The Niagara Frontier: A History of Connections

The line dividing Canada from the United States is only the most obvious evidence that the Niagara Frontier sits upon a crossroads.  Other borders have run through the region in the past, and even in modern times the area has been primarily shaped by its location at a nexus of cultures, economies, and geographies.  Indeed, the central defining theme of the Niagara Frontier’s history can best be characterized as “connections”:  on the one hand, the destructive and often bloody encounters of antagonists; on the other, the trade, transportation, and communication that have been the main engines of the region’s development.  When conceived as two sides of the same coin, these two kinds of connections have defined the Niagara Frontier, for better and for worse, since the beginning of the region’s recorded history.          

The First Middle Ground:   
Native Americans and Early Europeans

When Louis Joncaire first led the French into the Niagara Frontier in the second half of the 17^th century, a terrible and bloody war waged by the Iroquois (who had armed themselves with advanced weapons through trade with the Europeans) was emptying the area around Lake Ontario of its Hurons, Ottawas, Senecas, Algonquins, and other native tribes.  This calamity struck peoples whose numbers had already been devastated by European diseases.  The refugees headed west, where they eventually formed an alliance with the French that successfully put an end to the Iroquois war effort in the late 1690s.  The alliance was premised in no small part upon a lucrative fur trading partnership developed between the allies.  This cooperative economic underpinning laid the groundwork for a complex middle ground in which a distinct syncretic culture flourished.  Despite their very different agendas, the two peoples came together and forged a common ground to serve both their needs.  If that common ground was far from equal ­ the French’s guns and gifts gave them quasi-“paternal” status according to the system’s logic ­ it was also far from the brutality of open conflict and war.

Throughout the first half of the 18^th century, the French-Algonquin alliance maintained ­ not without difficulty ­ a fairly stable and profitable economic trading region bounded on the east by the Niagara Frontier and encompassing the Upper Great Lakes region to the west.  But by that time they were no longer the only players in the Niagara region:  the British, led by Sir William Morris, had begun to arrive, eager for their own share of the fur trade. As the stakes grew higher for the two had helped create and gambled instead on a unilateral military solution.  In the Seven Years’ War with the British that followed, the French and their Native American allies were defeated.  The middle ground at least temporarily survived, however, as the result of Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763.  In that year Senecas and Chippewas led by Chief Pontiac occupied all the British forts in the area except Niagara, Detroit, and Pitt.  The ensuing military stalemate gave Pontiac the leverage he needed to force the British into a role similar to the one previously held by the French.

The next chapter in the Niagara Frontier’s history is brutal and all too familiar.  During America’s Revolutionary War (1776-1783) many Indians fought alongside their British allies, and as a result were treated as conquered or to-be-conquered enemies by the new nation.  The new cash-poor American government sold land that it barely controlled, if at all, to restless and aggressive backcountry settlers whose hunger for lands ensured constant conflict with local Indians.  Despite heroic efforts by such famous Native American leaders as Red Jacket, Tecumseh, and others, most of New York State save a few reservations had come under the ownership of US nationals by the end of the century. 

On the Canadian side of the river, the Mississaugas fared little better.  After having been relatively unbothered by European encroachments in the sparsley settled Niagara peninsula, their territory was suddenly flooded by British loyalists fleeing the newly independent (and somewhat vengeful) United States.  These loyalists established the peninsula’s first townships, small farming outposts like Niagara, Queenston, Chippawa, and Fort Erie along the Niagara River.  Despite the Mississaugas’s official protection under Britain’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 (the Indian rights document that brought an end to Pontiac’s Rebellion), the tribe was negotiating from a position of weakness and ceded nearly all of its land to the incoming loyalists.  Ultimately the Mississaugas retained only small reserves and fisheries at the mouths of the Twelve and Sixteen Mile Creeks and the Credit River.

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