Two weekends ago, I took a baseball road trip to Cleveland. En route, it occurred to me that we'd be passing by Queenston Heights, and the monument honouring General Isaac Brock, one of the legends of the War of 1812.
Having not seen the monument since I was a kid, a minor detour was called for. And I'm glad we did it.
We have so few impressive monuments to past heroes in this country, but this is certainly one of them. It's worth seeing.
Two hundred years ago this Saturday, October 13, General Brock was cut down at Queenston Heights as the Americans tried to invade. If you go to the War Museum in Ottawa, you can see the actual uniform he wore, with a musket-ball hole in the chest, showing where Brock was mortally wounded.
The grounds at Queenston Heights are now beautifully manicured. There are lovely trees on the embankment where, 200 years ago, the Americans invaded. But standing on that embankment, one can't help but imagine how terrifying it must have been for the 1,300 regular army, militia, and First Nations of the day, to see three times as many American soldiers approaching. The British won the day, killing, capturing, or wounding more than 1,000 American soldiers. But we lost General Brock in the process. His death is immortalized in this painting by John David Kelly.
While our country is right to erect such an imposing monument to General Brock, my visit to Queenston Heights also reminded me of another unfinished piece of business we should attend to. There is a small, handmade reminder at the foot of Brock's monument that we have utterly failed to recognize the contribution made by the Aboriginal leader Tecumseh.
The fact is, the settlers who half a century after this war would become Canadians could not have done so without the invaluable assistance of the First Nations. We have no monument to Tecumseh. We should have one.
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