A substacker who posts strange old newspaper features ran an 1898 item on the Pelee Island Sea Serpent. The location sounded familiar so I looked up Pelee Island. It’s the southernmost bit of Canada, in the middle of Lake Erie between Toledo and Detroit. Large enough to have substantial farms and several lighthouses.
Pelee Island was a major battlefield in the Patriots War of 1838, where Americans from Ohio defeated a larger British regiment.
Huh? What? Looking up without trying to follow the complex military details… The war was part of the permanent conflict between French and English Canada, which is still running though not violent at the moment. A group of distinguished Francophone citizens in Montreal, including lots of doctors, got pissed at bad treatment by the British government and raised a fighting force, fortifying several towns.
Americans around Lake Erie, still wanting revenge on England for 1812, raised their own volunteer forces and joined the side of the Francophones. The Pelee Island battle was fought on ice, with cannons in sleighs and the American forces in snow forts. Col Seward, a regular US Army officer, was sent to intervene and tried to convince the American rebels to retreat. They refused, so Seward reluctantly joined the fighting as a private, without overruling the informal command. The Americans won the battle but didn’t make much difference in the big picture.
Eventually the British colonial government made enough concessions to alleviate the French grievances, and the skirmishes died down.
As far as I can tell this Col Seward wasn’t the same man who later served under Lincoln and acquired Alaska. Both were born around the same time in the same part of NY, but the bio of the famous Seward doesn’t leave room for Army service in the 1830s. Maybe they were brothers?
Let’s sing!
Cannon balls, cannon balls,
Shooting all the way,
Oh what fun it is to shoot
from a one horse cannon sleigh-ay!
Cannon balls, cannon balls,
Dead Brits all the way,
Oh what fun it is to take
the island of Pelee!
Polistra's Mill 