Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812 | Page 4

ready wit of one of her husband's Huguenot progenitors, a lady, who during the persecution that followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, at a period of domiciliary search for incriminating proofs of unorthodoxy, is said to have thrown a copy of the Bible--a doubly precious treasure in those days--into a churn of milk from whence it was afterwards rescued little the worse, thanks to heavy binding and strong clasps.
Envy having sent a shaft at even so warm and patriotic a breast as that of Mrs. Secord, Col. Fitzgibbon sent her a certificate, dated only a short time before his death, vouching to the facts of the heroic deed. It was evidently one of the cruel necessities of this hard life. The certificate runs as follows:
FITZGIBBON'S CERTIFICATE.
"I do hereby certify that Mrs. Secord, the wife of James Secord, of Chippewa, Esq., did, in the month of June, 1813, walk from her house in the village of St. David's to Decamp's house in Thorold, by a circuitous route of about twenty miles, partly through the woods, to acquaint me that the enemy intended to attempt by surprise to capture a detachment of the 49th Regiment, then under my command; she having obtained such knowledge from good authority, as the event proved. Mrs. Secord was a person of slight and delicate frame; and made the effort in weather excessively warm, and I dreaded at the time that she must suffer in health in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, she having been exposed to danger from the enemy, through whose line of communication she had to pass. The attempt was made on my detachment by the enemy, and his detachment, consisting of upwards of 500 men, with a field-piece and fifty dragoons, was captured in consequence. I write this certificate in a moment of much hurry and from memory, and it is, therefore, thus brief.
"(Signed) JAMES FITZGIBBON,
"Formerly Lieutenant in the 49th Regiment."
It is well to consider this great achievement of Mrs. Secord carefully, that we may be the better able to realize the greatness of the feat. To assist in so doing, it will not be amiss to quote the following, from Coffin's Chronicles of the War, bearing on the prudential reasons of Proctor's retreat at Moravian Town. "But whether for advance or for retreat, the by-paths of the forest intermediate were such as the macadamized and locomotive imagination of the present day cannot encompass. A backwoodsman, laden with his axe, wading here, ploutering there, stumbling over rotted trees, protruding stumps, a bit of half-submerged corduroy road for one short space, then an adhesive clay bank, then a mile or two or more of black muck swamp, may,?possibly,--clay-clogged and footsore, and with much pain in the small of his back,--find himself at sundown at the foot of a hemlock or cedar, with a fire at his feet, having done manfully about ten miles for his day's work." This was written of a time of year when the fall rains predict an approaching winter. Mrs. Secord's exploit was made on the 23rd of June, a time when the early summer rains that set the fruit and consecrate an abundant harvest with their blessing, nevertheless make clay banks slippery, and streams swift, and of these latter the whole Niagara district was full. Many have now been diverted and some dried up. I am happy to be able to give my readers the heroine's own simple account of her journey, as furnished me by the courtesy of Mr. Benson J. Lossing, author of the "Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812," to whom the aged lady in 1862 recounted it in a letter (given in a note in Mr. Lossing's book), the historian, on his visit to Chippewa in 1860, having failed to see her. She was then eighty-five years of age.
"DEAR SIR,--I will tell you the story in a few words.
"After going to St. David's and the recovery of Mr. Secord, we returned again to Queenston, where my courage again was much tried. It was there I gained the secret plan laid to capture Captain Fitzgibbon and his party. I was determined, if possible, to save them. I had much difficulty in getting through the American guards. They were ten miles out in the country. [Footnote: The American sentries were out ten miles into the country; that is, at any point commanding a possible line of communication within a radius of ten miles from Fort George, Mrs. Secord might come upon an American sentry. The deep woods, therefore, were her only security. These she must thread to the best of her ability, with what knowledge she might possess of the woodman's craft, for even a blazed path was not safe. And by this means she must get out of American cover and into