Arms Sideways
I visited Fort Niagara over the weekend. I went as part of my journey over the past few years to trace my family’s history from being captured by Native Americans on the frontier in Pennsylvania in 1780 and their journey to Fort Niagara, to Montreal, and back to Philadelphia.
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As I walked through the gates of the fort, I tried to imagine my ancestors’ 300 mile journey from present-day Lehighton, PA, on April 25th, 1780, to the region of Western New York and Fort Niagara. The patriarch of the group, Benjamin Gilbert, and a few other members of the family were released in June of the same year members at Fort Niagara. A group went on to Montreal as prisoners of the Crown, but some remained at Fort Niagara for two more years until they had recovered all of the members of the family group.
On the visit I learned that my family’s experience was part of a larger historical pattern that centered on Fort Niagara. In fact, the museum display used them as an example—an unexpected surprise! Their capture was part of the efforts of Colonel John Butler, who recruited a group of Loyalists and Seneca chiefs as well as Mohawks to wage a guerilla war against American frontier settlements. By April 1778, the Seneca were raiding settlements along the Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers and in June 1778 they attacked the settlers of the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, a short distance north of where my ancestors were captured two years later. Butler commanded his rangers from his headquarters of Fort Niagara and continued raids until 1784.
Fort Niagara is on a remote point at the mouth of the Niagara River where it empties into Lake Ontario. Even today the Fort seems remote as you descend the Niagara escarpment and go through the forest to get to the state park. I kept coming back to the idea that family members remained at this remote location for two years when they could have gone on to Montreal. What is it that drove them to risk staying at the headquarters of John Butler, persisting in seeking the freedom of their family? Perhaps we are not really individualists at our core. We are driven to live our lives embedded in relationships. It is essential to our being.
I recently finished the novel, Song Yet Sung, by James McBride, which is a story about African-American slaves in the region of the Chesapeake Bay. The story illustrates again this fundamental impulse to risk to save others when we ourselves could be free--and to desire and build relationships against all odds in the midst of attempts to destroy them through the institution of slavery. But in the novel it also portrays a vision of the future and the connection of bringing others with us because it is our connection to the future. McBride, in his novel, has a Harriet Tubman-type figure that dreams of the future and those that she refuses to leave behind become the ancestors of those that become the prophets in the future.
It is the fundamental human impulse to risk everyone to bring everyone with us—arms outstretched sideways as we gather the community together—that provides the soil out of which the next generation grows, and makes it possible to change and shape the future.