56 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Throughout the winter of 1783-84, preparations are made for the 
move westward in the following year. 
In the early spring my great-great-grandfather paid that last visit 
to his former home, allusion to which has been made above. His wife, 
a daughter of the Rev. David McGregor of Londonderry, N.H., accom- 
panied him on his return, to renew in the northern forests that life of 
exile which had been the lot of her family earlier in the century. 
Upon his return to St. Johns, leave is asked on behalf of a number 
of incorporated and unincorporated loyalists, that an officer of the 
King’s Rangers and a detachment of ten or a dozen men may go to 
Cataraqui to reconnoitre. A pathetic touch, betraying the ignorance 
and bewilderment of those distracted times, occurs, where the command- 
ing officer notifies the commander-in-chief of a report which he had 
come upon “amongst our common men, that the major was going to 
have them taken to Cataraqui and there made slaves.” 
Notwithstanding this alarming suggestion confidence seems to have 
been restored, and most of the King’s Rangers accompanied their old 
commander in that heroic advance into the wilderness, in search of a 
new home. Several of the officers remained at St. Johns, buying the 
ground on which their late barracks stood. 
The tale of how the final allotment of the territory in the Fron- 
tenac district was made is set out in Grass’s narrative, preserved by Dr. 
Ryerson. Grass, the pioneer of the district, chose the first township 
for his followers, Kingston; Sir John Johnson, the second, Ernest- 
town; Col. Rogers, the third, Fredericksburgh; Major Vanalstine, the 
fourth, Adolphustown; and Col. McDonell and his company, the fifth, 
Marysburgh; “and so after this manner the first settlement of loyalists 
in Canada was made.” 
In the pages of Canniff’s work upon the “Settlement of Upper 
Canada” is preserved a story told by the late Dr. Armstrong, whose 
recollections dated back to the closing years of the eighteenth century. 
He remembered to have seen as a child, at my great-great-grand- 
father’s house at Fredericksburgh, a quantity of old implements of war; 
broken firelocks, torn uniforms, and cannon-balls. 
Not a few relics of the soldier-settlement still exist in the family, 
in the shape of rusty small-arms, obsolete powder-horns and flint lock 
pistols. 
James Rogers passed away in the year 1792. His brother Robert 
had died in England eight years previously, and shortly after the close 
of the war? 

1 Ryerson’s ‘ Loyalists of British America.” Vol. ii., p. 211. 
2 I have followed here the family tradition as to the date of Robert Rogers’s 
