Choose, But Choose Wisely  

CHOOSE, BUT CHOOSE WISELY: The London District of Upper Canada during the War of 1812
When the Americans declared war in 1812, the inhabitants of Upper Canada were given a choice by General Hull, the commander of Fort Detroit. They could either allow the American army to take control of the region or face a war of extermination.  This play follows the reactions of five neighbours living near the forks of the Thames River (Askunissippi) in the London District: a Chippewa scout, a captain in the British militia, an American sympathizer and two Quaker pacifists.

Choose, But Choose Wisely
by Jeff Culbert
a play set in the London District of Upper Canada during the War of 1812

Characters in the Play

Four of the five characters in this play are based on real people and I have used their real names.

Keezhekoni
  The Chippewa diplomat Keezhekoni is the only character in the play who was born and raised on the Antler River (Askunissippi), or the Thames River, as it was later named. Unlike the European characters, Keezhekoni is a person that I created myself, because there are few written historical records of ordinary First Nations people from that time. New research is being done, however, and the first substantial accounts of the War of 1812 by First Nations people are being published, which is, I hope, a sign of the times.
  I imagine Keezhekoni to be a person who liked to travel, so growing up, he became a messenger and then a scout and then a diplomat, and he was doing all three of these jobs when the War of 1812 broke out. He had to keep abreast of the negotiations that were going on amongst First Nations, so he knew about Tecumseh’s efforts to form a confederacy to resist European appropriation of their territory. His English name was Scout and he had a good ear for music and story-telling.

Daniel Springer
  Daniel came to Canada as a teen-aged refugee from the States with his mother and siblings. His father, a British Loyalist, had been shot dead outside of their house in Albany, New York as the American Revolution was breaking out.  The family escaped on foot and eventually settled in what is now Ancaster Ontario. Even though he was under the minimum age of 16, Daniel and his brother talked their way into Butler’s Rangers, the famous and controversial team of soldiers that went into American territory on behalf of Great Britain during the war. This early part of Daniel’s life was fictionalized in Orlo Miller’s 1966 novel Raiders of the Mohawk.
  In his twenties, Daniel took a canoe to the headwaters of the Thames River and paddled downstream, to the south-west. He stopped at a Chippewa settlement and he liked it so much that he stayed in the area for the rest of his life, becoming the first European to call it home. To British mapmakers, the site where he settled became Delaware, in the London District of Upper Canada. As more settlers moved in, he started a post office (the only one between Detroit and Burlington, at the time) and became a magistrate and also a captain in the London militia, responsible to the British Army under Isaac Brock. His Chippewa name was Wabasah.
  Daniel was buried in 1826 in the Tiffany cemetery in Delaware Ontario, on the bank of the Thames.

Andrew Westbrook
  Andrew was born ‘Anderis’ into a family of Dutch immigrants to New York State in 1773. His loyalist father fought with Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant against the Americans during the revolutionary war, and was rewarded with land in Delaware, on the Thames River just downstream from the forks, where present-day London sits. Andrew inherited the land and started putting his considerable energies into building infrastructure and trying to facilitate the immigration of settlers to the region. But Colonel Thomas Talbot was in charge of settlement as far as the British were concerned and Talbot was keen to keep it that way, so he and Westbrook were at odds.
  When war was declared by the Americans, Westbrook turned his efforts towards helping the Americans take over. He even tried to talk General Hull in Detroit into sending fifty soldiers to his place in Delaware to start the military occupation of Upper Canada, but Hull declined. Westbrook spent the war leading American raiding parties into Upper Canada, destroying crops and infrastructure, stealing livestock and capturing military officers.
  Like Daniel Springer, Andrew Westbrook became the subject of a book. One of Canada’s first novelists, John Richardson, was a young soldier when he fought alongside Brock and Tecumseh. He was even at the Battle of the Thames when Tecumseh was killed. His novel, Westbrook the Outlaw, depicts his subject as a despicable person and a traitor.
  For his efforts during the War of 1812, Westbrook was given a parcel of land in Michigan by the American authorities, and when he died in 1835, he was living near present-day Marine City, on the American side of the St Clair River. 

Joshua Applegarth
Joshua emigrated from Durham County in England in 1801, at the age of 22. In 1808, he was given a land grant to grow hemp at the forks of the Thames, in what is now London Ontario, and he is recognized as being the first person to settle there on a permanent basis. Historian Dan Brock places his house by the curve in London’s Charles Street, near the corner of Wharncliffe Road and Riverside Drive.
  Joshua was raised in a Quaker family, but converted to the Church of England when he came to Upper Canada. Towards the end of his life, in 1856 or ‘57, he and his wife Elizabeth and other family members were moving to Minnesota to join a Quaker settlement, but Joshua died just before, during, or just after the trip. The Quaker bookends of his life, along with the fact that there is no record of him being in the Thames area during the war, led me to speculate that Joshua was a pacifist who left Upper Canada for a few years to avoid the conflict. I have them moving to New York State, where his wife was born. In the play, I have Daniel Springer visiting the Applegarths there, but there is no evidence of anything like that ever happening. There is evidence that Joshua knew how to build a still though; he was fined in London after the war for operating two of them illegally. Many years later, Joshua was acknowledged in the title of a short-lived literary journal that appeared in London during the 1970s, Applegarth’s Folly.

Elizabeth Applegarth
  Elizabeth was born in 1787 into the Tiffany family, which immigrated to Upper Canada from the Albany area of New York State in the late 18th Century. Her father and uncle, Sylvester and Gideon Tiffany, were printers and journalists, operating the Upper Canada Gazette, an official mouthpiece for the British government. Their journalistic tendencies got them into trouble with their bosses, however, and in 1799 they launched their own publication called Canada Constellation, which was Upper Canada’s first independent newspaper, based in the Niagara region. Less than a year later, after it folded, her uncle Gideon took up farming by the Thames River in Delaware, and that connection facilitated her meeting her future husband Joshua. Elizabeth would have grown up amongst people that were sharply observant of the trends and politics of the day.
  The last record I could find of her was just after she moved to Wabasha County Minnesota at the age of seventy.