Had John Stedman been a British officer, his actions on the morning of Sept. 14, 1763, would likely have earned him a court martial for cowardice in the face of the enemy. Certainly, his military career would have been ruined and he would have returned to England in disgrace.
In one fell swoop, Stedman deserted the 25 men under his command, leaving them to be slaughtered miserably at what later came to be called the Devil's Hole Massacre. And by failing to alert the nearest garrison of British troops, he allowed a relief column of more than 80 brave British soldiers to march into the deadly ambush as well.
But Stedman wasn't an officer or a military man of any stripe, despite the fact that he was in command that day of an armed column making its way through territory known to be crawling with enemy combatants.
He was a political hack, appointed to the plum patronage position of Master of the Niagara Portage by Sir William Johnson, arguably the most powerful British official in North America at the time. And British politics, along with nearly a century of fawning and incurious written history, made Stedman wealthy in his lifetime and a legend in death.
This is Western New York, after all, a place where a peculiar paucity of real heroes has often led to the canonization of more than a few villains, scoundrels and cutthroats over the years. And where the writers of what passes for history as often as not turn a blind eye to the facts in favor of civic boosterism and the nonsense of nostalgia.
While Edward T. Williams got the bad history ball rolling with his "Scenic and Historic Niagara Falls" (1925), the worst recent offender has to be Paul Gromosiak, whose pamphlets clutter the local history sections of libraries throughout Niagara County. In his writings about Stedman, he's even managed to confuse the French and Indian War with the Conspiracy of Pontiac -- the conflict in which the Devil's Hole incident actually took place.
Fortunately, a new breed of historian has arrived on the local scene, one not given to making a trailblazing frontiersman out of a run-of-the-mill crook. The Reporter's own Bob Kostoff, a walking encyclopedia of the old-style anecdotal local history, was perhaps the first to successfully bridge the credibility gap here with studies such as his "A History of Niagara County New York" (2001), the third volume in the prestigious British publisher Edwin Mellen's "Studies in Local and Institutional History" series.
And Edward W. Ahrens has more recently brought the concepts of exhaustive original research and careful analysis to bear on the Devil's Hole fight in his excellent and highly readable "The Devil's Hole Massacre: A True Story" (2004). While he doesn't permit himself to pass any judgment, the facts presented by Ahrens provide all the evidence needed for Stedman's successful prosecution.
John Stedman came to what is now Niagara Falls in the spring of 1762 -- barely a year before the disaster at Devil's Hole -- to take possession of land and a fortified storehouse that had been built by two enterprising pioneers, James Sterling and John Duncan, at the end of the French and Indian War here in 1760. The men established a thriving business, transporting cargo along the portage trail from their landing on the Upper Niagara River to the Lower Landing at Lewiston and on to Fort Niagara.
Predictably, British officials didn't feel they were getting a big enough piece of the action. Duncan and Sterling were forced from the territory, and Stedman was brought in to run the business the two men had founded. The stage was now set for the catastrophe to come.
The newcomer immediately set about antagonizing the Seneca Indians living in the neighborhood, refusing to allow them on the grounds of what was now his house, as Sterling and Duncan had. He was also niggardly in supplying the locals with rum and trade goods, and by grading the portage trail and making it passable for wagons, put a number of Senecas employed as bearers hauling cargo along the trail out of work.
While Gromosiak and his ill-informed ilk have repeated old wives' tales pointing to the Seneca unemployment as the root cause of the Devil's Hole Massacre -- joking about it being the first instance of labor unrest in what later became the union bastion of Niagara County -- such rubbish completely ignores the big picture. In reality, the action was part of a brilliant and wide-ranging campaign organized by the great Ottawa war chief Pontiac to drive the British colonists back east of the Allegheny Mountains.
Late in 1762, Pontiac sent out war belts made of wampum to more than a dozen tribes, including the fierce Huron of the upper Great Lakes region, the Miami of Illinois, the Shawnee, Wyandot and Delaware of the Ohio country, and the Seneca of Western New York. He advocated a general uprising, timed by the phases of the moon, with the ultimate aim of completely exterminating the British army occupying the frontier.
The Seneca chief Cornplanter was especially receptive to the dark message, having sent out war belts of his own a year earlier. Despite strong Iroquois support for the British at the siege of Fort Niagara and other actions against the French in the late war, he felt his people were ill used once victory was achieved. The noble Seneca sachem pledged his support for Pontiac's campaign.
For the British, the uniting of the tribes would prove nearly fatal. Complacent following their victory over the French, fewer than 1,000 regular troops were deployed across hundreds of thousands of square miles of treacherous wilderness. Pontiac himself led the attack on Fort Detroit in May 1763, sending a signal that would result in the eruption of no fewer than 14 major pitched battles and countless lesser skirmishes over the next four months.
From the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, through southern Indiana and Ohio and deep into western Pennsylvania and the Niagara Frontier, the ill-prepared British were overwhelmed by the brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed onslaught.
Quite obviously, it wasn't a coincidence, no mere accident, that led so many disparate Indian tribes to take to the war path at the exact same time, yet that is precisely the conclusion reached by more than a century's worth of intellectually challenged Niagara County history writers.
Labor unrest, indeed.
Cornplanter appointed a young warrior, known as Farmer's Brother to the English, as his war chief. Leading as many as 300 Seneca fighters, Farmer's Brother attacked the British forts at Presque Isle, Le Beouf and Venango -- now the sites of Erie, Waterford and Venango, Pa., respectively -- annihilating their tiny garrisons and putting the forts themselves to the torch.
As autumn approached, the victorious Seneca returned to their homes along the Niagara. There they prepared for one last fight before settling in for the winter.
Like many self-satisfied businessmen, John Stedman went about his business at Niagara Falls despite the growing threat. He rebuilt a sawmill abandoned by the Frenchman Joncaire, planted an orchard of apple trees and cleared a pasture on Goat Island, the largest of several islands located near the brink of Niagara Falls.
Counting on the British army to protect his mercantile interests, he permitted a garrison to be posted around his compound, and even allowed the construction of Fort Schlosser -- a stockade with four bastions, a mess hall and soldiers' barracks -- on the property he now thought of as "his." Stedman also happily noted the construction of a fortified blockhouse at the Lower Landing, and the establishment of a shipyard on Navy Island, about four miles upriver.
All of these projects required lumber, and Stedman had the only sawmill in the district. His store could barely keep enough goods on the shelves to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, and his well-stocked tavern let no thirst go unslaked.
War-profiteering came easily to John Stedman. It also nearly cost him his life.
On the morning of Sept. 14, 1763, Stedman was leading his wagon train north following an uneventful trip taking supplies down to Fort Schlosser for shipment to the beleaguered defenders at Detroit. Just as he approached the crest of the Lewiston Escarpment, nearly in sight of the garrison posted at the Lower Landing, the calm of the forest was fractured by a deafening volley of close-range musketry. In an instant, a war party of more than 100 shrieking Seneca braves led by Farmer's Brother rushed the convoy with tomahawks and scalping knives drawn and sharpened.
As his men fought and died around him, Stedman had but one thought -- saving his own skin. Putting spur to his horse, Stedman galloped off, leaving his command to its grim fate. But rather than making for the Lower Landing, less than three miles away, he headed for his store, a distance of more than five miles in the opposite direction. Out of pure fear, he added to the time it took to reach help by leaving the portage trail altogether and returning along the brush-choked banks of Gill Creek.
Did the men of Stedman's doomed command realize they would die at the place known to the Seneca for centuries as Devil's Hole? Probably. The lurid reputation of the place, the mythological Seneca belief that the cave located underneath the portage trail served as a portal to the dark realm of an evil demon, would have been well known to anyone who spent any time on the Niagara. What the men couldn't know, of course, was that the dry creek bed above the cave, which they were crossing at the time of the attack, would be known forevermore as Bloody Run.
With the fierce Seneca onslaught in front of them and the sheer 80-foot drop of the Niagara Gorge to their rear, more than a few chose the latter and leapt to their deaths. Panicked horses and oxen plunged over the precipice, and Stedman's wagons were smashed to bits on the jagged rocks below.
At the Lower Landing, Lt. George Campbell heard the firing and set out quickly toward the sound of the guns. With him were about 80 members of the vaunted 80th Regiment of Light Armed Foot, experienced Indian-fighters trained in guerrilla tactics.
But Farmer's Brother was waiting for them. Positioning his best marksmen on high ground with instructions to kill the officers first, he huddled with his main force barely 25 yards from the trail. Again he had the British where he wanted them, with their backs to the gorge.
Its leadership cut down in the opening moments of the battle, the relief column performed as feebly as had the men of the train, earning the everlasting scorn of the Seneca warriors who lived to tell the tale.
By the time the hysterical Stedman reached Fort Schlosser screaming and babbling incoherently about an ambush, most of his party and Lt. Campbell's were dead at Devil's Hole, their bodies stripped and mutilated in what was then the Native American custom. Various estimates of the number of British dead range from 80 to 100, making it the largest single defeat the Indians were to hand the British during what later became known as the Conspiracy of Pontiac.
Once Stedman regained his composure, he told the first of what would be many stories regarding his steely resolve and coolness under fire during the action. There was the painted Seneca brave who attempted to stop his escape by grabbing the horse's reins, only to be foiled by the quick-thinking Stedman, who cut the reins with his saber. In another story, the reins had been shot away by a Seneca musket ball fired at point-blank range.
He took no responsibility for his actions, going so far as to state that his hasty exit from the field of battle was motivated out of concern for the garrison at Fort Schlosser, who may have been in danger of getting overrun as well. The doomed garrison of Fort Grey should have been so lucky.
Stedman even had the chutzpah to seek damages from the British government for the financial loss he suffered as a result of the attack. He was ultimately relieved of his portage-master duties, but managed to insinuate himself back in when his successor was called up for active duty during the Revolutionary War and killed while fighting the American colonists.
Ironically, as Stedman worked for the British during the Revolution, his nemesis at Devil's Hole, Farmer's Brother, helped the American cause. Even past the age of 70, Farmer's Brother served the Americans bravely in the War of 1812, and was buried in Buffalo with full military honors following his death in 1815.
A wealthy man, Stedman retired to England to lead the dissolute life of a peer. But despite the ill-gotten fortune he made running the portage business Sterling and Duncan had founded, and the sawmill first operated by the Frenchman Joncaire, he still wasn't satisfied.
Stedman continued to pursue land claims against the American government until his death in 1808, arguing he was given title to all the land from Devil's Hole to Fort Schlosser by the Senecas as an apology for trying to kill a man made invincible by the obvious protection of a supernatural deity.
As if.
The truly bad "local historians" will continue to publish their pamphlets and pass them off to tourists looking for something to keep the children occupied on the way home. The kids will read tall tales about Stedman's warm-and-fuzzy side -- Goat Island was named by Stedman to celebrate the survival of a goat left alone there one winter -- or the plucky drummer boy of Devil's Hole, William Mathews, who jumped over the cliff in terror and was saved when his drum straps became caught on a tree.
"Legend has it ..." is the poor dodge meant to take the place of solid research and a keen understanding of the subject matter.
Rather than the gallant frontiersman portrayed by the pamphleteers, Stedman was, in fact, a corrupt coward, an opportunist, liar and war profiteer who was willing to sacrifice anyone and anything that got in the way of his own self-interest.
So save the fairy tales for the kiddies. When it comes to history, I'll take mine straight.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 19 2006 |