In late October 1814, deep into the War of 1812, a flying column of American horsemen riding east under a full moon reached the Thames River near Moraviantown, a settlement of Christianized Delaware Indians who had retreated to Upper Canada in the wake of the American Revolution. Led by Brig. Gen. Duncan McArthur, the riders had left Fort Detroit eight days earlier bound for the British army base at Burlington Heights, on the western tip of Lake Ontario.
The mission of the American incursion was twofold. First, McArthur intended to destroy mills, bridges, livestock and foodstuffs across western Upper Canada (present-day southeastern Ontario), thus rendering the region incapable of supporting British troops. Second, he hoped to isolate the Niagara Peninsula, between Lakes Ontario and Erie, and force the British to abandon Upper Canada west of York (present-day Toronto). In his 1816 history of the war Robert B. McAfee, an American veteran of the campaigns in Upper Canada, described what became known as “McArthur’s Raid” as “an expedition which was not surpassed during the war in boldness of its design and the address with which it was conducted.”
to lead a band of horsemen some 200 miles into the British rear. Tougher than shoe leather, born poor and raised on the Pennsylvania frontier with no formal education, he became one of the earliest American trailblazers to Kentucky. He later helped survey Ohio’s first capital, Chillicothe, at the confluence of the Scioto River and Paint Creek, and was ultimately elected that state’s 11th governor. Along the way he accumulated vast tracts of land. But the uncompromising influence of the then-savage Kentucky backwoods never left him. McArthur exemplified a popular expression of the era, later attributed to David Crockett, that Kentuckians were “half horse, half alligator, tipped off with the snapping turtle.” While not a Kentuckian by birth, he was by temperament and action.
