Wacousta | Page 2

long after this event when the head of the military authorities
in the Colony, apprised of the fate of these captured posts, and made
acquainted with the perilous condition of Fort Detroit, which was then
reduced to the last extremity, sought an officer who would volunteer
the charge of supplies from Albany to Buffalo, and thence across the
lake to Detroit, which, if possible, he was to relieve. That volunteer was
promptly found in my maternal grandfather, Mr. Erskine, from
Strabane, in the North of Ireland, then an officer in the Commissariat
Department. The difficulty of the undertaking will be obvious to those
who understand the danger attending a journey through the Western
wilderness, beset as it was by the warriors of Ponteac, ever on the
lookout to prevent succor to the garrison, and yet the duty was
successfully accomplished. He left Albany with provisions and
ammunition sufficient to fill several Schnectady boats--I think
seven--and yet conducted his charge with such prudence and foresight,
that notwithstanding the vigilance of Ponteac, he finally and after long
watching succeeded, under cover of a dark and stormy night, in
throwing into the fort. the supplies of which the remnant of the gallant
"Black Watch," as the 42nd was originally named, and a company of
whom, while out reconnoitering, had been massacred at a spot in the
vicinity of the town, thereafter called the Bloody Run, stood so greatly
in need. This important service rendered, Mr. Erskine, in compliance
with the instructions he had received, returned to Albany, where he
reported the success of the expedition.
The colonial authorities were not regardless of his interests. When the
Ponteac confederacy had been dissolved, and quiet and security
restored in that remote region, large tracts of land were granted to Mr.
Erskine, and other privileges accorded which eventually gave him the
command of nearly a hundred thousand dollars--enormous sum to have
been realized at that early period of the country. But it was not destined
that he should retain this. The great bulk of his capital was expended on
almost the first commercial shipping that ever skimmed the surface of

Lakes Huron and Erie. Shortly prior to the Revolution, he was
possessed of seven vessels of different tonnage, and the trade in which
he had embarked, and of which he was the head, was rapidly increasing
his already large fortune, when one of those autumnal hurricanes,
which even to this day continue to desolate the waters of the
treacherous lake last named, suddenly arose and buried beneath its
engulfing waves not less than six of these schooners laden with such
riches, chiefly furs, of the West as then were most an object of barter.
Mr. Erskine, who had married the daughter of one of the earliest
settlers from France, and of a family well known in history, a lady who
had been in Detroit during the siege of the British garrison by Ponteac,
now abandoned speculation, and contenting himself with the remnant
of his fortune, established himself near the banks of the river, within a
short distance of the Bloody Run. Here he continued throughout the
Revolution. Early, however, in the present century, he quitted Detroit
and repaired to the Canadian shore, where on a property nearly
opposite, which he obtained in exchange, and which in honor of his
native country he named Strabane--known as such to this day--he
passed the autumn of his days. The last time I beheld him was a day or
two subsequent to the affair of the Thames, when General Harrison and
Colonel Johnson were temporary inmates of his dwelling.
My father, of a younger branch of the Annandale family, the head of
which was attainted in the Scottish rebellion of 1745, was an officer of
Simcoe's well-known Rangers, in which regiment, and about the same
period, the present Lord Hardinge commenced his services in this
country. Being quartered at Fort Erie, he met and married at the house
of one of the earliest Canadian merchants a daughter of Mr. Erskine,
then on a visit to her sister, and by her had eight children, of whom I
am the oldest and only survivor. Having a few years after his marriage
been ordered to St. Joseph's, near Michilimackinac, my father thought
it expedient to leave me with Mr. Erskine at Detroit, where I received
the first rudiments of my education. But here I did not remain long, for
it was during the period of the stay of the detachment of Simcoe's
Rangers at St. Joseph that Mr. Erskine repaired with his family to the
Canadian shore, where on the more elevated and conspicuous part of

his grounds which are situated nearly opposite the foot of Hog Island,
so repeatedly alluded to in "Wacousta," he had caused a flag-staff to be
erected, from which each