At Niagara River, where the main troops of Ontario were centered, Brock's victory was greeted with simply a madness of joy. From the first it had been plain that the principal fighting in Ontario would take place at Niagara, and along the river Brock had concentrated some sixteen hundred volunteer troops, {341} raw farm hands most of them, with a goodly proportion of descendants from the United Empire Loyalists, who had furbished out their fathers' swords. But the army was in rags and tatters; many men had no shoes; before Brock captured the guns at Detroit there had not been muskets to go round the men, and there were not cannon enough to mount the batteries cast up along Niagara River facing the American defenses. As the boats came down Lake Erie and disembarked the American prisoners on August 24, at Fort Erie on the Canadian side, opposite Black Rock and Buffalo, wild yells of jubilation rent the air. By nightfall every camp on the Canadian side for the whole forty miles of Niagara River's course echoed to shout and counter shout, and a wild refrain which some poet of the haversack had composed on the spot: We 'll subdue the mighty Democrats and pull their dwellings down, And have the States inhabited with subjects of the Crown. Take a survey of the Niagara region. South is Lake Erie, north is Lake Ontario, between them Niagara River flowing almost straight north through a steep dark gorge hewn out of the solid rock by the living waters of all the Upper Lakes, crushed and cramped, carving a turbulent way through this narrow canyon. Midway in the river's course the blue waters begin to race. The race becomes a dizzy madness of blurred, whirling, raging waters. Then there is the leap, the plunge, the shattering anger of inland seas hurling their strength over the sheer precipice in resistless force. Then the foaming whirlpool below, and the shadowy gorge, and the undercurrent eddying away in the swift-flowing waters of the river coming out on Lake Ontario. On one side are the Canadian forts, on the other the American, slab-walled all of them, with scarcely a stone foundation except in bastions used as powder magazines. Fort Erie on the Canadian side faces Buffalo and Black Rock on the American side. Where the old French voyageurs used to portage past the Falls, about halfway on the Canadian side south of the precipice, is the village of Chippewa. Here Brock has stationed {342} a garrison with cannon. Then halfway between the Falls and Lake Ontario are high cliffs known as Queenston Heights, in plain view of the American town of Lewiston on the other side. Cannon line the river cliffs on both sides here. All about Lewiston the fields are literally white with the tents of General Van Rensselaer's army, now grown from twenty-five hundred to almost eight thousand. On the Canadian side cannon had been mounted on the cliffs known as Queenston Heights. Possibly because the two hundred men would make poor showing in