared water supplies to wash their mess kits, then rinsed them clean before packing the trays up and relaxing briefly. There weren't many newcomers this time, only a few dozen men, but any reinforcements were welcome.
Meanwhile, Ellen, Joseph, and the officers were crowded around her map as Joseph informed them of the situation. "A pigeon from St. Jean-sur-Richelieu on the tenth reported an estimated six thousand Vermonters marching down their side of the river toward Montreal and more marching down the east shore of the Richelieu River. It reported that the town will have to surrender due to the sheer numerical disparity."
Ellen shrugged. "We have about twenty-four hundred men… We must catch them crossing or smash them against Montreal's defences. As planned, I suppose."
Joseph looked sceptical. "About that latter option… the walls are old and worn down, cleared altogether in some places, as you remember from your last trip downriver? We will have little time to manoeuvre into the best positions if they are storming the city, I think."
"The agreed-upon plan is for the garrison to barricade the streets and force the Vermonters to fight house to house," Ellen replied. "That will delay the attackers for at least half a day, more than enough time for us to strike from anywhere on the island into their flanks and rear." She traced the city limits on the map. "The ships in port are enough to prevent a crossing today, and perhaps even tomorrow, depending on how quickly the Vermonters can get their artillery into position." She shifted her finger to the river east of Montreal for that option, then pointed at the Lachine region, about seven miles southwest of Montreal, for the alternative. "We can intercept them here, at the most likely crossings upstream of the rapids, and smash them immediately. If they cross downstream…" The mess of islands southeast of Montreal was an option, but so were the two relative clusters of islands further north, so she put three fingers on the map, over each of those possibilities. "…Six thousand men crossing is no short task. Our sailors will make a fight of it and slow any downstream crossing enough that we can catch them to our advantage."
The Vermonters had already reached the St. Lawrence, but that meant little as the closest route from St. Jean-sur-Richelieu would run straight into the widest part of the river, downstream of the Lachine Rapids. The Vermonters likely had insufficient anti-ship firepower to quickly sink the ships that could be conscripted from Montreal's harbour. Artillery with enough range to cover a crossing anywhere along the river should not move as quickly or easily as the Vermonters appeared to have done, unless they had a surprise in store like the SI Militia's own strategic mobility. Even if the Vermonters brought light cannons, well, the ships docked in Montreal could still sell their lives dearly, unless the Vermonters took the detour upstream of the rapids, where the troops from Upper Canada would be waiting for them.
Ellen broke the pause. "If we can inflict one-quarter or greater casualties, the enemy should give up the fight as they are militia on the offensive."
One of the regular officers, a captain if Ellen was reading his insignia correctly, cleared his throat. "If we are able to ambush them well, perhaps we might gain hostages instead? The enemy would be much more hesitant to regroup for a second attack if we had lots of hostages, instead of killing a lot of them out of nowhere."
"Huh, I was thinking of opening fire when about one thousand to perhaps fifteen hundred were ashore, to inflict a bloody nose…" Ellen frowned and trailed off.
Joseph saw his sister-in-law seemed to be mulling something over. "The officer is right. If we take say… six or seven hundred hostages by surprise when they first arrive, it should be enough to convince the other Vermonters to give up most of their weapons and go home. We can allow them to retain some weapons to protect themselves against wild animals and perhaps bandits, just enough that we could not afford an opposed crossing against them. They'd know we couldn't wait to pursue later when the crossing would no longer be opposed, since we must go relieve Quebec first."
"You are right… we must conserve our own forces, but why…" Ellen winced as she realized why she'd been thinking in an overly sanguine fashion. "Ah, I've been learning about the Native cultures too much. In Native warfare, the fighters would usually retreat after only a few wounded as the tribe couldn't afford too many losses or risks. Any wounded that were left behind would usually be killed unless they were someone important or had really impressed the captors, in which case feeding them long enough to ransom them or adopt them into the tribe through induction rituals would be worthwhile. I planned on similar bloody strategies, killing Vermonters instead of capturing them. It is an error of priorities, since we'll surely demand some territorial concessions for this, and having to deal with resentful citizens would be no good for the Empire." Britain had quite enough problems to deal with.
Shifting the blame to the Native elders she sometimes conversed with to better grasp the tribal cultures of the general region, to ease negotiations slightly, was not particularly respectable. Ellen excused this shunning of her personal responsibility by citing the need to maintain appearances. Having the commander admit to thinking like a literally bloody idiot seemed unwise before enough of a personal history had accrued that it would be seen as a joke or humility.
Ellen cleared her throat after a few moments of thought. "Well, hopefully there is suitable terrain for an ambush. Joseph and Captain…" She trailed off, looking at the man who had spoken up a moment ago.
"Johnson, ma'am." The man said with a grimace, causing smiles from some of the other officers for some reason…
Ellen ignored the byplay for now "…Johnson will lead the scouting elements once we are on the Isle of Montreal."
Johnson nodded acceptance of the task.
Ellen pointed at her map again, three miles above the Lachine Rapids. "I expect the enemy will attempt a crossing here tomorrow morning, upstream of the rapids and around the church at the meeting of these two roads, where we have no armed ships to massacre the boats in the water. This is the shortest crossing that's not within a mile of the rapids, and from the map the crossing should be about twenty minutes round trip by rowboat." Her finger moved northwest from the expected landing site. "The stream flowing southwest from Lake St. Pierre, with the village of Upper La Chine to the west of its mouth, is bridged at the shoreline road, but according to the maps shallow enough to ford a little inland. We should be able to cross the bridge in darkness and prepare an ambush if the terrain is suitable, but the scouts should check the stream for fording points regardless. When the enemy has a few hundred men ashore, we can all stand up at once and intimidate them into surrendering. My militia troops will occupy the entirety of the front ranks to ensure no accidents from differences in what a single short whistle in battle means. One whistle is to aim, two whistles is to aim and cock the guns, and three is to fire a volley. Any questions, suggestions, and so on?"
There was a brief silence as the officers glanced at each other.
"Good." Ellen said decisively. "We shall cross onto the Isle of Montreal by crossing the distributaries of the Ottawa River, via Ile Perrot in the middle of the river, crossing here and here at the narrowest points." She pointed out the crossings, which no one complained about, so after a glance around the group, she started folding her map back up "Let's join the lunch lines. Newcomers, come along and we can talk more while eating." Discussing military affairs while shovelling food down her gullet might be indelicate, but there was no time for that.
The Hochelaga Archipelago was best known as the Montreal Islands. The Ottawa River flowed into the area from the northwest, and its distributaries formed the archipelago of hundreds of islands by branching in every direction from due south to north-northeast, all joining the St. Lawrence which flowed southwest to northeast.
Ile Perrot was on the southwest end of the Hochelaga Archipelago, between the two west-most distributaries of the Ottawa, with the western end of the Island of Montreal directly to its northeast. North of the island, the Ottawa widened into the Lake of Two Mountains, and to the southeast the St. Lawrence widened and slowed to form Lake Saint-Louis. Reaching the Island of Montreal directly by either lake would be workable if they had enough boats to make the entire crossing in one go, but Joseph could not possibly have found enough boats to even carry a quarter of the men at once unless he had multiple schooners hidden somewhere.
Ellen's proposed route through Ile Perrot had two crossings that totalled under half a mile. The only sane alternative was a small chain of islands sticking out into the Ottawa north of Ile Perrot and northeast of the small settlement of Vaudreuil. The island chain was broken up enough to make that at least three crossings, with a mile of open water as the final stretch to the Island of Montreal. It was also a significant detour northward and the crossing would be later in the evening as a result. Shorter crossings meant much less fatigue for the rowers, so the Ile Perrot route was by far the best choice available.
The departure was on time, but there could have been a delay if not for the convoy taking a long time to finish leaving. The small group of local regulars had to be ordered to remove some outerwear a few minutes before the column set off. This was because the local SI Office was socially remote compared to Kingston's (let alone settlements further west) and the local officers had overlooked that part of the marching doctrine while demonstrating the drills to their troops. Joseph was not amused by his own failure to notice the bright red uniforms until the men were beginning to assemble into marching order and the regulars who should have joined the end of the column stood up prematurely. The spacing of the men at full march, a bit over six men per thirty feet (twenty feet between ranks, plus the vehicle lengths, was rather shy of thirty feet), meant the nearly twenty-four hundred men took up well over two miles of road. At a six miles per hour jog, the rearguard was over twenty minutes behind the vanguard!
Ellen set a slightly faster pace than she had previously, so the road march of forty-five miles to the Ottawa River crossing at Ile Perrot took just over seven hours. The local time was about 5:30 PM when the forward elements arrived at the crossing point where the boats had been rallied. Since this was before Daylight Savings Time, civil twilight, where one could still navigate the land by eye, was about 7:06 PM to 7:38 PM, making the first crossing trivial due to the light conditions.
The SI Militia's first crossing was about 350 yards across, near the north end of Ile Perrot, between two protrusions of land and crossing from west-northwest to east-southeast. A good rowboat making about 4.4 miles an hour could theoretically make almost ten round trips in an hour if rowed vigorously enough or provided with sails to help. In practice, this speed had to fight the current of the river, but the direction of the crossing, where the Ottawa flowed from north to south, used the current to assist the loaded-down crossing, while it affected the return trip less due to more propulsive power per displacement. Thankfully, the Ottawa River's distributaries were many and the flow rate in August low enough that its speed near Montreal was unimpressive. Thus, the crossing should just be closer to eight minutes round-trip than six.
Most of the rowboats assembled could safely carry a two-wheeler, its crew, and rowers for the return trip, with a few larger boats able to hold two crews, or a three-wheeler and its cargo, which were loaded separately so that the vehicle could actually be manhandled aboard from the shore. There were thirty-nine "small" boats and eleven "large" boats by that capacity criteria, almost all of which were of the shallow-draft, flat-bottom "Bateau" design, with small sails that assisted on the trip east due to the prevailing winds. This allowed up to sixty-one vehicles and crews to cross at a time. Ellen did some quick mental math by her estimate of roughly a 400-yard initial crossing, at seven round trips per hour—lower than the estimated practical maximum to be safe and to accommodate the three-wheelers—that would be 427 vehicles across in an hour. Taking two hours to get everyone across meant the boats would have to round the north side of Ile Perrot in nautical twilight, on their way to the second crossing at the northeast shore of the island.
Nautical twilight had a distinguishable horizon, and allowed distinguishing general terrain features, but not details unless the moon was bright—unfortunately a waning gibbous only rose long after sunset and set in the morning—but navigating near shore in nautical twilight was still risky. Ellen observed that a couple boats would have to be detached well before sunset to row around the north side of Ile Perrot. They would establish navigation beacon fires for the second crossing, and start ferrying across Joseph and Johnson's scouting force. These fires would have to be screened from view from downstream where the Vermonters might have pickets staring out over the water, and could not be numerous due to the risks of their light being noticeable on the horizon. The troops would have to ask locals along the north shore of Ile Perrot to set out lanterns or torches at sunset for half an hour or so, just in case.
In addition to such considerations, Ellen applied a lot of loud encouragement for the men to paddle quickly, hurrying the boats along to prevent having to navigate along the shore too much past civil twilight. Sure, civil twilight was still enough to navigate on land by, but it would be much preferable to settle into a routine at the next crossing as early into nautical twilight as possible.
By 7:10 PM local time the last of the troops were strung out in a two-mile line going east across Ile Perrot and the boats were hurrying around the north end of the island as the sun set. Ellen had overestimated the distance, much to her relief. The scouting force of 90 men were already on the Island of Montreal and had set off after organizing. The second crossing of about 320 yards between two nearly parallel shores began in earnest at about 7:20 PM local time, though many men were already across with the two boats sent forward having made many round trips. Despite the bright moonlight and white clothing of the men, the rowers were noticeably slower and more cautious than at the first crossing, and boats were launched in waves instead of each hurrying as much as possible in two lanes. The crossing of the full force took until about 9:30 PM local time to complete.
After landing on the Isle of Montreal, the men changed from pale summer marching wear into their dull brown combat wear. At 9:15 by Ellen's watch, while the rearguard was still crossing, the main body started on the last sixteen miles to the most likely Vermonter landing zone. At a night-time pace of three miles an hour, even the rearguard should arrive at the destination around morning astronomical twilight (about 2:55 AM on August 13th, local time).
The troops were not well-rested, and near the end had left a few stragglers who couldn't handle the sleep cycles in settlements along the way, but they still had just under 2400 men ready and able to fight. And that would be good enough.
XX
Archivists' Notes
1. This of course relies on the mother being relatively sane or at least sane toward her family members, a requirement that Emily Smith decisively failed by every metric of her time with how amok she let Ellen run… except in ensuring her children were successful.
2. This was before Daylight Saving Time and noon was reckoned using local solar noon. In Toronto under Eastern Daylight Time solar noon on August 10 is about 1:22 PM, with nautical twilight at 5:05 to 5:44 AM. In 1797, by local solar noon as the reference, nautical on August 10 in Toronto 3:43 to 4:22 AM.
3. It would be a few decades later that Ellen would learn that the speed gauge was a small generator attached to the front axle and wired up to a galvanometer. This was a highly anachronistic technology (being invented in 1820, with a self-correcting device taking a few more decades) and was chalked up to the mysteries surrounding Walker.
4. The settlers that came to the Western Lake Ontario Area in 1784 and later eventually voted to rename the village there from Frenchman's Bay to Pickering, though the sheltered harbour kept the name of "Frenchman's Bay".
5. The resemblance to the later technology of the adhesive bandage is coincidental, as the necessary pressure-sensitive adhesives were first developed in 1845, and adhesive tape came around rather later. However, we cannot entirely discount the idea that someone may have seen one of the old armbands in a museum and compared the colour pattern to a taped-down gauze pad on a wound. We would like to register our factional leadership's grumbling at not having come up with the idea in time for the Great Push West.
Very nice. I'll make sure to make my own maps and put them up every so often. After all, with so many wars planned for the TL, this is inevitably going to seem like a bit of a map-painting exercise
A/N: Here's an announcement that nothing even peripherally related to this alternate history scenario is to be considered a derail. If you want to see something happening, you need only convince me.
XX
Chapter 4-18: Ambush at Upper Lachine
La Prairie-de-la-Madeleine Parish (later Brossard), East-Southeast of Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River, August 12, 1797.
Ethan Allen greeted Jean-Baptiste Blois as the Frenchman entered the commandeered shed. "A nice day for a ride, no?" Ethan had enjoyed the chance to ride at a faster pace than walking while making field observations to the north along the river. It seemed Blois had been less enthusiastic despite his younger age, as making observations to the west should have been a noticeably shorter ride.
Blois snorted at the fake small talk as he shut the door, reducing the dull roar of the campsite to background noise. "Hmm, if the cloud patterns are as usual, there should be no rain nor much wind at least until midday tomorrow. I cannot predict beyond that."
"Ah…" Ethan took a moment to accommodate the over-literal interpretation of his half-jest. It was most likely sarcasm, but Blois seemed in rather grim a mood… "Good that we agree on that then. It seems that the fleet was prevented from coming upriver by the tyranny of time… and perhaps by the British artillery flanking the river at Quebec coupled with an unfavourable wind."
The French officer shrugged. "The fleet was spotted too early, but such is war, often a matter of chance. Without naval support to handle those armed schooners, the St. Lawrence downstream of the Lachine Rapids is nominally under enemy control. Were I defending the Isle of Montreal, with even one thousand competent fighting men and the leftover guns from the Seven Years' War, I would be able to hold against our fifty-five hundred men. This crossing should be impossible."
Allen frowned, as it seemed someone didn't quite pay enough attention to the latest reports by the spies in Montreal, indicating just over half a thousand regulars and lack of militia enthusiasm. Alternatively, perhaps Blois forgot the previous planning session—Allen was familiar with slips of mind. He wasn't so young anymore and that stroke hadn't done his memory retention any good—or maybe Blois was mentally regressing to the higher European ratios of garrison-to-inhabitants in important cities. "Have a care for the morale of the men…"
Blois frowned right back. "I said 'should be', not 'is'."
Allen sighed, Blois was just playing word games, so Allen should not have been so quick to react. Ugh, he didn't remember being this irritable before that stroke a few years back, unless he recalled his embarrassingly impetuous youth. In hindsight, maybe his renewed volatility was why he even agreed to Ira's invasion plan, but no use dwelling on that now.
He shook his head, then spoke. "The latest reports said there were under six hundred regulars in the garrison. The fortifications are in hopeless disrepair, and their militia drills are rare. Perhaps they fear a rebellion of the French Canadien majority if they were armed and trained in significant numbers, or if the English Canadians are armed and trained while the French are excluded. The loyalty of the citizenry is dubious enough that few should answer a hurried call for militia, so…" he shrugged.
Blois raised his eyebrows. "I highly doubt that, in a city of ten thousand, there are not one thousand men able and willing to take up arms for fear of a sack. Regardless, the terrain is vastly against us. I cannot think of how it could have been designed better without being obviously fortified."
Just upstream of Montreal, to the city's south-southeast, the St. Lawrence bloated out into a bend that verged on being a small lake. Ethan, Blois and most of their troops were camped east of this body of water. Further upstream, west of the bend, were the Lachine Rapids, which prevented ocean-going ships from navigating further upstream.
Blois pointed at the forest north of the rapids on the map. "These woods marked on this map as the King's Stores offer concealed emplacement for cannons watching the shortest crossings, and come right up to the north coast's coastal road. Even fifty men rushing to man two or three cannons emplaced in those woods could rip us apart. Canister shot would massacre us in the boats. Also, there is another band of woods that seems to have been planted at two hundred meters from shore, the far extremes of musket shot, but easy rifle-shot. These woods stretch along the length of the potential crossings upstream of the rapids. The previous governor-general must have been quite spooked by the occupation of Montreal twenty-some years ago."
Allen chose to pretend Blois was not making a jab, save perhaps in ignorance, at the last time Ethan tried to capture Montreal. He had not forgotten his capture in late September of 1775, when he had crossed the river with a hundred men but was unable to rendezvous with a second force that failed to cross. At the time the British could only send thirty-four regulars, about two hundred militia, and a few natives against him. If his second force of well over two hundred men had arrived, he would have prevailed.
Ethan had not forgotten being paraded through Montreal in chains, part of why Ira was willing to let him head for Montreal in the first place. Originally Ira wanted to keep his brother out of this affair to take care of the extended Allen family should his gamble fail. Their brothers Heman, Heber and Zimri had passed over a decade ago, and only Levi remained. Ethan's two surviving children (of five) from his first marriage were adults now, but the children of his second marriage were still young, and if things failed and the brothers had to go into hiding, foisting their care on Levi would be difficult. Ethan had reminded Ira that Ethan's adult children could help their uncle care for their half-siblings and stepmother financially if need be, and eventually talked Ira around to letting him have this chance to parade through Montreal as a victor.
Allen pursed his lips. "Then both of the fastest crossing points upstream of the rapids are in doubt."
Blois blinked down at the map, then realized what Ethan was suggesting. "Forcing a crossing less than half a mile upstream of the rapids? Daring, but if I told the men to cross in the pre-dawn hours, so close to unnavigable rapids, I'd likely be relieved of command for temporary insanity. Regardless, the same potential ambushers in the woods can manhandle those cannons around to cover either crossing in the time it takes for us to cross."
Allen raised his eyebrows. "You only meant the further crossing, near the church?" That church was on the north shore a few miles upstream of the rapids, where the river's south shore narrowed northward again.
Blois snorted. "Indeed, but I would not be surprised if they put a cannon or two in the church, firing out the doors." He had thought of that possibility as he rode back to meet with Ethan, after making his field observations. He realized there was in fact a large enough building on the north shore to potentially house an old cannon without being either completely obvious or essentially untraversable."
Ethan frowned. While early cannons were historically cast by the same methods as church bells, cannons and churches should not mix under this societal environment. "Would the British not be leery of angering the locals by hiding cannons in a Catholic church? At least, I presume it is Catholic?"
Blois shrugged, thinking perhaps I only thought so little of the issue because of the Revolution? Here the Church is still very important to the locals… "I would do it if I was to design the defence. There is no future without the present. It would be well worth it to get opening shots against our flanks using canister… or just intimidate us into surrendering. The potato fields are also more than concealing enough to hide an army."
Ethan stiffened. "What?" Potato fields had soil mounded around the plants in rows, effectively forming troughs about a foot deep between each row, and potato plants could grow to be…
"Yes, about three feet tall, rows parallel to shore I think. Not quite as clear shots from the woods as rows straight inland, but it does lose less water and soil to run-off when it rains, and advancing through them without standing up and getting shot would be a nightmare." Blois grimaced. "They're planted that way between the coastal road and the woods for most of the shoreline, except at the King's Stores where the forest comes up to the road."
Ethan hummed, Blois likely had an alternative landing site in mind, but the Frenchman best not be overestimating the enemy resistance. "Well, at least it would be physically possible to batter through the potatoes until a final bayonet charge clears the woods, but the enemy would have continuous concealment in a fighting retreat. Still, how many men could they bring anyhow?"
"Depending on militia recruitment, I would suggest the Montreal garrison can spare perhaps two or three hundred men to be mobile along the shore upriver of the rapids. I only have enough boats for about a thousand men at a time, which means even a hundred men can easily inflict disproportionate damage as we begin landing, even without use of cannons. If a negotiator is polite enough to show their strength in hopes of averting needless bloodshed… our men are not going to be interested in facing a forest of muskets with the threat of cannons from both flanks."
"It sounds like you are once again dancing on the line of talking me into giving up." Ethan growled. "You may also be lecturing me on how badly the lack of French warships strangles our options. You clearly have something in mind already."
The 59-year-old's opinion of Blois was that, being an excellent set-piece defender according to his service record, he was paranoid on the offensive, at best. To Ethan, the man had seemed perfectly reasonable during planning, but after a few days of forced march and limited sleep, Blois' caution was grating. The man was young enough to be Ethan's son, yet had none of the youthful vigour one might expect. Some of the younger officers thought he seemed cowardly, which was not totally unfounded considering how elaborate and paranoid some of his musings were. However, as the older man, Allen was obligated to be reasonable and listen, since Blois did have valuable experience and expertise. Now if he'd stop baiting Ethan's temper by being so circumspect, that would be just great…
Blois grimaced. "At the earliest, the enemy should receive significant reinforcements by foot in just over a week from Toronto and Lakehead after receiving notice that an invasion is incoming. It takes one day to rally the men to arms, one day to sail to Kingston, and the march from Kingston is a hundred and seventy miles by road." His finger tapped the relevant settlements and the roads on the map. "In the past few decades well-drilled armies averaged usually between fifteen and twenty miles a day. The record is Prinz Henri making a forced march of thirty miles a day for three days. Therefore, Kingston to Montreal is at least six days, and more likely eight to ten for militia, assuming no rain. If boats and portages are used, especially sailing through the night, they could move much faster. With the current and wind both at their backs they could arrive in as little as five days' march, a week after receiving notice by pigeon. That's accounting for repeated loading and unloading, if they have only light infantry and enough boats."
That was a recalculation of his original estimate. Originally, Blois had thought waiting for the fleet was feasible if the winds were favourable. But assuming the enemy would actually march and behave like slow militia instead of well-drilled regulars seemed dangerous. Underestimating the foe was a sure recipe for problems in all endeavours after all.
Blois continued. "By what we know, the Kingston and New Johnstown settlements are not large enough for their militia to venture to Montreal on their own for fear of being destroyed in detail. If they have ventured out, then New Johnstown's troops will have already joined the Montreal garrison by this point and there is nothing we can do about them, while the Kingston troops have likely staged forward to New Johnstown to reduce the burden on Kingston's resources. Unless suicidal, they will wait for the arrival of the Toronto contingent before marching further."
Ethan pursed his lips and nodded acceptance. "So, that's your rationale for having to force the crossing within the next two days: a pessimistic estimate of the enemy's ability to rush into position to intercept us." Well, at least Blois' concerns were less paranoid than Ethan had half-expected. "We'd have time to either threaten the city into surrender or storm it. Well, we have the boats for it. The problem is dealing with those gunboats and any fire rafts they have put together… We know there are no warships upstream of the rapids… and so does the enemy. If they believe we'll most likely cross in force upriver, they may become lax in patrolling downriver with their ships, and we have artillery to cover hopping from one island to another." His fingers were drumming along the portion of the St. Lawrence east of the Island of Montreal, which flowed northward.
Blois narrowed his eyes. "A two-pronged attack?"
Ethan nodded again. It hadn't worked twenty-two years ago, but last time he had actually managed to cross the river within line of sight of Montreal without being intercepted, and failed only because the other prong hadn't bothered to show up. With artillery, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a crossing somewhere further from the city, and this time he had the manpower to win afterward.
Blois hummed, considering Allen's personal history. Each prong would require enough men to overwhelm the Montreal garrison, at least a three-to-one advantage, but if the garrison was truly under six hundred men that should be possible even with some allowances for militia. "How many men and guns do you need to stage a fake crossing downstream? It need be enough to convince the enemy we are relying on our artillery to cover a crossing, and enough to overcome the Montreal garrison if you somehow manage to actually cross, but not so many that they decide to send out fire rafts and warships in an all-out counter-attack."
Fire rafts were cheap, quick to assemble, and devastating when the wind, current or both pushed them into the enemy. A crossing downriver from Montreal always had the current favouring the defender, and most of the time, the wind in the region came from the southwest through west. If fire rafts were being released from the western bank, woe betide he who came from the east and from downriver.
Allen took a moment to consider the map. "How many men? The lowest by the three-to-one ratio you've spoken of before is about seventeen hundred… but a bit more than that should be safer. Let me think it through… location first then. The southernmost possible crossing is at Longueuil, directly east of Montreal, but that takes too many crossings across too many little islands. It also invites the schooners at Montreal to weigh anchor, loop north around the islands, and blast us out of the water." Longueuil also carried too many bad memories. That was where he had crossed twenty-two years ago.
Allen moved north onto the next cluster of islands in the river. "The coverage isn't as complete as I'd like at Boucherville, as the main channel is too wide. It looks to be multiple kilometers, even accounting for the imprecise map." He went even further north "I think the best choice is just south of Varennes, across from the northeast end of the Island of Montreal. It is most of a day's march away, but it won't be as forced as our dash up here. Our troops are all along the river gathering up boats and trying to gauge local interest, sadly they don't seem as interested as they were back in '75, but some of the troops are near Varennes already. We'll be able to reach Montreal within four hours of getting everyone across, so most likely we will arrive around noon or in the early afternoon, depending on delays."
Allen pulled out a small note pad where he had scribbled his observations, then slapped it down on the map next to the crossing. Blois quickly read through the pencil notes describing the observations of the crossing at Varennes. Allen had ridden quickly, it seemed. After a moment, the Frenchman nodded.
Ethan resumed speaking. "Two thousand men and four guns should be sufficient as a distraction. I would not go over twenty-five hundred men lest we find ourselves with either too many boats in the water to reliably evade fire rafts or so few that the crossing is prohibitively slow. Being twelve miles downriver from Montreal means we should have enough time to cross in good order and in sufficient force to not be repulsed on land, barring serious delays, or at least occupy the attention of a large proportion of the garrison and their fighting sailors. Fortunately, the terrain on the other side is not nearly so difficult as what you will have to face."
"If you are sure four guns and two thousand men are enough, then I will take the other thirty-five hundred men and four guns." Blois accepted the division of labour, then addressed the proposed crossing. "If the maps are somewhat inaccurate as your notes here suggest, with the main channel narrower and the side channels wider, your force should face… two crossings of about six or seven hundred meters and one of about three or four hundred meters. That's within effective range of our guns with ball, but canister would be marginal even at the shortest crossing. Still, we should be able to inflict critical damage on the enemy's minor warships, though they could slaughter our rowboats in a death ride if they decided to fight it out."
Allen's jaw tensed. "It's the most workable plan we can enact quickly."
Blois sighed. "It's not a good plan—"
Allen glared.
"—but having to force a major river while the enemy has the only warships on the river is never a good plan." Blois shrugged. "It will have to do. We cannot wait for the fleet to cover the hundred and forty miles from Quebec to Montreal."
Blois took Allen's annoyed grunt as indicating he had similar reservations. Maybe all the planning sessions about strategy had convinced the hothead to be about as steady as when his wife was present to keep a lid on him?
In truth, Allen's grunt expressed irritation at fretting over concerns that had already been discussed and resolved.
Blois now indicated his own destination. "I have no desire to be ambushed in the potato fields, so I will cross west of them, to the village of Upper Lachine. Storming the village at bayonet-point could cost quite a number of casualties if they are ready for us, but it's at least possible due to the limited frontage the enemy could occupy, unless they emplaced cannons there firing down the piers. I saw no sign of such, not even windows suitable to conceal a cannon, and they are surely not suicidal enough to fire a cannon from inside a building or in narrow alleyways between buildings." The men shared a snort at that. "The church also had no doors of suitable size facing west to operate a cannon from."
"I will need enough boats to move at least eight hundred men across at once, likely a thousand counting the rowers." Blois continued. "That should suffice to take the village. The men have scraped together a good number of boats, but the tally is yet uncertain. Do you have any boats you can spare?"
"I'll need to put about five hundred men across at a time, not counting rowers." Allen thought for a moment. "I should have a number of extra boats considering that. But crossing into a village… the houses would shelter the enemy, much like the fields."
Blois' mouth curled at the thought of being forced to storm a potential hardpoint, even if all the other potential hardpoints could be worse. "At least the houses are close to shore, so my men can close the distance quickly. Then the houses will shelter us just as easily, allowing us to bypass any cannons in the woods." Allen nodded agreement, so Blois continued "A blocking force in the village cannot be both numerous and open fire early, or we could easily turn and land downriver. A fighting retreat within the fields would normally be far easier for the enemy and far more dangerous to our men, but not if the enemy is caught out of position. There should not be so many in the village as to require that though, and a soldier in a house cannot fire so many times when stormed as one in a field who can withdraw from contact and reload."
"Just remember the speeches and promises Ira and I made in Vermont to rally up all these men for a stroll north." Allen said, grimacing to indicate his opinion of that constraint.
Blois nodded. "I know, I heard the speeches. The men believe the Canadians need only be intimidated to be receptive of negotiations, and I have no intention of getting anyone killed on either side, barring absolute necessity."
The two men finalized the division of the troops, then left the shed to issue their orders. Both groups maintained picket lines monitoring the shore for attempts to inform the British. Blois carefully stayed out of line of sight of the coast, while Ethan marched in plain sight at speed, using brambles lashed to wagons and the artillery pieces to scuff up rather more dust than normal and pretend to be a larger force.
The British would either sortie to intercept Allen and leave Montreal even emptier, for Blois to easily seize, or they would ignore the obvious ruse (due to lack of manpower) and Allen would be able to cross safely. If the British gunboats alone followed him, well, shore artillery was vastly more accurate than artillery fired from a rocking ship, if it came to that. Such a sortie would also remove at least one or two hundred sailors from conscription for the landward defence of the city. Any of the options would benefit the Vermonters.
XX
Vicinity of Upper Lachine, Isle of Montreal, Early Morning of August 13, 1797.
"We found potato fields, rows parallel to shore, with woods a furlong inland, and the King's Stores reaching up to the coastal road between the two narrowest crossing points." Joseph informed Ellen as the main force approached the village of Upper Lachine. "Johnson and a few men Cato and I are familiar with have been sent ahead to Montreal to notify them of our presence, on horses we rented from the villagers."
Ellen hummed acknowledgement. "How tall are the potato plants?"
Joseph grinned. "Two and a half to three feet, tall enough to crawl through while hidden."
"Very well." Ellen said. "Pass the word to Fourteenth and Fifteenth Companies and Mary's cargo group that they are to garrison Upper Lachine. Everyone else keeps moving with me." Each company in the SI Militia of this period was 150 men. Fifteenth Company was currently not a full company, but it, Mary's supply group, and another full company should more than suffice to watch the flank, at the west-most point the enemy could possibly force a crossing.
Under cover of darkness, the troops marched past Upper Lachine and streamed over the bridge over the St. Pierre River, a minor tributary of the St. Lawrence (later used for the Lachine Canal). They flowed inland up along the shore of the St. Pierre River to get behind the wood line that Carleton had ordered planted (or left in place) back in 1776. After parking their vehicles behind the trees, Ellen gave a short speech on the need for absolute fire discipline—while mentally thanking whatever had compelled Johnson to remind her that killing as many enemies as possible wasn't the objective.
Then the First through Eighth companies, twelve hundred men in all, advanced through the woods to the potato fields. The troops moved forward most of the way to the shore, their way lit by the waning gibbous moon, and then laid prone beneath the level of the leaves, waiting for dawn. The field soon quieted save for the sounds of crickets and the occasional quiet curse and slap at a mosquito.
Soon, Ellen felt that morning astronomical twilight was about to begin. She recalled this to be around 2:55 AM local time, although there should be a time adjustment of her clock compared to at New Johnstown, and she didn't have a great reference for that. In theory, the enemy could cross almost immediately as soon as nautical twilight began at 3:40 AM, and should be preparing about now, due to the waning gibbous moon being high and bright.
Ellen moved forward and scanned the south shore with her telescope… and spotted nothing in a full pan along the shore. Every ten minutes she looked again, otherwise letting her eyes take in the full shore instead of the narrow field of the telescope. It would not do to miss something by being focused on looking elsewhere.
Some of the more experienced woodsmen took the time to rest, and some even slept, but the younger or more urban men were growing more tense and restless as the wait went on and insects buzzed around them and sometimes crawled onto them. Nautical twilight was at 3:40 AM, the earliest the enemy could reasonably start a crossing, but only at 3:35 did Ellen managed to spot some torches flickering beyond the tree line on the south shore…
Ellen frowned and paused her telescope scan. The faint flickers of activity on the moonlit south shore were far to her right (upstream, to the west) of where she expected to see them… "They're crossing at the village?" She said loudly.
Her officers glanced at each other, and more than a few raised their hips and tucked their legs under themselves, anticipating a redeployment.
This was bad. If the enemy were crossing at the village, that would be a considerably longer crossing, but First through Twelfth companies were her most reliable troops, most accustomed to her ways, and they were all in the field with her. There hadn't been enough time to fortify the village innocuously, so Mary's troops should not have tried to do so, which could ironically deceive the enemy into thinking it defenceless. However, there was scant time to even move stealthily on such short notice!
Ellen spun to project her voice back toward the woods instead of out over the water. Even so, she did not dare speak at full volume. "First through Eighth Companies, relocate to the village by the ford! Relay the order! Ninth and Tenth Companies, into the fields and obey Joseph's orders!" It would have been great if she didn't need to take that precaution. "Eleventh through Thirteenth Companies, stand by in the woods under Joseph's command! MAKE HASTE!"
Ellen was suddenly grateful the potato rows ran parallel to the coast as she jogged westward, repeating the order as she went from near the King's Stores to halfway to the St. Pierre River. Hundreds of brown-clad shadows rose on her command and soon surged passed her as she stopped by Joseph and instructed him that he was to command the eastern wing of the army. Then she followed the troops in fording the St. Pierre River where marked by the scouts, with help from locals. The ford was safely concealed from the south shore's sight, unlike the shore bridge they had used earlier, so lanterns could be safely used to prevent accidents.
Despite a lack of tripping and shouting out thanks to the lanterns, the splashing of twelve hundred men rushing across the ford seemed thunderous in the moment.
Even with the manoeuvre conducted at a run, the redeployment took half an hour for the men to be quite settled, holing up in every house and alleyway along the waterfront, entering the houses via opened windows facing inland if need be. The mile-long St. Lawrence crossing was still empty when Ellen checked at 4:30, just past the beginning of civil twilight, but she could spot men beginning to board the boats after dragging the last few to the water.
"It seems that the opponent wishes to arrive at sunrise, about five minutes or so before five…" Ellen grumbled to the officers. "The crossing itself is a mile, should be about fifteen or perhaps twenty minutes of paddling… Militia officers, go along the waterfront and give the men reminders that we are here to take hostages. Not a single cocked musket unless I give two whistles!"
The army settled in to wait as a few of the brown-wearing officers rushed about shouting reminders of the orders while pretending to be panicked villagers.
A few minutes later, a horse galloped into the village from the road to Montreal, the rider announcing himself with: "News from Montreal!"
Ellen rushed over to the back window of the house she was holed up in, squinting into the darkness behind the house until the guards brought a torch close enough to illuminate the redcoat's face. At least it was behind the house, well hidden from the south shore, and a light or two coming out into the streets in the early morning should not seem suspicious anyhow… "Johnson? Is it urgent?"
The man shook his head. "Not immediately."
"Come on up then." Ellen said.
Once Johnson made his way up to the second floor of the house, he explained "The Montreal garrison acknowledges your forces' arrival and declares that they will merely delay the enemy crossing in the northeast—"
"There's a second crossing?" Ellen yanked out her map of the Montreal area and unfolded it. Longeuil… no that would be an Eastern crossing and would be straight into urban combat, nothing to delay about that. Boucherville… main channel is too wide, to not intercept would be too absurd for either side to contemplate… "Varennes?"
Johnson grinned at her deduction. "According to the scouts, most probably at Varennes, yes. The Montreal garrison has decided—given we are here—to delay the second attack instead of aggressively defending at the landing zone and during the crossing, followed by a fighting retreat to Montreal. However, they will aggressively intercept if the enemy decides to go for a foothold immediately, instead of moving all his troops between each relay island over time. The warships will be on watch for such a manoeuvre."
Ellen snorted. "Well the enemy will certainly know that, so they wouldn't attempt such without control of the river. Their artillery can only cover one crossing at a time effectively, so I doubt they're dumb enough to seek defeat in detail while our ships are lurking about. What else?"
"The Montreal garrison is thankful for the information that there will be another crossing here that we will intercept, which would have caught them off-guard looking the other way. They had expected a crossing here but since the Vermonters visibly went north, they thought the enemy may have been exploiting their expectations. In conclusion, the garrison is happy to comply with the use of defensive strategies and morale shock if possible, to reduce future resentment."
Ellen noticed the garrison commander, or perhaps Johnson, had been polite enough to leave out "avoiding risking mass defection". For some reason the British worried about French Canadien militia loyalty, despite their performance at Quebec in 1775.
"Good, more prisoners make for more bargaining chips later." Ellen said. "I was going to ask one of the sergeants to carry the flag of parley, but since you have fancier rank decorations…"
XX
Vicinity of Upper Lachine, Southwest of Montreal, Early Morning of August 13, 1797
"Looks like some of the locals noticed us." Blois observed as the boat rocked under his feet. His telescope showed a few men running up and down the waterfront shouting in alarm, and the few formerly open windows were being shuttered. Well, to hunker down and wait it out was the best that peasants and townsfolk could do when the armies came marching.
"They should be sending notice to Montreal," he said loudly so that officers in surrounding boats could hear, "but I see no signs of fortifications. We'll have enough time to get two waves across before any enemies can show up beyond a minor blocking force, even if they didn't sortie to counter Allen."
Crossing near dawn was safer for the men than at night, as per the need of the campaign to avoid unnecessary casualties—especially friendly ones and even more so accidents. This sudden breakout from the woods on the south shore and quick crossing should be fast enough to avoid being jumped by enemy reinforcements arriving by forced march from Montreal before a second wave could cross. Just the lead-up to a full night crossing would surely be enough time for someone to ride to Montreal and start the troops moving. Trying to get hundreds of men into boats and crossing a mile-wide river at night, even with the waning gibbous moon providing light in the pre-dawn hours, was a great way to have lots of accidents and alert the foe.
The boats pulled alongside the piers extending out from the north shore, all along the village waterfront, to the chirping of early birds and the harsh breathing of tense men. The men who were to row the boats back grabbed hold of the piers and pulled the boats closer to the piers so that the others could scramble onto the piers one by one. The men advanced as quietly as they could, looking around at the buttoned-up houses as they approached the buildings at the waterfront.
As the men began stepping off the piers and spreading out, a shrill whistle blast pierced the air across the docks. A few of the experienced woodsmen immediately tucked themselves behind the very few crates or barrels found along some of the piers, but most were caught in the open. Blois' gaze snapped up and he opened his mouth to react to the surprise, but the words died in his throat.
The whistle ended, but the squealing and slamming of wood and metal it set off kept going. Every window, door, alleyway, and even hedgerow Blois could see, and more than a few overgrown gardens in the once seemingly deserted village, had sprouted—in mere moments—a veritable forest of muskets pointed at his men. By Blois' estimation, at least a thousand muskets were aimed at his force.
No one dared move.
A motion drew his eyes and the eyes of his stunned men. A white flag of parley was being extended from the second floor of one house, a house he realized had no musketeers taking aim from the second floor, and was being waved back and forth.
It was the only motion among a sea of dark-faced (often literally so) men in filthy-looking brown uniforms staring down their muskets at the Vermonters. No, not filthy, mottled, to be more difficult to spot. A good choice of colour, fit for all seasons save deep winter… Blois' thoughts wandered while he very slowly pulled out his white handkerchief and raised it to wave solely by wrist motion.
He noticed the enemy relaxing slightly in posture, and his men relaxing too, but everyone seemed to be looking at him.
"Parley?" That voice sounded rather high-pitched, perhaps the commander's young aide, perhaps a ward, was speaking?
"Sure, Talk!" Ah, no, he'd interpreted the shout from the building as French, but responded in English expecting a British officer to speak English… he'd been talking to the Vermonters far too much in the past months if he had resorted to English first instead of a shared term between the languages. Or maybe it was just the sudden shock making him a bit garbled. "Parley!"
The word "parley" in English came from the French "parler" meaning "to talk". To fumble languages in a tense situation was quite unbecoming.
"Parley! We are coming down to parley! Men, be at ease!" The same voice shouted.
A redcoat officer stood up in the window the white flag was extended from, surveying the docks with slow turns of his head. "Vermonters, tie up your boats while we parley! We don't want anyone drifting off and having an accident!" The same unmanly voice shouted, while Blois saw that the mouth of the visible officer did not move.
The Frenchman yelled back, taking care to be exceedingly clear. "Agreed! Men, tie up the boats properly while we negotiate terms!"
It was the only reasonable option after all. The ambushers somehow seemed to outnumber him. Had the entire garrison from Montreal laid in ambush here? Worse, most of his troops were still in their boats and thus similar to fish in barrels if shooting began. Blois turned back to look over the piers, watching the men slowly begin to tie up the boats. Some were more sluggish after the shock than others.
"Hey, you!" He pointed and glared at one particular boat of young men, boys really, who seemed to still be gawking as their boat started drifting away from the dockside. "You're drifting away!" They all twitched in surprise, but only one sprang into action, stabbing his bayonet into the wooden pier deck and hauling his boat closer. At least he was better than the idiots sitting there and trying to look immobile and unthreatening while holding oars, but leaning his weight on the musket like that would make it tough to remove…
Blois turned back around in time to see a person in brown stand up next to the redcoat, holding up a second white flag of parley and folding up a pocket mirror. Such mirrors were uncommon, and of dubious use at long distances, as sufficiently flat and uniform glass was very hard to manufacture. However, Blois supposed peering over the edge of cover at this range while remaining safe was a smart use of the tool. The person tucked it into their breast pocket and yelled in that same unmanly voice. "I will be down in a moment!" Their apparent height was not noticeably shorter than the redcoat officer, but the hair certainly seemed on the long side. Ah, the profile when she was turning to disappear into the interior of the building certainly explained why the defending commander's shouts sounded distinctly unmanly.
She appeared at the doorway, striding forth to meet him, and stopped a pace short of handshake distance. For a moment, all was quiet as the two commanders looked each other over, and Blois' minds analyzed this woman who had clearly outmanoeuvred him. Folded-up ponytail exposes the neck, improves cooling in a summer march, and is simpler to tie up and alter as needed compared to a more formal and dignified braid. Her brown hair mixes well with her clothes, good camouflage… dyed, perhaps?
Blois realized he should introduce himself, as the lady was not going first. "I am Jean-Baptiste Blois, General de Brigade. May I have the pleasure of the lady's name?"
"Ellen Shepard, Upper Canada Militia Commander."
Blois' eyebrows made a bid for flight before he stopped them. The claim was absurd. The distance was far too great! Even an unusually prescient training excursion putting them in the area should have been at least near Kingston, if not further away, when news was received. They would have to use river boats to move at night, and even in that case should have taken until later today! Otherwise, they should have required at least a couple more days to arrive on the Isle of Montreal, let alone be here!
There was nothing to do about the plausibility though, for she was clearly here somehow. He broke the silence by commenting on something he'd heard of Upper Canada's leading oligarch. "Ah, that would certainly explain the skin tones among your army. I had heard about how Upper Canada accepted anyone willing to work and is prospering as a result."
"Aye, we care not for blood, creed, or origins. Any who will work and be lawful are welcome." Ellen made a broad, sweeping gesture with her right arm, putting on a show for the troops.
Blois inclined his head in respect for what were fundamentally republican values. Then he cut to the core of the matter. "I suppose you will be demanding surrender terms?" If she actually was in charge, they best commence the discussion of terms quickly, before any misunderstandings could show up. If not, well, best get whoever was actually in charge out quickly.
The woman nodded. "Yes. Your men should surrender their arms in orderly fashion, but discharging over the water might give the wrong impression to your men on the far shore…" Blois thought the trailing off of her words was because she suddenly realized she didn't know how surrendering arms worked.
There was the sound of some tussling behind Blois, and he glanced back over his shoulder. The boy who'd stuck his bayonet in the pier found it lodged fast and two other boys were attempting to help pull it out without overbalancing or shooting themselves. They were quite possibly too lazy to detach the bayonet, or simply were too nervous to remember. Then again, bayonets were not known for being easy to detach, lest they fall off in battle…
"Whoever negotiates the actual treaty might disagree," Ellen seemed to find the situation humorous if the quirk of her lips actually indicated her opinion, "but I say no compensation shall be asked for scratch damage to vehicles or items, not even by being asked to patch it up." Perhaps she was mocking of his troops' lack of professionalism, as that was either a smirk or a sneer, but at least it seemed to be in good humour. If he'd had the chance in the past to win a defensive battle bloodlessly, Blois hoped that he would have been similarly genial.
"The men will be less than pleased that they won't be doing carpentry during the captivity. We will expect reasonable treatment and accommodations however, regardless of manual labour performed." Blois said as he turned back to the woman. Rather than carpentry, the prisoners would likely be put to work bringing in the harvest, much duller and more exhausting work.
She smiled. "But of course! We—"
There was a crack of a musket discharge behind Blois and he jumped in surprise, noting in that instant that Shepard merely twitched and snorted. He spun around just in time to see one of the boys on the pier lose his balance and fall into the water with a loud splash. If the chuckling, sniggering, and at least a few men openly laughing among the ambushing Canadians reflected their mood, at least there wouldn't be any real misunderstandings. The now-freed musket's stock was soon used to help the boy back up onto the pier, now quite soaked.
"My apologies, madame, for that mishap," Blois said.
Ellen waved it off with a smile. "Accidents happen. So, let us haggle. Your men shall surrender their arms, my accompanying regulars will supervise this, then our men shall have breakfast and your men will be escorted toward Montreal, while we talk about how many muskets the men on the south shore get to go home peacefully with, to protect them from wild animals."
Blois nodded, hiding his surprise at the good initial terms. He would drag this out as long as he reasonably could to give Allen a chance, but his negotiating position was painfully weak, especially with how reasonable she was being. The Vermonters had only been persuaded to go on this venture on the premise that only shows of force would be necessary to convince the Canadians to cooperate. Most of the men weren't out here to risk their lives so much as go on a long hike and get a share of the fire tax from surrendered settlements (Note 1).
If the Canadians prevailed against the French troops at Quebec and Ira Allen's force, hopefully they would not be too enthusiastic in collecting fire taxes from the towns and villages of Vermont. Blois had managed to maintain discipline well enough among his men. The Allens and he had all noted the need for good relations with future neighbours and countrymen during speeches in Vermont rallying the troops. However, the French troops landing at Quebec under Marceau had no such warnings, and Blois knew well how infernally soldiers could behave. Marceau had been a superb aide-de-camp and was a good officer, but he wasn't supported by trusted community leaders to help enforce orderly, respectful conduct.
Hopefully, the Canadians were aware of the likelihood of border adjustments and would be gentle with potential neighbours and countrymen. If the generous sharing of rations outside was indicative of Ellen's countrymen, then all should be well enough.
XX
Blois sipped at the odd herbal tea he had been offered after the prisoners had been sent away toward Montreal. The teacup belonged to a set borrowed from the locals, who were nervously floating around the edges of the military presence. He looked out the window where the flag of parley was originally presented, peering through his spyglass across the river at the progress of the redcoats confiscating most of the muskets and ammunition from the Vermonters.
Technically, Blois only had the authority to surrender the French advisors, but the Vermonter militia officers had agreed to go home instead of continuing to fight and thereby put the captives at risk. It was obvious that the Canadians weren't sanguine and would—like the Vermonters—prefer no bloodshed, so disarming and going home was acceptable (Note 2). One hundred captured Vermonters, mostly sole sons of their lines, would be traded back to the south shore for the armaments and as a gesture of good faith. Shepard had asked the returned prisoners to tell their peers that the muskets with names on them would be returned after the war, since guns were a required part of life in North America.
Unsurprisingly, most of the men believed she was just placating them. She had gone off shortly after their negotiations to check on the trading of cold rations between the Canadians and the prisoners for breakfast, leaving him with his thoughts. Before he was invited indoors by Captain Johnson for some of the tea he couldn't quite identify, Blois had spoken briefly with some of the men who were to be released. During the discussion, there were reasonable rumbles of lack of faith in the woman's word.
The artillery, the first things to be confiscated and retrieved, had been sent off with the sixteen confiscated horses (a single team of four per gun) at a trot a bit over forty minutes after the ambush. Most of the horses had been left with the Vermonters for their supply wagons and "because the loss of even one horse could render a family destitute, the horses I shall borrow will be returned after the war with rent paid" as Shepard had told the prisoners who were to be released.
A few minutes later, having finished their breakfast, the other nine hundred prisoners, except Blois, were escorted down the road toward Montreal. The relatively light breakfast was a British or perhaps colonial habit Blois had gotten accustomed to over the months since he'd been sent to Vermont. In France, breakfast and lunch were the main meals.
The twenty-six hundred retreating Vermonters on the south bank of the river were to be allowed to hold onto five hundred muskets, officially to protect themselves against wild animals. The Canadians had to deal with the attack on Quebec, and had no real reason to pursue the Vermonters. Even so, having enough firepower to repel a crossing or at least hold out against pursuers reassured the Vermonters that they really were just being asked to go home.
About an hour after Blois' capture, the Canadians were cursing creatively as they muscled the last of the artillery ammunition ashore and loaded it back into the caissons. With the last boat carrying confiscated weapons and ammunition tied up at the piers, the handful of boats with the one hundred released prisoners were allowed to leave.
Blois found this attack on the Vermonters' will excellent. First, Shepard armed the Vermonters enough to take vengeance on nearby villages if she did not abide by her word. Second, she only took horses she needed for the gun teams in the name of not risking the livelihoods of families on the successful return of the horses after the end of hostilities. Some of the wealthier community members had been honour-bound to volunteer their horses according to some of the gossip Blois was hearing among the redcoats about the announcements they had made to the Vermonters. Third, Shepard followed the agreement and returned one hundred of the captives, placing further bindings of honour upon the Vermonters to simply go home and avoid further bloodshed. There were no bindings more effective upon men than in their own minds after all.
Shepard came in as Blois moved to the other side of the room to look out the window facing the main road of the village again, observing how the Canadians were handling the captured supplies, as there were no horses confiscated to pull the heavy caissons. Interesting, the copper-roofed caissons (known to the British as "ammunition waggons") were being lashed to the three-wheeled hand-pushed carts that seemed to carry most of the Canadians' supplies. Why pushing though? Pulling was more efficient…
In his previous stint at the window watching the artillery leave, Blois had overheard Shepard grumbling to the officers before sending the prisoners on their way. It seemed she had wanted to send the guns and their caissons along with the prisoners and their large escort to Montreal an hour after the ambush, but then altered the schedule. The caissons would have to travel with the main body of the army, while the cannons trotted ahead to Montreal, for horses did not endure so well on hot summer days. A rider had been sent to Montreal in the interim.
As Blois finished his second cup of now lukewarm tea, Shepard returned her own teacup to the tea set, then spoke. "A good strategy, you tied down my army… not by the means you would have preferred, I'm sure, but you tied us down nonetheless. You will have to come along with us, Blois, if we want to prevent unnecessary bloodshed." She strode up beside him, inhaled deeply, and shouted out the window "MARCHING ORDER IN FIVE MINUTES, MEN!"
There was a chorus of, "Aye!" from outside.
"Well, they're good boys and men, so I doubt anything untoward should occur even if you left us under the watch of the villagers in paddocks, but I can understand the reasoning of bringing hostages to the field, and there's not likely to be enough villagers…" Blois said, smiling. It seemed she was about to show her hand on how she could move so quickly; that would be interesting to see. There would be too many witnesses, so he probably wouldn't meet with an unfortunate accident before he could be repatriated to France after the war ended. Still, bringing actual hostages to the field could just result in unfortunate melee and disruption of the lines if things came to blows.
Tactically speaking, it was unfortunate that Allen hadn't taken any more men north, but at least the defenders hadn't brutally intercepted the crossing unless he was gravely misreading her words. Strategically however, given the total surprise Shepard had achieved, Allen should be competent enough to realize that—barring catastrophic mistakes on Shepard's part in tactical deployment before negotiations with Allen—this whole venture would follow the secondary plan the Allens had advertised to the Vermonters.
"Failing to take Canada?" The Allens had told the Vermonters. "Why, that will surely result in cession of a slice of northern Vermont to the British, and then the British will be obligated to construct a canal or otherwise improve navigability of the Richelieu to stabilize loyalty in the region, and we the people of the old Republic of Vermont will benefit regardless from easier, better commerce! Vermont is not defined merely by lines on a map but by its people, and however this venture goes, it cannot but improve the lot of our people." That part of the speeches had perhaps been a bit defeatist, but presenting it as a win for the Vermonters either way—and a low-risk armed hike with some posturing—was the only way Ira Allen could rally enough men to actually make the expedition theoretically easy.
And then the Canadians sprung an army in the plan's face.
Blois' boots thumped and his shoulders slumped as he descended the stairs. These things happened sometimes.
XX
Archivists' Notes, Chapter 18:
1. Terminology may vary somewhat here. The age-old customs of war dictated in siege warfare that a town that surrendered without being sieged would usually be spared. A town that surrendered during siege was usually made to pay a "fire tax" to compensate the attackers for their effort. If the town could not pay, it would be torched, but towns that paid were generally spared. Any settlement taken by assault would see massacre or enslavement of its populace and three days and nights of plundering. Later revisions to the customs generally reduced the bloodthirst. For example, in 18th century and later European sieges, a city would generally be allowed to surrender with no honour lost when its inner lines of defence were reached. Only if the attacker was forced to storm the inner defences would a sacking be seen as fully justified.
2. "Sanguine" originally meant bloody or bloodthirsty when introduced into the English language, but later was used for "cheerful" based on the humours theory of medicine.
XX
A/N: I hope Allen and Blois come off as generally competent, just utterly shat on by information failure. TTL Ethan Allen survived the stroke that killed him IOTL.
Hmmm, not gonna lie, I was thinking of this scenario, and I connected that to the wierder method of getting into space. Orion drives and fission rockets and such. One such method is the "airship to orbit," which seems so self explanatory that Canada would jump all over it in this timeline.
I was thinking about writing an omake for this, but I wouldn't even know where to start. One thing is that this timeline's Canada wouldn't end the space race if given any other options.
Can't wait for this Canada to be a superpower!
After this war, and some border adjustments on the Canadians favour, will we see confederation happen faster than happened OTL? Maybe before 1867?
Two Great Powers strong enough to rival each other, despite having a great amount of trade flowing between them across the longest land border in the world, both engaged in the Space Race, with one's economic policies (by Victoria II standards) being laissez-faire (only capitalists can build factories) and the other being state capitalism (state or capitalists can build factories)...
How likely do you think it is that the state capitalism side would ever fully give up the space race?
Yes. When exactly, I am not sure, but certainly before 1867.
The War of 1810 is also known to Canadians in this history as "The (First) Motherland War" based off one of Kana's speeches in 1810.
I've change my plans and should probably update the opening post of the thread, but American involvement (1854-1857) in the Crimean War (1853-1856) is going to be termed "The Second Motherland War".
Methinks that at some point between 1815-1854, someone (i.e. Lord Durham after coming over to investigate some unrest) will propose a rather larger union than he did OTL (which resulted in the United Province of Canada) and, sometime in the 1850s, the loose union will be tightened up into the Dominion of Canada.
Hmm, that means the "War on/of Terror" (depending on who you ask) AKA "Third Motherland War" AKA "World War Six" planned for 2001-2005 is going to have American propaganda about making sure the "upstart neighbour" does not see 150.
I suppose if Confederation is finalized during war, the Canadian equivalent to this poster
The mountains and rivers are still there, the country is strong and the people are at peace.
Would be "1855/2005", one with the corpse-strewn fields of the Battle of the Thin Brown Line as its backdrop, the other with the scorched ruins of Toronto* (suggested below). If we could have met, I would surely tell you:
"The Line holds, the Motherland endures, and the Americans are repulsed again."
Every visible building is partially or wholly collapsed, a large chunk of the highway at left has fallen in, the skydome looks like a bowl from the roof falling in, and the CN Tower is truncated just above the horizon level with the upper parts dashed against the ground toward the foreground (i.e. falling on relatively open ground).
On the other hand, if I push the Sixth World War to 2005-2010 (Confederation in 1857 or 1858), we're looking at hailing back to TWO wars against American aggression...
...I'm going to procrastinate on that decision until after the Fifth World War.
PS: In case anyone is wondering why people still loathe Japan for old crimes... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-...he-will-end-san-francisco-sister-city-n826656
Well thankfully TTL 2017 Osaka will almost certainly be under North Japanese control. Their ball is going to be in a vice (The two red bars of the flag are the typical icon of being under SI control, corresponding to the Union Jack canton) to not try this shit.
As a side note, since I'm planning for Cherry Blossoms At Night to be against Western Canada, Canada will have one hell of a stabbed-in-the-back myth against the US for a while post-WWII after MacArthur decides to protect Unit 731 in South Japan for "research". This timeline's Berlin Airlift equivalent is most likely going to involve mines, submarines, and US Army tanks facing SI Army tanks across the inter-Japanese border as part of the factional dispute at the Kyoto War Crimes Tribunals.
...No, North Japan won't have a starvation crisis, because of great population reduction.
Last edited:
1770-1810, Vol 0-1, Ch 4-19: Ambush at Pointe-aux-Trembles
A/N:You will notice a shift to metric after that system is sufficiently established, but that'll be a while. For now, we're stuck with Imperial units (which I strongly dislike using), and apparently, we will be stuck with that well into the train age. Methinks 5-foot-3 (1600mm) like Ireland, for convenience of unit conversion (the first official meter bar was made in 1799 in France). Hey, the Empire happens to make rail cars in that gauge too!
In this year of 1797 while Ellen is pulling off a campaign that everyone else will scoff at for many years as a major exaggeration, the engraving of "Sale of a Wife in Smithfield Market" was being printed. I was directed to this engraving by a remarkably balanced post on Quora which would easily qualify as an article on most online outlets, with a wonderfully long list of good citations: Colleen Anne Coyle's answer to What historic facts are hard for you to believe? - Quora The funniest part of that is the quote from a wife in 1830 getting mad when her husband tried to back out: "Let be yer rogue. I wull be sold. I wants a change." Which translates to "Oh fuck off already, I'm going to find a new man to take proper care of me, you're boring!" AKA something that sounds remarkably familiar from no-fault divorces…
These rituals of "look, she's with that guy now, don't come after me for her debts and problems!" were an affordable way to get a divorce acknowledged by the community compared to a private Act of Parliament!!! It doesn't make the timing of that engraving any less ironic though.
There are generally four gradations of content on SV, and they should be handled in a progressively more mature fashion.
The least mature content - the kind of thing you'd find rated no more than PG-13, like episodes of Star Trek or My Little Pony or what have you - there are essentially no restrictions. Nothing need be spoilered, and it can be as terrible as you like.
E.g. two adults wake up next to each other in bed, a Klingon is vaporized by phaser fire.
Content which has mature themes but is also widely acceptable - Lingerie advertisements, Mass Effect Andromeda, Dragon Age: Inquisition - (where sex and violence are implicit and/or handled in a larger context), should not be pornographic and should be handled with at least a minimum level of maturity. That means that images must be spoilered, tagged, and be appropriate for the context in which they appear. Text should also be tagged and appropriate for the context in which it appears.
E.g. adults covered by a sheet are obviously engaging in sexual activity; frank depictions of nudity; sexual innuendo; a person is shot and falls to the ground in a pool of blood or is hit by a car; etc.
Content which has mature themes and which might be available in restricted distribution - for example, the Kushiel's Legacy series of books, or Game of Thrones episodes on HBO (where sex and violence are explicit, but still form part of a larger body of work) - you cannot post images, and you must tag text content, but, if handled in a mature and appropriate way, it will be acceptable on Sufficient Velocity.
E.g. Explicit depictions of adult sexual activity, rape, dismemberment, or other severe physical injury.
Content which has mature themes and which would generally be considered pornographic, outrageously explicit, or offensive - for example, actual pornography; Bible Black; Saw, Human Centipede, etc. - (where sex and/or violence are explicit and form the purpose or a significant portion of the work) is not acceptable on Sufficient Velocity, and may, depending on the circumstances, fall afoul of the Terms of Service prohibition against obscene content.
I'm pretty sure we're somewhere around level 2.
EDIT: What the shit, Xenforo 2.0 doesn't auto-space paragraphs by making one enter sign into two when copy-pasting????
XX
Chapter 4-19: Ambush at Pointe-aux-Trembles
North-Northeast of Montreal, Early Morning of August 13, 1797
It was about four-thirty in the morning, ten minutes after morning civil twilight and about twenty minutes to sunrise, when Ethan Allen took his eyes off the two British schooners lurking upstream and surveyed the boats which were commencing the crossing with him. The British must have staged closer than Montreal to be in the river so early, but at least now the sailors could not be pressed into the defence of Montreal as infantry. The British seemed uninterested in storming the crossing since they were presenting their sterns and weaving about to hold position against the current and wind.
Moments after the Vermonters' boats left the shore, with Allen in the boat furthest upstream, a great cry went up among the men. "FIRE RAFTS!"
Allen spun and spotted smoke against the slowly brightening southern sky, from four small, dark masses that had been released from strings of such shadowed objects trailing downstream of the British ships. Moments later, wreaths of flames began to visibly shroud the objects. "STEADY, MEN!" He turned and roared over his speaking trumpet. "HEED THE HELMSMEN! STEADY! STEER AROUND THE RAFTS AS THEY COME!" Then he seized his spyglass and looked to the south again. Thankfully, civil twilight was bright enough for him to see past the fires.
The British warships held position, trailing long strings of rafts behind them and dispensing only one or two rafts at a time into the channel. "MEN! THE BRITISH ARE JUST DELAYING! THEIR WARSHIPS COWER AWAY FROM OUR ARTILLERY!" Allen announced to his troops to avoid panic.
With some vigorous paddling and the modest current of the river, the Vermonters' first wave managed to mostly outrun the first four fire rafts released down the river. The sole exception was Allen's boat. Three of the fire rafts were improvised from lashed-together wood, but Allen had to help the helmsman push away a flaming bateau (a shallow-draft, flat-bottom boat pointed at both ends, named for the French word for "boat") which had begun the run with a sail that helped it surge ahead of the other three rafts until the canvas burnt away. The bateau came dangerously close to clipping the stern of Allen's boat due to a misjudgement of relative speeds. Shoving away the flaming hull packed with oil-soaked straw with a spare oar was far too close for comfort. Allen had to wipe his brow of nervous sweat as he stepped off the boat onto La Grande Ile—not to be confused with Grande-Ile near Ile Perrot on the other end of the archipelago—and noticed a problem.
"This ground is a lot squishier than the abundant woody vegetation suggested." He observed, looking down, shooing away a fly as he did so. Most swamps had lots of reeds and such to be sure, and perhaps even mangroves, but shrubbery and non-mangrove trees? Ah, it couldn't be helped. "Men! Fan out and search for solid ground to stage cannons on!" Allen commanded, then pulled out his map for a look.
A few moments later, someone shouted to his left. "Sir, the ground over here is pretty solid!"
Allen looked up and spotted the arms waving over some tall bushes, then waved another fly away from his face as he put away his irritatingly-inconsistent map. "I hear you! Hey, gun crews! The ground's firmer over there, past those bushes!" He shouted at a team manhandling the first four-pounder into position to watch over the crossing from Varennes, then beat that fly away from his head again while gesturing to the relevant bushes.
"Mappers couldn't even decide between being consistently completely wrong and consistently only mostly wrong." He grumbled as he squelched across the soft, marshy ground, then raised his voice again for the troops to hear. "We'll have to move the guns to the other side of the island by boat. Maybe the horses too!"
The northern end of La Grande Ile lay almost exactly in the middle between the southern end of Ile St. Therese to the west and the town of Varennes to the east. It was roughly a third of the way across the river to the northeast shore of the Isle of Montreal. Allen's map said La Grande Ile was halfway across the full river, and was a strung-out cluster of small islands. He had dismissed the map position as laughably false after observations, then decided the map looked wrong on the terrain too based on observation. Certainly, it wasn't a cluster of small islands, but the map at least suggested the swampy terrain he was encountering…
"You'd think these bushes would hold the soil together and trap sediment, instead of just tricking my eyes and disguising the marshy land between the more solid clumps. Well, we have to land the guns here anyway to cover the crossings properly." Allen said to himself as he helped hack some branches down for the men dragging the first cannon into position. They couldn't risk any of the draft horses getting bogged down, so arduous manhandling it would have to be, and the horses could keep to the firmer bits of land if they had to come ashore at all.
Allen slapped himself when his cheek stung, finding a squashed mosquito on his palm. "We're going to have to kill a lot of these damned things…" He looked around at the men who were finishing unloading the boats from the first wave. "If we cross the river in dense masses instead of a steady back-and-forth, we make ourselves vulnerable to fire rafts due to crowding!" He announced. "Send the boats back as they are emptied instead of in a wave!"
By the time the army had moved all its men except a few campsite guards and most of its supplies to La Grande Ile, it was a little after six in the morning. As Allen expected, the British had continued dispensing a few fire rafts at a time to slow the crossing. As Allen also expected (and regretted), the mosquitoes and flies were out in force today around the swampy island. "Pah!" Some sort of insect, which he had no wish of identifying, managed to commit suicide via his mouth. "Ugh, why are there so many mosquitoes here? There aren't many large animals here to feed on!"
"Perhaps they smelled us, sir, from either shore, or perhaps these are their breeding grounds and they normally disperse to the shores after emerging!" One of the nearby militiamen suggested (Note 1). "Or they are species that don't normally feed on live animals and perch on us without fear." The young man slapped himself. "Curses, I missed."
"I hope you're right, and we aren't about to break out in even more itching." Allen patted the young man on the back. Then he boarded one of the boats which had just finished loading supplies and was taking on men, and set off for Ile St. Therese.
The second crossing was marginally longer than the first one. Unfortunately, the southeast shore of Ile St. Therese had plenty of ponds of standing water where insects could breed, though the land between the ponds proved thankfully firmer. Allen found himself waving away insects for what must have been the hundredth time this morning as he waited for the scout reports, in case the British were planning to skirmish across the broad expanse of Ile St. Therese with him. Thankfully, the scouts reported nothing. However, a few merchant ships had joined the British warships idling upstream, and brought their own supplies of fire rafts to continue slowing the crossings.
By about 7:15 AM, Allen was forcing himself to not scratch at the numerous insect bites on his face and elsewhere. The late summer heat was already beginning to rise and drive away the cool of the night. It was a humid day, and if the locals at Varennes had been honest about the weather of the past few days, it was likely to rain sometime soon.
The enemy must have brought up a blocking force by now, so camping on the west side of Ile St. Therese and occupying the enemy's attention should be a theoretically productive use of his men. Allen wasn't as energetic as he used to be, especially after the speedy marching and deficient sleep of the past days, and though his men were young they had to do far more of the physical labour. Unfortunately, there were too many insects and the risk of rain was too high, given the usual weather patterns of this region and the days since the last rain. It seems I'm getting so pestered… Allen clapped a mosquito to death with great pleasure …that I'm picking up Blois' paranoia and wishing we'd just baited them from the shore at Varennes. These buggers must really be wearing at me! Bah, we can sit down and have a good rest once we're in Montreal.
Allen had enough numerical superiority against any expected blocking force that he could spread out along the shore and land at essentially any point on the Isle of Montreal that faced Ile St. Therese. He had planned to cross from the northwest end of Ile St. Therese for the shortest possible crossing, which provided the best artillery cover. However, to spend an hour moving the boats around the island to that point in the increasing heat, and then make the men march back south on the other bank afterward, seemed an awful waste…
He called a halt to preparations for the planned northwest march overland. "Men! We shall go due west and cross directly to the Isle of Montreal from there. Our cannons are able to cover the crossing from enemy ships well enough. We will send some scouts first, then cross in force! It's less of a detour down the river, and a wider channel means any fire rafts won't be coming so densely, nor moving so fast!" The road was much further from the shore at the new crossing than further downstream to the north, so the landing would be safer from any musketry from the roadside houses.
The second crossing was completed at about 7:50 AM, due to two feigned charges by the British warships that caused the entire crossing to be cleared for several minutes at a time. It took until 8:10 for the boats to show up at the final 800-yard crossing, after getting the boats around the southern tip of Ile St. Therese. The currents were unfortunately complex there and some of the larger boats, carrying some of the horses, had to be unloaded and humped back into the river after grounding. The cannons were manhandled overland to provide some cover in case the British ships decided to swoop down and pin the transports against the shore. There weren't enough large boats to carry all the horses or even all the guns at once, so it was fortunate that the ground here proved solid and safe enough for unburdened horses. Unfortunately for the men, it was only safe enough for unburdened horses, so the cannons still had to be manhandled.
The scouts arrived on the shores of the Isle of Montreal around 8:25 and fanned out, approaching the string of buildings to their front (the west) along the road. After ascertaining that the road was clear, they spread up and down the coast, probing for contact.
XX
Isle of Montreal, Morning of August 13, 1797
The Upper Canada Militia column set out from Upper Lachine just before 6:00 AM by Ellen's watch. She wanted to take the shorter route of the central road that ran northeast up the island, which could also outflank the enemy if need be, but her men were not familiar enough with the terrain to risk it. On to Montreal and facing the enemy head-on it would be. The route was eighteen miles to mount an ambush at the small town of Pointe-aux-Trembles, which straddled the shore road to the southwest of the southern tip of Ile St. Therese. The Vermonters could use that island as a stepping stone to land anywhere along several miles of coast, but barring some deranged detour, they would have to pass through Pointe-aux-Trembles.
Ideally, such an ambush would allow the repeat of what she'd just done at Upper Lachine, the bloodless capture of a vanguard formation large enough to convince the rest to just go home. From what Ellen had figured out talking to the prisoners, the Vermonters really just wanted canalization of the Richelieu so they could conduct trade more easily. Blois soon confirmed their desire to avoid pointless bloodshed and lasting grievances with the neighbours, and that the Vermonters' secondary plan was to surrender part of northern Vermont draining into Lake Champlain, to persuade the British to build a canal. Ah, what a marvelous strategic manoeuvre, to start a war knowing that your objectives would be achieved regardless of military victory or defeat, so long as you did not wreck your economy by labour force casualties…
The march would be three hours… no, too risky to take so long, she would have to set a pace of about six and a half miles an hour or more. That should shave it down by a bit over ten minutes in theory, an appreciable improvement without unduly exhausting the men. The scouts had left at the same time as the prisoners, to run ahead of the main column, and she'd reorganized the companies to form fourteen infantry companies and one artillery company, the latter of which rode ahead too. Twelfth Infantry was allocated to prisoner escort, which showed her preference to use the Torontonian troops she knew better for autonomous duties.
The column had changed back to their white marching clothes, which should look good running to Montreal's rescue.
Less than half an hour into the march, Ellen's force caught up to and passed the walking and puzzled-looking prisoner column at a steady jog. According to Twelfth Company's reports, the prisoners thought the unsustainable pace was an interesting decision. They believed it would exhaust a third of the men, but allow rapid tactical redeployment, and made quite a novel use of hand carts. They would gradually figure out how it worked in time, but the knowledge did not spread much for the next decade and some.
When Ellen called a shift change to the second crewmen, as they were nearing Montreal, Blois smacked himself in the forehead and groaned. "Taking turns, you can jog whole days… and the vehicles are supply carts too… why hasn't anyone else done it before?" It took a few minutes of pondering before the right wheel of the three-wheeler went over a pebble and Blois was rocked for a moment. "Ah, almost all two-wheeled hand carts use an axle and wheels abreast, where hitting an obstacle results in a twisting motion!" He looked back at the column. "In-line wheels do not twist to the side as badly! These three-wheeled vehicles have natural stability in both axes, and pulling instead of pushing the tripping axle, should it encounter a minor obstacle, reduces twisting!"
Ellen chuckled from where she was sitting at the other side of the vehicle's cargo deck, as sitter for the present hour. "Indeed! We usually have an hourly rotation, but that would be changing crews as we were passing through Montreal."
Blois inclined his head. "I understand the value of secrecy." The strategic mobility advantage was far too high to let the secret out under anything but truly decisive circumstances.
The houses along the road grew denser, and the people staring out at them from windows and doorways grew more numerous. Redcoats became visible in the distance, keeping order among the curious crowds lining the road and peering from roadside windows and doorways through the outer city. The road the column was taking happened to line up with one of the main thoroughfares of Montreal, which would later be named Dorchester Boulevard (and eventually René Lévesque Boulevard), allowing a quick passage. As they came close enough to see the individual faces in the crowd, Ellen plucked her Red Maple Leaf on White banner off the holder to wave it about at the head of the convoy, and a dull cheering reached the convoy a moment later. The remaining safe portions of Montreal's walls were also crowded, and their celebrations seemed louder, the sounds travelling unhindered above the mass of humanity.
The sound increased with every step, every jolt of the vehicles, until Ellen's ears met an echoing wall of noise emanating from the city gate her troops were to pass. As she entered the city, Ellen stood on the cargo deck of her three-wheeler, feet set wide apart and knees bent, to raise her banner as high as possible. Her eyes remained pointed straight ahead, to avoid the risk of ignobly falling off should the three-wheeler encounter a large enough bump in the road, if the pusher didn't register or alert her in time. At least the path was clear enough, and remained generally quite orderly with redcoats keeping the crowds orderly.
It was not the first time the Red Maple Leaf on White flew over the city of Montreal, as the local Shepard Implements office hung their banner outside its front door. However, it was certainly the loudest occasion to date. Shouts of encouragement came from all sides as the initial jubilation passed, blending together into a cacophony of verbalized excitement. The garrison commander rode up alongside the convoy, communicating to Ellen all the information available to him that was relevant to the upcoming encounter, such as the presence of British and local militia pickets along the road north, then rode alongside silently until he saluted and peeled away from the column at the northeast gate. By the time the army finally exited the northeastern gate of the city and the crowds began to quickly thin out, Ellen's arms were tiring. She ultimately set her banner into its holder with a huff, and sat back down.
"You alright, ma'am?" The pusher asked.
"I'm fine enough to take the last shift before we get to Pointe-aux-Trembles, most of an hour from how." Ellen said, before looking across the cargo deck at the other occupant. "Blois needs to convince his friends that we mean well. Being sweaty and unkempt would give a poor impression."
Blois inclined his head. "Thank you for the consideration, but it would be poor manners to make the lady who is my captor exert herself so in my stead, no?"
Ellen smirked. "Actually, the normal twelve-hour rotation is arranged to ensure everyone gets a four-hour block of uninterrupted rest on decker duty, and you're the decker for now."
"She won't even let me assuage my personal honour!" Blois said with a fake swoon. Ellen just laughed and patted his knee.
Blois registered her flippancy and ignoring of propriety. He was yet unsure whether Ellen was showing the magnanimity of a confident victor or an extreme focus on ends over means, but his understanding was rapidly skewing toward the latter. This boded well for his future, as he likely faced a choice of emigrating or being scapegoated for the failure of the campaign. If her troops could move as quickly as he surmised… Marceau wouldn't have much of a chance at Quebec, accounting for the fortifications.
After stopping for a second shift change where the column also changed back into their brown battle uniforms, the infantry caught up to the artillery half a mile shy of Pointe-aux-Trembles. The horses had been driven at an eight-mile-per-hour trot (the usual working gait of horses) for most of the redeployment, but had slowed to a four-mile-per-hour walk as the destination neared, to give them time to rest and cool down in case of need for tactical speed. The walk also threw up far less dust than a trot, even if the thin white cloths draped over the horses, to keep the sun off and for the occasional pouring of river water to further cool the beasts by evaporation, were rather visible at a distance.
The column began to arrive at Pointe-aux-Trembles just after 8:45 AM and disembarked from their vehicles, which were left to the villagers and a few militiamen to watch. The army proceeded on foot to prepare to meet the enemy. Some vague distant sounds, which must have been the Vermonters yelling and cursing at the crossing, registered intermittently as the First Company took up positions in the northern side of the town.
According to the scout and local redcoat pickets' reports, the enemy had begun sending scouts across with the first ones landing most of a mile north of the town at about 8:25. The townsfolk who were unwilling or unable to take up arms had almost all fled to Montreal or holed up in their cellars at the behest of the navy, which had sent men ashore to warn them. Those few denizens that remained were volunteer fighters.
The pickets reported that they had encouraged the townsfolk to prepare their reserved fire rafts and launch them when the army began crossing in earnest. A group of brave volunteers had just returned from sending off several fire rafts near the enemy crossing, while others had released rafts closer to the town. The scouts had notified the pickets of the plan, and fired a couple blanks in the general direction of the Vermonter scouts when they came too close to the town, to ward them off.
Most of the volunteers were sent to the back with the artillery, because Ellen wanted a bloodless ambush if possible. Sure, they didn't want to risk their homes by starting a fight and they claimed they would follow orders, but Ellen did not expect their fire discipline to be up to her standards. She had enough men for morale shock already, and keeping the local population in reserve to commit only at the point of decision if need be was not overtly insulting.
Ellen surveyed the fields the enemy were landing in for a moment before making her tactical decisions. "The enemy is still distant! Joseph, take Second through Fourth and Eighth through Eleventh Companies, and flank around to the west. It's our left, their right. The fields there are only harvested out to around our musket range. The crops along with the rising slope will screen your men from the roadside houses. Be prepared to form a line and advance out of concealment when you hear my whistle! Only posturing will be required unless things go severely wrong. Pick up some of the local volunteers to help guide you among the fields, and grab a spare flag of parley from Mary to lead the force out into the open."
"Acknowledged!" As Joseph set to his task, he passed the artillerymen, who were manhandling their guns as far through the town as they could without being spotted. The horses were left outside the town, as men could make tighter manoeuvres and were far stealthier.
The tail of the army took another fifteen minutes to fully trickle in. The thin crust of First Company men holding the northern perimeter of houses were reinforced by Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Companies filling the gaps between the buildings, in case of a quick push by the Vermonters. Then Thirteenth and Fourteenth Company joined them, and the trap was almost fully set. All that remained was for Joseph to work his way around through the fields.
XX
North of Pointe-aux-Trembles, Isle of Montreal, Morning of August 13, 1797
At just short of 8:40, the scouts signalled back to Ethan Allen that the immediate area was clear. So, the first wave of the final crossing set out.
Then someone yelled yet again. "FIRE RAFTS!"
Allen whipped around and spotted smoke coming from the reeds along the shore to the southwest… then some of the reeds began to move, and the rafts burst out from among them. Some were already aflame, while others were still smoldering. Other, smaller clumps of reeds were running up the shore to the town. Those were the disguises worn by some very brave men who had sent the rafts on their way.
"PREPARE TO REPEL RAFTS WITH OARS IF NEED BE!" Allen shouted to his troops, then grabbed one of the spare oars in his boat. "HOW THE HELL DID THEY HAVE THIS MANY FIRE RAFTS PREPARED AND RESERVED???" He bellowed as the rowboat he was in heeled in evasion. "I KNOW THESE DAMNED THINGS ARE CHEAP… UUUUAAAHHHHHH!!" He snarled in exertion as he shoved a raft away with his oar, much like at the first crossing. "…AND FAST TO MAKE, BUT WHAT THE HELL IS THIS???"
It should have taken eight to ten minutes to cross. Instead, a singed, haggard and tired fleet of rowboats finally ran the last boat aground fifteen minutes after the crossing was launched. A few of the boats were already asking permission to set off again, to which Allen responded: "Just like at the first crossing, concentration makes it easier for future delaying tactics to hurt us! Now go!" He could reasonably expect about two hundred and fifty men to come over in about twenty minutes, and then a rate of about two hundred and fifty men landing every ten minutes after that.
After taking a moment to collect himself and survey the landing site, Allen turned to address the scout leader. "So, you signalled something about a few shots from the south?"
The man nodded. "Blank shots from the town, sir, the muzzle smoke is distinctive and they were fired at a high angle."
Allen raised an eyebrow. "Nothing else of note?"
"No, sir. Coastal road's secure and fields beyond are empty too. They've only been harvested out to about a hundred fifty yards, and the crops are damned tall out there, but the road's safe enough to use."
Allen grunted. "Well I'd prefer pickets out in the fields, but they wouldn't be able to see a damned thing anyhow with the tall crops, especially with this wind. I'm going to announce our intentions to the locals. It wouldn't do to create misunderstandings and grudges among our future countrymen." Standing around waiting and doing nothing would just make his half-swollen face itch more, and an announcement was important after all…
Ah, he should go see how his horse had fared, the combination fire and water had likely terrified the creature. Riding it during actual military action would draw fire, but if he was going to go shout a message, having a restless horse was easily excused compared to pacing about erratically in case of some rifleman trying to pick him off.
He rode up to about four hundred yards from the town—well outside effective musket range and a devilish shot for a rifle with how his horse was moving about—and bellowed through a speaking trumpet. The translation from French came out to: "Canadiens! We wish peaceful passage! We will simply pass through your town to Montreal to convince the garrison there to surrender! No bloodshed should be necessary this day! Please do not startle the men by shooting at us when we pass through your town!" They would do this, avoid shedding the blood of future neighbours and countrymen, not because it was easy, not even because it was hard, but because it was both practical and a good demonstration of moral decency.
There was no response, but Allen did not expect any. If the town's buttoned-up windows and doors were any indication, the civilians were taking shelter as best they could. Well, he would have to probe the town soon. If the British had been delaying him so long, they must have a blocking force in position by now, but why hadn't they met him at the landing zone then? If the British were somehow absent, taking the town quickly would prevent the enemy from surprising him.
By about five past nine, Allen had about seven hundred men and two cannons ashore. Apparently, the men were tired and couldn't paddle very quickly when not spurred by fire rafts. Well, that couldn't be helped.
Gathering up about four hundred of his men, Allen climbed atop a boulder with some minor difficulty, then gave a briefing. "We will probe the town to see if there is an enemy blocking force. It is unlikely unless they just happened to show up between us starting crossing and now, but they may have brought perhaps a hundred or even two hundred men, and should be we encounter such significant resistance, we will shelter behind the houses along the road into town and skirmish to fix them into place, so our main force can flank them through the western fields after crossing. I don't intend to throw away lives storming a town if I can get them to surrender peacefully. The scouts reported a few warning blanks fired from the town, likely some panicked, scared civilians. You are all steady men, old enough to understand the sort of rash errors often made by youth, so should the shots prove any more than that, I expect you will take cover, not take needless risks, and wait for reinforcements. Am I understood?"
Allen saw only nods, with some of the men scratching at their faces or necks as they nodded… God, he wanted to scratch his own face… He resumed shouting, trying to distract himself from the effects of the remarkably powerful insects Canada had defending it. "GOOD! Remember that, and remember to maintain discipline and conduct yourselves honorably. That is all." Then he climbed down with the assistance of one of the French officers who had helped train the militia this past winter. Some years ago, he would have simply hopped down.
Allen moved with his men along the road toward the town, a few ranks back from the head of the column, then advanced to the front again as they reached two hundred yards, to give another notice through the speaking trumpet. This time, he used English. "Local citizens! We are coming to inspect your town for hostile forces. Do not be alarmed, future neighbours and countrymen, our men WILL conduct themselves honorably and disturb you as little as possible."
There was once again no response. The column resumed advancing down the road, tense and ready to jump to the sides behind the houses at any moment.
Forty yards from the town perimeter, a shrill whistle blast pierced the air. Allen's column split immediately at the obvious ambush signal, with Allen evading to his left side (the east). The men piled behind the houses, then the faster ones peered out in confusion due to none of the slower ones getting shot.
"PARLEY?" That voice blaring out over the crowd was awfully high-pitched… like a child's, but probably with their own speaking trumpet to be that loud.
"This better not be a prank by some brat with a whistle!" Allen growled as he got back to his feet. He looked around the far side of the house he was up against, to the east of the road, and spotted hundreds of muskets levelled through every building's windows and doors and around their corners, and his jaw dropped. No… not ANOTHER failure…
After a spell, Allen registered a militiaman tapping his shoulder. "Sir! Sir, are you alright?"
"Bwah?" He caught himself. "No, I'm not alright, I may not be drooling from a second stroke from this shock, but to come this fucking far and get ambushed like this… do you THINK I'd be alright?"
"No, sir." The young man shook his head rapidly.
Allen palmed his forehead. "Ugh… I shouldn't take it out on you for just trying to help."
While Allen was doing a mental review of how many enemies he'd seen, some other youngster decided to be distinctly unhelpful by stating the obvious. "Sir, they're offering parley!" The scout yelled from the window of a house across the road.
Allen rolled his eyes and shouted back. "DO I SOUND DEAF TO YOU?"
"The army in the fields is offering parley!" The scout elaborated.
Allen spun to face the man. "WHAT?"
"At least a thousand men are in the western fields, sir, walking forward with a flag of parley!" The man shouted as Allen looked past the line of buildings… those fields looked a bit browner than he remembered.
Allen raised his spyglass. "Well shit." His teeth ground together as he contemplated the sickening but obvious final choice his options had been cut down to.
"PARLEY?" The voice from the town yelled again, and Allen peeked down the road into town. There was a big white flag waving out of an open window, visible from the roadside houses.
Allen forced his jaw to open. It wouldn't do to crack a tooth. Sagging in place was healthier… There was nothing for it. He was grossly outnumbered, and the men didn't sign up to be massacred. At least the enemy seemed merciful, given the posturing and display and offering truce before any shooting… He had to keep his rage at this failure under control…
…God, his face itched even more when flushed with anger, the back of his hand too… He took his speaking trumpet off his belt, and there on the back of his hand was a welt of more than two inches across. How did he miss that mosquito bite until now? No matter… He forced himself to take some deep breaths before raising the speaking trumpet to his mouth and poking the other end around the corner of the house.
XX
Pointe-aux-Trembles, Isle of Montreal, Morning of August 13, 1797
"WE ARE WILLING TO PARLEY!" The older man replied with his speaking trumpet, from what Ellen could see by her mirror.
"Johnson, stand up with the flag please." She ordered. The redcoat officer nodded and rose to visibility, holding the large white flag out the window. She raised her speaking trumpet to project over the windowsill again. She'd left it on her vehicle during the first ambush and only remembered to fetch it when she saw Allen using one from horseback earlier. "VERY WELL, WE ARE COMING DOWN UNDER FLAG OF TRUCE! RELAX, MEN!"
"I SHALL WAIT IN THE OPEN FOR YOU! STAND DOWN, MEN!" The older man replied as he waved his white handkerchief over his head and slowly walked to the middle of the road, then proceeded some steps closer to the town.
Ellen stood, raising her smaller white flag, then trumpeted in the direction of the western field troops. "FIELD FORCES, CEASE ADVANCE! STAND BY!" As they stopped walking, she handed the speaking trumpet to Johnson, left the window, went down the stairs and out the door, and met the older man halfway between their forces. "Ethan Allen, I presume?"
The older man inclined his head. "Indeed, may I know the lady's name?"
Ellen set her shoulders and gave a bow, right hand held over her chest in a fist. "Ellen Shepard, Upper Canada Militia Commander."
Allen's mouth flapped a couple times before an exclamation of "Surely you jest?" burst from his lips. "How is that possible? We would have heard of preparations for massed exercises near Kingston or further east! We would have heard a week or more ago! And surely supplies for such an exercise would require even greater lead time?"
Ellen kept her face carefully blank. "We walked."
Allen's face twitched violently for a moment, then he swallowed and spoke. "Now I know you jest. It isn't polite to play with your food, young lady." He waggled a finger and pouted in an admonishing fashion.
"We walked with great enthusiasm (Note 2)." Ellen amended. "Well, I hope you are amenable to the same surrender terms as your friend Blois."
"Which are…?" Allen narrowed his eyes, still off-kilter and annoyed at her perceived japing.
"I should call for him." Ellen turned and cupped her hands around her mouth. "BLOIS! COME OUT HERE!"
"HE'S ON HIS WAY!" Johnson shouted back, then the door opened and Blois strode out.
"I presume they surprised you at the village?" Allen said as the Frenchman came close enough.
Blois nodded. "Aye, they managed to get there ahead of us. I wasn't about to throw away lives trying and failing to assault a prepared and superior force while most of my men were still caught in the open or even in boats. We promised these men that their lives would not be spent carelessly."
"So that's why the British delayed us so long during the crossings, to give her time to move up here after stopping you." Allen grimaced.
"Yes." Blois grimaced back.
"HOW?!" Allen roared, hands grabbing at his hair, then caught himself, removing his hands from his head and clamping his mouth shut. He resumed after a few moments of being eyed expectantly. "How little equipment are your men carrying? Endurance running would make eighteen miles possible in less than four hours, but that's carrying next to nothing and running for the sake of running!" He scowled at Blois' grimace. "Military secrets I see." Allen sighed and shook his head. "I understand."
"So…" Ellen changed the subject. "Blois, tell him the terms you surrendered under."
Blois sighed. "Well, about a thousand men were taken captive at first. Since I surrendered, the Canadians had hostages, so the men on the south shore were convinced to mostly disarm, and agree to all go home and take no more aggressive action. These men released under a parole-like agreement were allowed to keep five hundred muskets, and another hundred men, mostly sole sons, were paroled back from the north shore. The remaining prisoners have been escorted to Montreal."
The oath of parole was one of the rules of war in this time period. Men could take an oath not to attempt escape in exchange for some freedom of movement. An oath to not take up arms again until "released" by a prisoner exchange would allow men to return to their home countries. This was generally only for officers, as the enlisted were often too hard to keep track of, but since an agreement to go home was the best the Canadians could get, it was what was asked of the Vermonters.
Allen gave a high, wide-eyed frown and leaned his head and shoulders back. He chose to look theatrically disturbed to express his skepticism without outright rudeness, let alone the anger coursing through him. He had been so close, but this woman's army had just sprung out of nowhere… "Don't patronize me, Blois. If you're cooperating with her because you thought me impetuous at the meeting yesterday, then I apologize, but give me the real terms, please."
Blois shook his head. "Those were the real terms. We were right in our assessments. The Canadians really would prefer to avoid bloodshed. We also believed correctly that mere intimidation should resolve things without need for deaths and lingering resentment. It's just the tables that have been turned."
Allen's face went blank for a long moment in contemplation, until Ellen yawned, which triggered both the men yawning. Ellen broke the ensuing awkwardness after a few seconds. "How many men do you have? I need to consider how many I'm willing to parole back from this side immediately after the surrender."
Allen looked toward the landing zone and found his field of view obscured. Surely the men in charge of the crossing were competent enough to see and hear the ambush being announced, and thus stop or reverse the crossing, but even then… "Well, about a thousand men should be across now, with a thousand men still on Ile St. Therese."
"A good number…" Ellen said. "Very well, all the men on Ile St. Therese will be allowed to go home after disarming and I'll agree to release up to a hundred prisoners from this group as long as I have over eight hundred to take back to Montreal. However, I can only let them keep a hundred muskets, since Blois' contingent are going home with plenty. They should be able to meet up, but can protect themselves well enough on their way home regardless. They will return home in good order and peacefully, under oath, and agree to not take up arms until officially released in formal prisoner exchange. These are my terms."
Allen snorted. Really, a generous opening position trying to overwhelm his thought processes after the huge morale shock of an ambush? He was neither senile nor inexperienced enough for that, even if he had frozen up for a moment earlier. "How about two hundred muskets? Blois' lot went home with twenty-six hundred men and about a fifth that number of muskets, so it's only reasonable that my thousand men go home with a similar one-fifth."
Ellen smiled. "We'll be searching your baggage train left in camp south of Varennes while your men are ferrying back across the river, to make sure you only carry a reasonable amount of ammunition and to check if you've been looting the homesteads you've been passing. Assuming conduct has been good so far, you will get exactly one hundred and fifty muskets for security. We will also need to borrow some of your horses to pull the cannons, but the horses will be returned or compensated for after the conflict is concluded, just as the horses we borrowed from Blois' force will be returned or compensated for. We will also seek to return captured muskets with names inscribed after the peace settlement."
"Oh, and how would you search the camp? The boats would surely have all fled to the Ile St. Therese shore." If he could snatch some scraps out from under this woman's attention…
"I instructed the Upper Lachine civilians to portage their boats around the rapids and row them downriver to Montreal, and made sure the garrison knew to expect them. Given another hour or two they can be here. If those thousand men on the island refuse to disarm, our warships and even a token blocking force can bottle them up on Ile St. Therese until the next summer storm comes by and makes their camp more miserable than the bugs have managed, not to mention supplies would be a problem." Ellen glanced pointedly at the insect-bite welts on Allen's face. "While we'd prefer to avoid any bloodshed, we DO have control of the river via our warships, and since we have that, checking if your men were doing any looting before letting them go home is legitimate."
Allen sighed through his teeth, knowing he was massively outmanoeuvred, and that the terms were already quite generous. He tried to speak, but had to unlock his jaw first. Apparently, his anger had overcome his wilful resistance and his jaw had clenched again even while he was mentally deflating in defeat. "You'll surely get many true and false grumbles about theft of personal possessions if your men went fully through the baggage train, but I'll accept it. Since you have full control of whether the men get to simply go home or be a self-guarding prison camp on a swampy, mosquito-infested island, you get to check our luggage first. That's easy enough to explain to them." He gave a sharp nod. "My men and I are in your care."
Ellen nodded. "I will write a note for the escort who will take you to Montreal, to ensure you are not humiliated as you were twenty-two years ago. Presently, no one in Montreal has the authority to override my command, authorized by the governor-general for this conflict. May I have your speaking trumpet?"
Allen's eyes darted downward to search Ellen's belt. "Don't you… you left yours behind?"
Ellen thumbed over her shoulder. "In case Captain Johnson has to communicate something important."
Allen chuckled as he pulled the device off his belt and presented it to her in both hands with a theatrical bow. "Usually officers surrender their swords, but…"
"I can't shout orders or make speeches through a sword." Ellen grinned, and Allen snorted in acknowledgement. "Thank you," she said, then raised the device to her mouth, pointed it sufficiently away from Allen, and started bellowing.
As first Ellen, then Ethan, informed the troops of what was to occur, the Vermonter recon force peered around the sides of the houses to observe the L-shaped force ready to close on their landing zone. There was some chatter among the men, but the general air was that they had been outmanoeuvred and it was quite sporting of the Canadians to try to prevent bloodshed inflicted by anything besides hostile wildlife.
XX
"So dies my reputation." Allen growled after the announcements to the men concluded and the troops of both sides began filtering out of cover. He removed his sabre from his hip and presented it in surrender.
Ellen accepted the weapon and clasped it at her left hip. "Your men will understand well enough that you humbled yourself for many of their lives."
Allen sighed. "Perhaps. We DID tell them this was going to be a simple stroll, and that we would make it as bloodless as possible. Should you win, I hope you can move quickly enough that we can enact our contingency plan, for surely the British will want something for their trouble." He was either probing how much Blois had told her or how quick she would be to understand what might happen.
Ellen smiled again. "Certainly. Let us conclude the surrender procedures quickly, then I will signal to the ships to let your men get off Ile St. Therese and go home. We may have time to work out a preliminary annexation plan this evening that will ensure a canal is built." Defence Scheme Green had been well-planned, so she should have the time for a short meeting after reviewing the next stage of the operation with the officers.
"I will look forward to it, assuming I am not enraged to another stroke." Allen grumbled.
Ellen presented a hard, imperious face. "As I said, no one in Montreal has the authority to overturn my order. They WILL not humiliate you as they did in 1775."
Allen grunted. "I sure hope so, because one way or another, I want to live long enough to see a canal being planned, if not built."
Ten minutes later, a handful of boats borrowed from the locals of Pointe-aux-Trembles, carrying three Vermonter officers under oath of parole and some Upper Canadian militia and redcoats, and flying flags of truce, began to paddle across the river. The militia and regulars were third crewmen, who had not pushed the vehicles en route from Upper Lachine and thus were relatively fresh. Their three-mile crossing, going east-southeast around the southern tip of La Grande Ile, then heading downstream with the current to Varennes, should require about thirty-five or so minutes with the current and wind. They would inform the handful of camp guards of the surrender while under the cover of the warship guns in the river, then quickly inspect the Vermonter supply wagons to look for egregious amounts of weapons and ammunition. The Vermonter officers supervising would ensure fair conduct by the search parties.
Half an hour after the surrender, the eight hundred new Vermonter prisoners were marched off toward Montreal, escorted by Eleventh Company, which was supervised by Mary and her fiancé William Carleton. Another hundred men were to be paroled back once the rest of the Vermonters were on the other shore, as relayed by the warships monitoring the progress of the evacuation. The locals who had not fled emerged from their hiding places and set about restoring their lives while generously supplying hot meals and praise for the soldiers. Ellen insisted on paying for the former, and was grateful for the latter.
An hour and a half after the Vermonter surrender, the disarmed Vermonters began to land at Varennes, and the Canadian presence on the east shore was increased slightly in case of unpleasantness. The Vermonters were allowed to witness the minor amounts of materials, namely some spare weapons and additional ammunition, confiscated from their supply wagons. Then the boats left for the Isle of Montreal to deliver those materials. Half an hour later, all the disarmed Vermonters from Ile St. Therese had arrived at Varennes, and the final hundred were sent off while the Canadians began rowing all the other boats back to the west side of the river.
Ellen considered a post-battle speech on necessary conduct in Montreal to pass the time, but that would be best with all the men present. Hmm, if they proceeded southward to find a decent-sized stream or several to wash in, the boat crews would be able to catch up. Ah, but the artillery had to proceed toward the next battle at Quebec, now that it could safely be done without the Vermonters' knowing. The cooling covers they'd applied to the horses could not be constantly used, or the horses would fall ill from having wet fabric on their skin for extended periods of time. The horses would have to walk, and the army would meet up with the artillery at the small city of Trois-Rivieres. Since the artillery company was not even at a full 150 men, another company would have to be sent with them for security.
She sent Joseph forward with Tenth Company and the Artillery Company, while Cato rode on ahead to prepare the way for the troops by arranging for supplies. Joseph was specifically instructed to remind the men to avoid venereal disease or risk thereof, and to have the men wash themselves before Ellen's army reached Trois-Rivieres. The two companies who had been detached to escort prisoners would have to be briefed on the hazards by their officers and sergeants. William Carleton and Mary should have reminded everyone when Eleventh Company arrived in Montreal with the second batch of prisoners, but Ellen would check to make sure.
After sending her brother-in-law and brother off to the north, Ellen led the march south. The pace back to Montreal was more modest than the usual six miles per hour of daylight marching. It was hot, though thankfully some cloud cover had come in since the morning, the men were tired, and there was no need to parade past the prisoners. Allen was a smart enough man that he could reach and spread important conclusions, especially as defeated and humiliated as he surely felt after this debacle. Others could too, but the chances of people of note believing them were rather lower.
Blois had been brought along to help ensure the second landing could be persuaded to give up. He had to be in good health and of obviously clear mind, so he could not be drugged, but at least he was politically trapped in Canada by dint of being the first commanding officer to surrender, without even putting up a fight. If he went back to France he would almost certainly be scapegoated for his failure and mistrusted… if not jailed or worse. His being shown how the army moved was necessary, and could be rationalized as reasonably safe.
To make sure that the prisoners arrived first, to let the trailing elements catch up, and to improve the state of the troops, Ellen ordered the men to take a quick bath, splitting men up among the streams north of Montreal to not crowd the water supplies too badly. A good splashing with cool water followed by some soapy scrubbing and rinsing certainly helped the men relax after the tense morning and refresh themselves in the hot, humid early afternoon. Changing into casual clothing—which were under no regulations, unlike marching and battle uniforms—made the militia look a motley bunch, but the improved smell of the army was generally appreciated. Their uniforms could be washed in Montreal by locally hired laundresses.
XX
After washing themselves in some streams north of Montreal, the men were directed to assemble in a recently-harvested field, where many fell into relaxed stupor or outright dozing. Eventually they noticed that the men showing up freshly groomed were those who had been assigned to row the boats back from the eastern shore—the last ones to regroup—and they began rousing themselves as the army would surely soon be on the march again. They looked forward to hot food and warm bunks in Montreal… and perhaps some pleasant company too.
Then they saw Ellen stand up on the back of her three-wheeler at the south end of the field, while four men, including Blois and Johnson, steadied the vehicle—the small parking brace (Joseph had borrowed the term from artillery parks as far as he was aware) might be insufficient for the task. The army quieted themselves in anticipation of a speech.
"We are all tired from our great march, and from achieving something to be proud of. Some of our Native friends and countrymen have a tradition of counting coups in battle, with touching an enemy in battle without harming him, or capturing a foe alive, being considered notable achievements worthy of respect. Clearly, the former is grossly impractical, but the latter is certainly valid. We have captured thousands of foes and convinced thousands more to give up fighting, without even a drop of blood being shed. If we were to count coup by eagle feathers as some of our Native friends do, then we have earned as a group something between a pillow and a small blanket." She snickered, setting off a wave of snorting and chuckles.
Ellen resumed once the audience had quieted. "Know that after our night of rest in Montreal we will go forth and do it again at Quebec, and on our way back you can regale the curious maidens with tales of your heroic feats, of how the enemy trembled and threw down their arms at your very presence. After all, on the frontier we have far more young men than young women, so when the time is right, I would encourage you to convince them to immigrate… though your sleeping arrangements and any accusations against you will be registered with the officers. I'll have no woeful tales of abandonment or seduction on my watch!" She waved a finger back and forth, and another rumble of amusement passed through the crowd. "Unfortunately, the time is not yet right."
She sighed loudly. "Times of great stress naturally drive men to desire sexual comfort. Few among the married men were not 'seen off' by their wives." She grinned, and the married men in the crowd grinned back. "I know this is a lot to ask, but please, try not to sleep with anyone in Montreal today, especially with the dangers of contracting diseases. Married men, if honour does not stay you, think of the health of your wives and future children if you should contract the incurable dread disease that is the Great Pox, syphilis. Single men, think of the choices you will have in eager maidens when returning triumphant, if you were not confined to barracks for committing seduction today. If you manage to convince some locals to put you up for the night instead of using the barracks, it must be registered with the sergeants, and they'll record any complaints in the morning, pending investigation by the Montreal authorities. Incapacitation by the clap or other sexually transmitted diseases will be considered a form of desertion, and will be made public knowledge. Married men who cheat on their wives will receive a public beating from said wives, as is their right. Any questions?"
From where he stood to her forward left, Johnson raised his voice and stuck a hand up in front of her face. "Ma'am, would having the wife publicly beat her husband not also punish the entirely innocent wife by damaging her husband's reputation, and thus make her look worse as his associate?"
"Captain Johnson asks if the wife would look bad for punishing her husband in public!" Ellen broadcast to the crowd. "Unfortunately, yes." The crowd mostly grimaced or frowned at that. "Since the days of knights and castles, public disgrace has been the means to punish husband-battering wives. Since the man has either failed to govern his own behaviour, thus forcing his wife to such excesses, or failed to reign in her excesses, so his is the fault if she should batter him (Note 3)!"
Is she going somewhere with this? Johnson thought. Maybe she's just tired and her focus is wandering?
"However, since before the Old Testament was scribed, women have been regarded as civilizing influences on men (Note 4). In adultery, certainly the fault is in the character of the adulterer, and in all objective morality the betrayed wife has the right to punish him, but she should also be aware of her own failure to keep him properly disciplined. After all, when a child is spanked to teach them that the breaking of certain rules yields painful consequences, does the hand of the adult not sting?"
She smacked herself loudly on her left palm, the hand holding the speaking trumpet, then held up her right hand. "Would it not be cowardly of the adult to resort to tools, to spare themselves of that stinging reminder of their own failure to teach?" Violence with tools tended to be far more damaging, and so Ellen took this chance to demonstrate the moral cowardice of those who used tools to physically discipline children. Manpower was valuable, and she would not tolerate needless and lasting damage to her future resources.
She lowered her hand after turning it a few times for the sight of the audience. "Therefore, an adulterer's wife will also suffer somewhat when punishing her husband's disgraceful misconduct." She paused for a moment, struck by realization. If she was already planning to protect future manpower, she should address all possible means of protection for present manpower. "Now, men, there IS an alternative if your control fails and you absolutely must seek sexual release despite your exhaustion. The least immoral and dishonorable choice left, compared to risking spreading diseases, is to take care of your own problem, by hand and sword (Note 5)."
XX SEXUAL EDUCATION AHEAD XX
"Is she suggesting what I think I'm hearing?" Blois whispered incredulously at Johnson from Ellen's forward right.
Johnson held up a hand, waiting for Ellen to speak further. "Clergymen, and those particularly devout among us, would advocate restraint, and verily, that would be ideal. But should self-governance fail, then to save our loved ones from the dangers of pestilence, you must swallow the galling realization that your discipline as men proved inadequate, and turn to what you can do to reduce the damage. There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for others. If the clergy claim that taking care of the problem ourselves is sinful, what of using it to save others from suffering? A frustrated man, whose fingernails dig into his own palm in anger instead of throwing a punch, is certainly committing self-harm, which is considered sinful, but is it not more self-governed and less damaging to society than wanton brawling? God sees, knows and understands when we are forced to choose the least bad option. In this case He may be disappointed at the indiscipline, but it is still far better than to risk spreading contagion to innocents. And if we are to be damned for such, then at least we will know that we did not make others suffer with us."
"Sounds like it… and I thought my father's line was crazy for how we've named our firstborn sons for the past few generations." Johnson said, holding the other front corner of the cargo deck.
Blois gave him a flat look, then glanced meaningfully toward the two militia officers (who were nodding along in approval) who held the back corners of the cargo deck. He quite clearly meant something like I don't know what your family's naming conventions are, but she surely feels those men breathing on her legs, and higher than that if they exhale through their mouths.
Johnson grimaced. If his idea of Blois' thoughts was correct, the man had a point that there was something very off with Ellen Shepard. When even the two men back there found the positioning awkward enough to avert their eyes to the side, staring straight ahead of the vehicle because they had to keep their heads and shoulders braced to catch her if need be, and she saw nothing awkward about it…
Johnson flinched away when Ellen abruptly snatched up the scabbard at her left hip. She held the sword vertically by the hand-guard and scabbard for all to see, with her left arm at full extension, the hilt at the top and the finger guard facing her (Note 6). "Pretend the finger guard doesn't exist, unless you have unusual anatomy down there." The chuckling of the crowd seemed incredulous to him, though somehow a few men still seemed confused? "Grasp it thusly, with a loose grip at first, then reciprocate the hand up and down."
Oh no, she's really serious about this… Johnson's face flushed bright crimson and the summer day suddenly felt much hotter than it actually was. It seemed quite a number of men in the army were similarly flushed or had gone pale in realization, from what Johnson could see.
Ellen on the other hand looked thoroughly bored as she tucked her speaking trumpet under her left arm, grasped the sword hilt with her right hand, slid her hand up and down a few times, then took the speaking tool up again. "Adjust your grip, speed and stroke length to personal preference as you proceed. Be careful to not overdo any aspect to avoid chafing. This process lasts several minutes, perhaps longer, until satisfaction is achieved."
Johnson notice Blois staring with eyebrows raised across the vehicle at him. He understood Blois' intent, but was too stunned to offer a coherent response to the look.
"From what I understand, a handkerchief is recommended to capture emissions and ease clean-up. If anyone is unsure about the details, ask older, married men how this works." Ellen said before putting the sword back at her hip.
Johnson was quite relieved the demonstration was over. Otherwise his face might have singed his eyelashes and eyebrows off, or his jaw might have stuck half-open like an idiot. Blois looked rather more composed and less baffled than Johnson felt. Johnson supposed such self-control was to be expected from a general officer and older, steadier man.
"HUSBANDS, RAISE A HAND!" Ellen suddenly barked, and many hands rose.
Oh God no… she's going further… Johnson thought.
"Some sources have claimed that the emissions are an essential oil, and that expenditure of it would cause perceptible reduction of strength, memory and reason, but it is clear that author was merely jealous of married men for, ahem, frequent opportunities to pay their conjugal debt to their wives (Note 7). Behold these strong, virile husbands standing among us, and think of your fathers, uncles, and older brothers." She swept her free hand across the crowd. "They demonstrate that frequently yielding up emissions does not observably sap strength!" She lowered her free hand after a moment to let that sink in. "You may put your hands down now."
"She meant the devoir conjugal, as enshrined in French law, right?" Blois whispered.
"How should I know? I'm not even courting yet!" Johnson whispered back, still flustered.
XX END SEXUAL EDUCATION XX
Ellen waited for the crowd to lower their hands, noting the exchange below as she resumed speaking. "I do not recommend this solution unless it is the only alternative you can see to risking disease." She grimaced and shrugged, while her eyes sought out the clergy relatives and the Upper Canada Militia's chaplain in the crowd. Good, they were mostly looking pensive or resigned instead of upset. The chaplain however looked like he was about to interrupt, so she paused and gestured toward his place in the crowd.
"Ma'am!" The chaplain shouted.
"Yes, chaplain?" Ellen mentally prepared some rebuttals to religious protest.
"You haven't mentioned how Governor-General Carleton sent out smallpox-infected civilians from Quebec to spread the disease! There were even some prostitutes who were paid to be variolated before concealing their symptoms, who were infectious enough to transmit full-blown smallpox when they were sent out!" The man yelled.
Most of the army gave a visible frisson of shock, and Ellen couldn't manage any reaction more intelligent than "Uh…" due to the sheer surprise. I must really be tired. I'm supposed to be better than this! THINK, Ellen! "That he did." More than half the army gasped at Ellen speaking ill of her future brother-in-law's family, they must have been recent immigrants to be ignorant of the previous Battle of Quebec in 1775…
Ellen pressed on to suppress any objection. "Anyone in doubt can ask William Carleton after we return to Montreal. His father, Lord Dorchester, later regretted using smallpox against the enemy as the disease lingered around the vicinity of Quebec for years. When Dorchester's sons Lancelot and William caught the disease in 1780, he saw it as divine retribution. Lancelot died a yearling from the pox, and you may have seen William's scars. I don't know why that recent time when prostitution destroyed an army slipped my mind, but thank you chaplain! Is there anything else you would like to voice?"
"My twin brother died because the pox spread by those women among the American soldiers and to the civilians living nearby!" The chaplain shouted. "They housed the sick and dying in my family's barn… I will never forget those days! The men crying out for their mothers… other men too weak to cry out… the bodies taken outside to be burned… I will never forget that it was the whores who started the epidemic in the army camp outside the walls! I dislike your suggested methods, and would debate your theological claims, but in memory of those men who died on my watch, which caused me to join the clergy, I cannot protest your efforts to prevent the men from cavorting with whores!" That was as much support as possible from a chaplain.
There was a dull hum of understanding from the army. Such a personal history certainly could explain why the chaplain supported protection against infectious diseases and more specifically loathed the prostitutes that armies commonly made use of. Ellen raised her speaking trumpet again to signal for quiet.
A few moments later, the volume of whispers and murmurs had dropped enough for her to resume speaking. "Well you heard the chaplain's tale! Those whores had the pox on parts of their bodies they weren't exposing and thus did their deadly business. Women of negotiable affections will often hide their diseases for the sake of doing business! If you lack restraint, then at least have the decency to protect your present and future families, and your own health for that matter!" She cleared her throat. "To summarize, you SHOULD not woo any maidens just yet, we will have ample opportunities later, but you MUST not pick up diseases! You also MUST not sleep with any married women!"
She inhaled, then switched to a deep, fast bellow. "ALL WHO UNDERSTAND, SAY AYE!"
"AYE!" The army yelled or perhaps yelped back, seeming a bit startled by the sudden shift.
"GOOD!" Ellen grinned down at the troops. "Let us get on to Montreal, in good company, for good food, and for a good long sleep in real beds!" She turned, hopped off the back of the cargo deck, then circled around, fastening her speaking trumpet to her belt as she did, to take up the pusher position. "AFTER ME!" She shouted and set off at a fast walk.
Sitting down after giving a speech would make a poor impression, even if it was a poor speech by her standards. She'd thrown it hastily together when she realized that there were serious hidden dangers to a triumphant army overnighting in Montreal. The demonstration was completely improvised in the moment because she had very suddenly remembered that outlet for pent-up youths, an outlet which was a lot safer than having a good chunk of the army being incapacitated by the clap or worse.
The steady tamping of thousands of feet on the dirt road trailed behind her, penetrating even the rumbling inside her skull from another yawn. Thankfully, being at the front of the line meant no one could see it. The smell of coming rain was in the air and dark clouds were visible near the horizon to the southwest. The wind had yet to pick up, but the humidity was perceptibly rising. At least the clouds were flat layers instead of towering storm clouds, and they were quite close to the city already, so there was no great rush. If the usual weather patterns held, Jane must have been rained on while sailing on Lake Ontario. The clouds weren't right for a serious storm, so hopefully Jane's travel had gone smoothly.
A message would have to be sent to New Johnstown about the satisfactory conclusion of the defence of Montreal, to inform Jane and the western troops that Montreal was secured. Then the officers could gather for briefings on the details of the advance to Quebec. After all preparations to that effect were in motion, she would speak to Allen about the maps. And then…
Ellen yawned again. Ah, perhaps a quick nap was in order before the meetings, after checking in with the Montreal garrison and city hall, issuing orders for supplies and other preparation, and so on.
Ellen let her thoughts drift, considering the eventual confrontations she could likely expect with the clergy after this campaign concluded over her disease prevention methods. She had a reasonable reputation with them so far, after demonstrating that her factories had good conditions that did not injure women's health, unlike many professions throughout history where women had worked the same jobs as men. Back-breaking labour, for example, was named such because twenty or thirty years of it practically demolished adult male bodies, let alone women's bodies. Older peasant women often suffered scoliosis (warping of the spine) and other health disorders from hard lives, more so if their men had been away for extended periods and they had to take up the hardest tasks.
Ellen had plans to step down the frantic pace of the Upper Canada economy slightly, to improve her business efficiency and ideally encourage the general citizenry to tinker and innovate. This required making her factories more efficient to have more investment-ready funds to support innovators, which presented a serious problem of popular resistance, especially from the women.
Legitimizing self-pleasure among the army was sure to be unpopular, since it cut into women's monopoly on legal and moral sources of sexual release for men (Note 8). There would be grumbles from this attack on women's power and control in the domestic sphere, but it should eventually become a resigned understanding as their husbands and sons weren't coming home sick or as adulterers. However, a woman bringing home a good income had more power in household affairs despite legal coverture turning over her earnings. Refining manufactory processes and trimming some factory jobs presently done by women, even if some men's jobs were removed too, would be an attack on women's power in the public sphere.
Women would not stand for such a double offence against them, especially out on the frontier with a female deficit, where women naturally and habitually held greater bargaining power. And if something was unpopular with women, then it was likely to rapidly become unpopular in general in a society, especially on the frontier, and Ellen could not run afoul of that principle. She would have to delay efficiency improvements until new jobs were ready to receive transferred workers. Well, there would surely be plenty of demand for her goods from curious denizens of Lower Canada, not to mention the large numbers of immigrants who would also require equipment… Good, there should be enough demand for a new factory or two, perhaps some new products too. Maybe even whole new industries could become viable with increasing population and trade. The details could be considered later.
Ellen started as she realized Montreal's walls had gotten quite close while she was mentally rambling. There was no time left to change pushers without everyone in Montreal witnessing it. They would just have to keep going until the city square. There would be no flag-waving this time. She couldn't be bothered doing it one-handed while pushing after the doings of the past few days.
The cheering from the crowds lining the streets, buildings, city walls, and even more than a few rooftops was even louder than before though.
XX
Archivists' Notes, Chapter 19:
1. Spontaneous generation of insects had been disproven in the 17th century already. Children seeing wild animals mating was quite normal, and raising a butterfly from an egg for amusement was hardly rare. Therefore, mosquito eggs and larvae were well understood already.
2. Ellen believes the "very enthusiastic walk" meme was created far, far later, so she must have worded this in a different way. She can't remember how exactly she said it, but this is the best reconstruction of the conversation we can manage.
3. The abuse of men has been dismissed with phrases like "He probably deserved it" since time immemorial. One may compare the bystander reactions to a public accusation of cheating followed by battery by a woman against a man, compared to vice versa.
4. How Walker knew of and taught her this is unknown, as the Akkadian text for the Epic of Gilgamesh was not rediscovered until 1849, with its mention of Enkidu being enthralled and civilized by a whore sent to tame him. Readers should also note that feminine moral superiority was a concept appealed to very often in the modern era. For example, Nellie McClung and other Canadian Feminist icons used the idea to argue for more women holding political office, while conservatives of their time argued against such, since women were seen as "above it all", among other reasons. Chief among those oft-cited other reasons were the 100+ hour work weeks every SI Faction Leader takes as normal, which post-Industrial Age conservatives decry as dangerously unhealthy for the crushing supermajority of people in general, not just women.
5. Ellen would like to note that if she knew how many jokes this phrasing would later inspire, she would… actually, she would still totally have said it. Just because she has an obsession with efficiency and power doesn't mean she can't enjoy a good joke!
6. This sword was not returned to Ethan Allen after the Vermont War, so no one had to summon up the heart to tell the old guy what it had been used to demonstrate. He would likely have suffered another stroke if he'd learned of this.
7. See the Shepard Implements Recommended Reading "The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Late Medieval England" for details. The Church-supported concept of Conjugal Debt states that in a marriage, either spouse refusing sex when the other is desirous absolves the spurned spouse of subsequent adultery and suspends the refuser's right to request a separation on grounds of adultery. The Church also notes that since many women were shy about initiating, husbands should pay their debt to their wives not only when she outright demands, but when she gives some indication of desire. This is indeed the French "devoir conjugal" where women have been known to successfully sue their husbands for lack of sex, while almost all men would rather take mistresses than undergo the humiliation of suing their wives. After all, the wives would surely be more agreeable if the men were not horrifically inadequate in bed or in other ways.
8. In this era, forcing oneself on the wife by violence or explicit threats was a form of wife-beating. The American Founding Fathers—who were not so culturally different—wanted the DEATH PENALTY for wife-beaters and there was noticeable public support for the idea, so no, marital rape was NOT legally or morally acceptable and certainly did exist as a concept at least in Western civilization. As for other cultures… to fail to excite one's wife into consent generally makes the man a subject of mockery, so technically the concept did exist, but tolerances varied.
XX
A/N: No, Allen is not allergic to mosquitoes. After my and my family's personal experiences with them, I have no cause to think Canadian mosquitoes 222 years ago were any less powerful.
Both sides are essentially after similar objectives: minimizing their own AND enemy casualties while achieving strategic goals. Unfortunately, since one side has a massive Outside Context Problem up its sleeve, the other side can achieve its objectives just fine by losing/conceding every battle, and Ellen isn't anything like the speaker Kana will grow up to be… well curb-stomps without a GREAT narrator/orator have a ton of anticlimactic moments.
On that last Archivist Note, this Archive is not quite written for an Early-21st Century OTL Western audience/culture. "Marital rape", "No-Fault Divorce" and other subjects evolved a little differently in this timeline.
