Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812 | Page 4

him? She also relates that during the
short occupation of Queenston by the invaders, their soldiery were very
tyrannical, entering the houses and stores to look for money and help
themselves to plunder, and even destroying the bedding, by ripping it
up with their swords and bayonets, in the search. Mrs. Secord who had
a store of Spanish doubloons, heirlooms, saved them by throwing them
into a cauldron of water which hung on a crane over a blazing fire. In
this she unconsciously emulated the ready wit of one of her husband's
Huguenot progenitors, a lady, who during the persecution that followed
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, at a period of domiciliary search
for incriminating proofs of unorthodoxy, is said to have thrown a copy
of the Bible--a doubly precious treasure in those days--into a churn of
milk from whence it was afterwards rescued little the worse, thanks to
heavy binding and strong clasps.
Envy having sent a shaft at even so warm and patriotic a breast as that
of Mrs. Secord, Col. Fitzgibbon sent her a certificate, dated only a short
time before his death, vouching to the facts of the heroic deed. It was
evidently one of the cruel necessities of this hard life. The certificate
runs as follows:
FITZGIBBON'S CERTIFICATE.
"I do hereby certify that Mrs. Secord, the wife of James Secord, of
Chippewa, Esq., did, in the month of June, 1813, walk from her house
in the village of St. David's to Decamp's house in Thorold, by a
circuitous route of about twenty miles, partly through the woods, to
acquaint me that the enemy intended to attempt by surprise to capture a
detachment of the 49th Regiment, then under my command; she having
obtained such knowledge from good authority, as the event proved.
Mrs. Secord was a person of slight and delicate frame; and made the
effort in weather excessively warm, and I dreaded at the time that she
must suffer in health in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, she having

been exposed to danger from the enemy, through whose line of
communication she had to pass. The attempt was made on my
detachment by the enemy, and his detachment, consisting of upwards
of 500 men, with a field-piece and fifty dragoons, was captured in
consequence. I write this certificate in a moment of much hurry and
from memory, and it is, therefore, thus brief.
"(Signed) JAMES FITZGIBBON,
"Formerly Lieutenant in the 49th Regiment."
It is well to consider this great achievement of Mrs. Secord carefully,
that we may be the better able to realize the greatness of the feat. To
assist in so doing, it will not be amiss to quote the following, from
Coffin's Chronicles of the War, bearing on the prudential reasons of
Proctor's retreat at Moravian Town. "But whether for advance or for
retreat, the by-paths of the forest intermediate were such as the
macadamized and locomotive imagination of the present day cannot
encompass. A backwoodsman, laden with his axe, wading here,
ploutering there, stumbling over rotted trees, protruding stumps, a bit of
half-submerged corduroy road for one short space, then an adhesive
clay bank, then a mile or two or more of black muck swamp, may,

possibly,--clay-clogged and footsore, and with much pain in the small
of his back,--find himself at sundown at the foot of a hemlock or cedar,
with a fire at his feet, having done manfully about ten miles for his
day's work." This was written of a time of year when the fall rains
predict an approaching winter. Mrs. Secord's exploit was made on the
23rd of June, a time when the early summer rains that set the fruit and
consecrate an abundant harvest with their blessing, nevertheless make
clay banks slippery, and streams swift, and of these latter the whole
Niagara district was full. Many have now been diverted and some dried
up. I am happy to be able to give my readers the heroine's own simple
account of her journey, as furnished me by the courtesy of Mr. Benson
J. Lossing, author of the "Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812," to
whom the aged lady in 1862 recounted it in a letter (given in a note in
Mr. Lossing's book), the historian, on his visit to Chippewa in 1860,
having failed to see her. She was then eighty-five years of age.

"DEAR SIR,--I will tell you the story in a few words.
"After going to St. David's and the recovery of Mr. Secord, we returned
again to Queenston, where my courage again was much tried. It was
there I gained the secret plan laid to capture Captain Fitzgibbon and his
party. I was determined, if possible, to save them. I had much difficulty
in getting through the American guards. They were ten miles out