A recent article on OS about the Battle of York during the War of 1812 got me thinking about another War-of-1812 story that happened in the area where I was raised, involving a nifty deception.  This is the story as it was relayed to me by my father, so I can't vouch for all the historical details.  Another thing I learned from my father is "never let the facts get in the way of a good story", so I'll just tell the story as I know it.

 Background: The Backhouse Mill was built in 1798, located in what is now called Backus Heritage Conservation Area.  It is just a mile or so north of the unincorporated village of Port Rowan on the north shore of Lake Erie, in Norfolk County, Ontario.  It is one of a very few surviving mills in southwestern Ontario that are so old, for reasons that will be explained later.  It was built by John Backhouse, who was originally from England and came to the area in 1791 after a brief time in the United States.  He served as a major in the 1st Norfolk Militia during the War of 1812.

 The War:   During the first years of the war (1812-13), a major front was in Ontario as American forces attempted to conquer Upper Canada (present-day Ontario).  In particular, in southwestern Ontario, they invaded from the west end of Lake Erie (crossing from the area of present-day Detroit) and the east end of Lake Erie (crossing the Niagara River). During the same years, the Americans also attempted to conquer Lower Canada, now Quebec.

Thomas Jefferson had predicted that conquering Canada would be a mere "matter of marching" - a 19th Century version of the Bush administration's prediction of being greated with flowers as liberators in Iraq, maybe?  Jefferson's prediction made a certain amount of sense at a superficial level, though, because Lower Canada was full of French Canadians who had been conquered 50 years earlier by the British, and they were probably not fond of the English elite who now ran things there.  And Upper Canada, where our story takes place, had a population where the majority of families had arrived from the United States during the preceding few decades, and so many in the US assumed they'd be happy to become Americans again. 

However, the French prefered an English elite who allowed them to keep their own French civil law system and French language and protected the position of the Catholic Church to an English elite who would not protect those things and who would impose anti-Catholic policies, which is how they tended to view the United States.  And many of the transplated Americans in Upper Canada were United Empire Loyalists - political refugees who had left the US because they were persecuted by their neighbours after the Revolution, had their houses looted and burned, and were not protected or compensated by the new US government in spite of its treaty obiligation to do so.  (True, these Loyalists were not the majority of the recent settlers in Upper Canada from the US, but they often had respected positions in their communities.)

The Story:  As part of the American campaigns of 1812-13 along the north shore of Lake Erie, US forces had a policy of destroying mills.  Mills were pretty much the extent of what passed for "heavy industry" in the early 1800s, at least in the "frontier" that was western Upper Canada and Michigan, northwestern Pennsylvania, upstate New York, etc.  So it was an attempt to devastate the industry and economy in order to passify the inhabitants.  It was known to the locals that there were two groups of American forces in the area, burning mills.  So they built a huge bonfire next to Backus Mill.  Both groups of Americans saw the large plume of smoke and assumed that it was coming from the mill and so the other group must have burned it.  Both groups then bypassed Backus Mill, assuming that the other had burned it, and that's why Backus Mill is one of the few mills predating 1812 in southwestern Ontario.

I like this story and while I lived in the US I wanted to share it with some of my American friends and co-workers, because it is a clever story, has a local connection for me, and doesn't involve Americans (or anyone else) getting killed, which may not have gone over as well.  A relevant situation in which to tell this story never came up, though.