On Common Ground. Richard D. Merritt
a right angle to the river, with several small log houses, possibly for married rangers, within the hollow of the L. The total cost of construction was almost £2,500, half of which was itemized for rum to fortify the Rangers and other workmen during construction.[8]
Later in 1779 another building was erected as a hospital for sick and wounded Rangers.[9] This hospital was the first in the Niagara Peninsula and the earliest purpose-built hospital in what is now Ontario. In the mid-nineteenth century, a buried tombstone was found in present St. Mark’s cemetery for “Lenerd Blanck.” Ranger Blanck, whose actual name was Planck, had been wounded at Sandusky in the Ohio Valley in June 1782 and was probably brought to the hospital at Niagara where he succumbed to his wounds. He may well have been the first European to be buried in that portion of the military reserve later designated as hallowed land, just north of the Rangers’ barracks complex.[10] Interestingly, the house of surgeon Robert Guthrie of the Butler’s Rangers was situated just north of the burying ground.[11]
More buildings were added to the complex, including a barracks “for the Savages,”[12] probably the Indian Department’s personnel, and for the storage of their trade goods. The Indian Department would maintain a presence at Butler’s Barracks[13] until its purchase of Peter Russell’s house on the Military Reserve in the late 1790s. With the Butler’s Rangers officially disbanded in 1784 and the men and their families eventually dispersed to their new land grants, rental space in the complex became available. In 1790, meetings of the influential Land Board were held in the home of clerk Walter Butler Sheehan “in the Rangers’ Barracks.”[14] Sometime schoolteacher and land agent Francis Goring also lived in the barracks for a while.[15]
Just as the log buildings had been erected quickly using green wood they also deteriorated rapidly.[16] When Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe arrived in the summer of 1792 he ordered that at least one building in the complex be thoroughly repaired “for the Legislature of the Country”[17] with the addition of two wings.[18] One chamber served as the House of Assembly, and presumably the other wing accommodated the legislative council. Renovations of Butler’s Barracks were incomplete when the first session of the first parliament of Upper Canada was opened on September 17, and hence the first session was held in nearby Freemasons’ Hall on present King Street, facing the Commons. However, sessions two to five were in fact held at the refurbished Butler’s Rangers complex, where many of the formative laws and legislation of Upper Canada were enacted. The legislative chambers were also used by the Church of England for divine services[19] and probably for occasional indoor Indian Council meetings.
With the heightened threat of war with the United States in 1794 and the future Fort George still just a concept outlined by Royal Engineers’ stakes in the turf of the Military Reserve, Simcoe ordered at least one of the log buildings in the complex be used as a barracks for the mustered militia[20] and proposed that if the “Heights at Butler’s Barracks” were fortified with Carronades, an attack by the Americans and Natives would be “frustrated.”[21] In essence, the fortified Butler’s Barracks complex was very much the precursor of Fort George.
After the capital of Upper Canada was moved to York, the local militia continued to use the complex as did the Indian Department. The battery became less important with the building of Fort George to the south. In a 1799 list of “Public Property” at Niagara, the reference to Butler’s Barracks states simply, “This House was since burnt.”[22] However, apparently not all the buildings had been destroyed.
Niagara, 1790. This map shows the waterfront from the Navy Hall Complex (A) on the left with an area behind marked “reservation for a Fort” (B). Part way along a building is identified as the Rangers’ Barracks (C). Towards the lake, a fortification is indicated at Mississauga Point (D). The small building (E) is probably the site of Widow Murray’s farm. Library and Archives Canada, NMC 17879.
It was already uncomfortably hot and humid at daybreak when a twenty-one-year-old regimental assistant surgeon, Dr. William “Tiger” Dunlop, stepped ashore at the ruinous Navy Hall wharf in July 1814. He and fellow officers of the 89th Regiment of Foot had sailed all night from York after a gruelling ride by horseback from Kingston. He was soon informed that a horrific all-night battle near Lundy’s Lane had just been fought and that soon wagons carrying the wounded would be arriving. He later recalled:
Accordingly, upon inquiring where my wounded were to be put, I was shown a ruinous fabric, built of logs, called Butler’s Barracks, from having been built during the revolutionary war by Butler’s Rangers for their temporary accommodation. Nothing could be worse constructed for an hospital for wounded men — not that it was open to every wind that it blew, for at midsummer in Canada that is rather an advantage; but there was a great want of room so that many had to be laid on straw on the floor, and they had the best of it, for their comrades were put in berths one above another as in transport or packet, where it was impossible to get round them to dress their wounds, and their removal gave them excruciating pain.[23]
One can barely imagine what horrors were endured by the wounded as they were loaded hastily onto the wagons side by side and transported those fifteen long miles from the battlefield to Niagara under a hot July sun. Many of the men had open abdominal, chest, or head wounds or bloody, mangled limbs dangling by fragments of skin, muscle, and tendon. As the creaky wagons bounced, lurched, and jolted over the rough, dusty country roads, blood curdling screams, curses, whimpering cries, and agonizing groans were heard from fellow wounded. There was the gut-wrenching stench of acrid gunpowder, vomitus, oozing bowels, bladder wounds, fetid breaths, and sweaty body odours. For many soldiers the last gasps of life transpired before the wagons even pulled up to the old Rangers’ Barracks.
Meanwhile, Dunlop was informed the regimental surgeon “had gone to Scotland” and the other assistant surgeon was “of a delicate constitution” and too “exhausted”[24] to assist. Dunlop lamented:
Waggon after waggon [sic] arrived, and before mid-day I found myself in charge of two hundred and twenty wounded, including my own Regiment, prisoners and militia, with no one to assist me but by my hospital serjeant [sic], who, luckily for me, was a man of sound sense and great experience, who made a most able second; but with all this the charge was too much for us, and many a poor fellow had to submit to amputation [without anaesthesia] whose limb might have been preserved had there been only time to take reasonable care of it”[25]
In what has become one of the most famous quotes in military medicine, Dunlop recounted the horrors of the week to follow in the old log Rangers’ barracks.
I never underwent such fatigue as I did for the first week at Butler’s Barracks. The weather was intensely hot, the flies were in myriads, and lighting on the wounds, deposited their eggs, so that maggots were bred in a few hours, producing dreadful irritation, so that long before I could go round dressing the patients, it was necessary to begin again; and as I had no assistant but my serjeant [sic], our toil was incessant. For two days and two nights, I never sat down; when fatigued I sent my servant down to the river for a change of linen, and having dined and dressed, went back to my work quite refreshed. On the morning of the third day, however, I fell asleep on my feet, with my arm embracing the post of one of the berths. It was found impossible to awaken me, so a truss of clean straw was laid on the floor, on which I was deposited, and an hospital rug thrown over me; and there I slept soundly for five hours without ever turning.[26]
Dunlop related one particularly poignant story that perhaps better than any other sums up the futility of the War of 1812. A stoic American farmer, possibly a militia man or camp follower, was brought in with a smashed thighbone and a severe penetrating injury. His wife arrived from across the river under a flag of truce and while trying to console her husband who was lying on a truss of straw and writhing in great agony, she suddenly exclaimed:
O that the King and President were both here this moment to see the misery their quarrels led to — they surely would never go to war again without a cause that they could give as a reason to God at the last day, for thus destroying the creatures that He hath made in his own image.[27]
Eventually, all of Dunlop’s surviving patients were transferred elsewhere and Dunlop’s