In a thin red line along the banks of the Niagara River, English, French and Aboriginal Canadians stood side by side in two long ranks, staring 100 yards (metres) across a creek at a field of gray. What they saw were invading gray-coated U.S. soldiers led by Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott, described by one historian as ´´half-man, half-alligator, with just a touch of lightning bolt thrown in.'' They took aim and fired with four-foot (1.2-metre)-long muskets that averaged four or five shots a minute. This was the start of the battle of Chippawa, the first of the Niagara campaign, which would become the longest and bloodiest military operation of the War of 1812. Guns blazed nonstop for 30 minutes on the north side of the Niagara as both sides fired nearly 50,000 lead pellets the size of marbles before the Canadians, who lost 148 men, retreated.
´´You had French Canadians, British Canadians and Native Canadians united against a common foe,'' said Canadian military historian Donald Graves, commenting on the importance of the War of 1812 to Canada's cultural fabric. Young Canadian soldiers returned to Chippawa recently, searching for pellets with metal detectors to mark the exact location where the two sides stood and fought. The project is part of the Niagara Parks commission's plan to develop the area that will include educational signs and guided tours.
´´This is the most pristine battlefield site in North America east of the Mississippi . . . it literally was forgotten about because it was a Canadian and British defeat and nobody wanted to commemorate it like Queenston Heights,'' Graves said. In October of 1812 Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock heard American forces occupying the high ground near the town of Queenston, and in a famous scene re-told in Canadian history classes he led a small army charge and retook the heights, paying with his life when he was shot while charging up the hill on horseback. The excavation at Chippawa, now adjacent to a residential community of two-story houses, comes at a time when Canadians are searching high and low for cultural identity to distinguish them from their southern neighbours. ´´Looking at the past decade, when we've become if anything much more American because of the integration of free trade and a range of other things, we may be about to see a resurgence of a Canadian nationalism and an attempt to reach back into our own roots,'' said David Murray, a professor of Canadian history at the University of Guelph.
Canadians have long been frustrated by living next to the world's most powerful country. Few would have predicted the popularity of a beer commercial running recently on Canadian television that seems part nationalism and part jest. The ad features a guy named Joe who says, ´´I speak English and French, not American . . . and I pronounce it ´about' not ´a-boot' and Canada is the ´best part of North America.''' When Canada's Heritage Minister Sheila Copps visited the United States and addressed journalists, foreign policy and international government officials about her country's cultural angst, she played a tape of the commercial. ´´Someone in North America has to drink pints of beer and play rugby and spell colour right,'' said Sgt. Douglas Gordan, 25, a part-time soldier and full-time college student who said excavating the battle site meant uncovering his history too.
Gordan, whose cap badge is based on General Brock's coat of arms, said many of the soldiers digging up military artifacts have surveyed live mine fields in Bosnia and elsewhere and were more than happy to be doing this instead. ´´It's not that we don't like being thought of as Americans, it's just that we want to be recognised as Canadians,'' he said. Just weeks after their defeat at Chippawa, the Canadians pushed the Americans back to Fort Erie and claimed victory - depending on who is talking. ´´You're damn right we won . . . we're on the land,'' said 85-year-old Ken Sloggett, who flies a Canadian flag atop the antenna of his rusty Ford Thunderbird. Sloggett has lived all his life near the world's longest undefended border - as well as the site where his cousin Red died in 1951 while attempting to go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel - and that is long enough, he says, to know that Canadians might have lost the battle but they won the war.
But Murray says the War of 1812, the last official war between the U.S. and Canada, is best described as a draw.
´´Certainly the fact that the war occurred helped to entrench British cultural roots in Canada in a way that perhaps might not have occurred,'' he said, adding that its aftermath may have been more significant than the actual war: ´´The outcome set the terms of peace, not only between Britain and the U.S. but between Canada and the U.S., and it basically demilitarized the Great Lakes, helping us to move from potential enemies to potential friends and allies.''
Freitag, 04. August 2000