American town marks a dark episode from War of 1812 – Canada.com

BY RANDY BOSWELL SEPTEMBER 10, 2012

In the Conservative government’s $28-million, bicentennial retelling of the War of 1812, the borderland conflict represents the heroic defence of colonial Canada in the face of expansionist American aggression — a noble alliance of British soldiers, English- and French-Canadian citizens and First Nations fighters that laid the foundations of an independent, modern Canada.

But a New York town’s centrepiece commemoration project to mark the war’s 200th anniversary offers a sharply contrasting perspective on the 19th-century struggle for North America, one that casts the British-Canadian forces and their aboriginal allies — at least in one horrific instance — as vengeful perpetrators of a terrible atrocity that still resonates in Americans’ collective memory.

The December 1813 burning of Lewiston, a U.S. village located directly across the Niagara River from Upper Canada’s Queenston, left not only a torched pioneer settlement but also at least a dozen American civilians dead and mutilated — an attack described by the leading chronicler of the incident as a “massacre” by “unrestrained British-Canadian troops” and the aboriginal warriors under their command.

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