Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada by Peter Vronsky, Allen Lane, Canada, 394pages, 2011.
Few Canadians have ever heard of the Battle of Ridgeway and fewer yet understand its place in the creation of our nation. It is also very nearly certain that fewer still could name it as the first battle fought by the Canadian Army and the first place where we suffered battle casualties, including seven killed and two who later died of wounds. Peter Vronsky has written the first full length account of what happened in the fields of the Niagara Peninsula in the period 31 May to 3 June 1866 in over a hundred years.
Those of us who have read anything about Ridgeway have probably learned that the Fenians were on the verge of breaking and running when an ill-advised order to form square to repel nonexistent cavalry led to a Canadian defeat. That, frankly, was a blatant misstatement of events. The Fenians lured the inexperienced militia into a trap and then launched a charge in overwhelming strength that drove all before it. Up to this time there have only been a very few accounts which accurately portrayed the events. Two were written at the time, one appeared in 1925 and two were published in the last decade of the 20th Century. In the latter cases, one was by an ex-member of the RHC and the Canadian Airborne Regiment, and in the interest of full disclosure I wrote the other.
His account is the first full length attempt to challenge the accepted version of events. Vronsky shows that the Canadian authorities, who were deeply embarrassed by the debacle that ensued, set up two rigged inquires and then supressed the findings because even a whitewash could not hide the bungling, incompetence and in one case outright cowardice displayed by the Canadian authorities, both in and out of uniform.
The book is divided into three sections. The first explains who the Fenians were and describes the making of the Canadian Army following the passage of the Militia Act of 1855. It then goes into the background to the invasion itself, placing it into a larger Fenian plan for a multi-pronged assault on Canada. The second section, which takes up over half the book, describes the events on the ground including the two battles, the first at the Limestone Ridge near the Village of Ridgeway, and the second through the streets of the border town of Fort Erie. The third section recounts the story of the two inquiries and the largely successful attempt to make the whole thing go away, or at least to reduce it to a comic opera farce.
This book is highly recommended.
