Section IL, 1915 [79] Trans. R.S.C. 



The Loyalists and Six Nation Indians in the Niagara Peninsula. 

 By Professor Wilbur H. Siebert. 



Presented by Dr. W. D. LeSueur, F.R.S.C. 

 (Read May Meeting, 1915.) 

 FORT NIAGARA BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, 1759-1775. 



The British acquired Fort Niagara from the French in 1759, 

 through the efforts of Sir William Johnson. The post stood, as it 

 still stands, on the eastern point formed by the junction of the river 

 whose name it bears and Lake Ontario. The new possessors of the 

 fort, like their predecessors, maintained it as a garrison and trading 

 post. The place now became the scene of Sir William's activities, 

 one of the first of which was the establishment of peace with the Indians 

 at the great treaty of 1764. It served as the rendezvous and recruiting 

 center for Western expeditions, and through its friendly attitude 

 towards the Iroquois, or Six Nations, it prepared the way for the alli- 

 ance between England and the tribes which a few years later "turned 

 their tomahawks against the 'American rebels' ". Fort Niagara was 

 also an important mart for the fur trade with the Indians and the center 

 of trade routes to the interior of the continent. The capture of the 

 post by the English led to greater activity along these routes and to 

 the transfer of the carrying rights over the portage around the Falls 

 from the Seneca Indians to white men with their teams and wagons. 

 This change in conditions on the river soon manifested itself in the 

 formation of a small settlement at what is now Lewiston, and doubt- 

 less a few of the families belonging to the portage cultivated fields 

 in the neighbourhood.^ 



Until Revolutionary times the country on the western, or Cana- 

 dian, side of the River Niagara was a wilderness of forest and swamp, 

 and was occupied by the Mississauguas. Their chief settlement lay 

 opposite the fort and on the site of an earlier town, once belonging 

 to the nation of the Neuters, which bore the designation of Onghiara. 

 On the old clearings of the extinct Neuters, now the commons of 



1 Kirby, Annals of Niagara, 2,3, 34, 40, 47-49. Severance, Old Trails of the 

 Niagara Frontier, 120; Thwaites and Kellogg, Rev. on the Upper Ohio, 245, n.; 

 Cruikshank, Butler's Rangers, 27. 



