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Episode 1 - The Chocolate Lady
61 Plays8 months ago
When you ask the average Canadian what they think of when you say the name "Laura Secord", they immediately say something about chocolate.
In this episode, we talk about who she actually was and how she spent most of her adult life without being acknowledged in her role in saving what would eventually be called Canada. The War of 1812 likely ended up being in the British's favour thanks to her work.
If you're from southern Ontario, we're sorry for being ignorant about where everything is. Heather has only been to Niagara Falls once.
Historica Canada video about Laura Secord:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L-vL5NFkYA
News article for this episode: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/guinea-fowl-pets-1.6976479
Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Stó:lō (Stolo), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) first nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Mission
00:00:07
Speaker
Hi, welcome to the Swiggin Moments podcast. My name is Heather and I use she-they pronouns. Hello, I'm Tabarac and my pronouns are they them or it is.
00:00:19
Speaker
What are we doing?
Heritage Minutes: Format and Influence
00:00:21
Speaker
We're embarking on an adventure, an adventure to watch all the Heritage Minutes that we had the pleasure of watching and riffing on since we were little children. There are so many for us to talk about. We're going to talk about a whole lot of them, actually. There's single-minute segments that are still on Canadian TV and sometimes are in movie theaters. And you could totally fit an entire
00:00:47
Speaker
historical segment into one minute, right? I mean, sure. They certainly tried. Yeah, exactly. Like, I've watched so many of them. And like when I was watching TV as a kid, like they would be on all the time.
Nationalism in Heritage Minutes
00:01:02
Speaker
And I didn't know until recently that they count towards CRTC content regulation, like you have to have like, I don't know, 30% of your
00:01:11
Speaker
content on TV and radio is made in Canada. And like, because they're a minute, and if you accumulate them over the course of a day, I think like if you did like one segment every hour, you'd end up with like 24 minutes of content. Yeah, it's the content quotient, which is very silly, but I kind of get what it's what it's going for.
00:01:33
Speaker
And they're not bad, actually, like they're, they're well produced in everything. It's just, they're not presenting history. They're presenting, I want to say like, it's sort of nationalism, but sometimes it isn't. Yeah, I can. So I can sort of appreciate what historical Canada the
00:01:51
Speaker
the company that produces these is trying to go for is that they're essentially producing little expanded dramatizations of what was little footnotes from our social studies 7 through 11 textbooks, basically.
00:02:09
Speaker
Well, it's basically a huge dramaticization of the Family Compact, if you think about it. But actually, one thing I should note, though, just a slight correction, is that it's not a company. It's actually a nonprofit organization. It needs to be two nonprofit organizations. One of them did these heritage minutes, and then the other one did some other educational work as
Ariel Reid's Guinea Fowl Legal Battle
00:02:30
Speaker
well. And then sometime in the early 2000s, they merged into what I think is now known as Historic Canada, which is still a nonprofit, so technically not a company. OK.
00:02:40
Speaker
organization. Yeah, it's an organization. Let's be let's be fair. So like they've had several they do a lot of modern stuff and a lot of not so modern stuff. And again, they're just well produced and Tamarack and I were like talking about this like a couple months ago, like there's just so many of them and some of them we just wanted to talk about and well, this is the first episode. So here we are talking about them.
00:03:09
Speaker
Unfortunately, though, we're not going to dive just into that right now. We're going to go into. Yeah, no, no, it's oh no for me, actually, but it's the news. All right, what do you got for me? I've sent you a bird bird. I like birds. Birds are cool. This is a good sell.
00:03:33
Speaker
This is a guinea fowl. Would you enjoy the pleasure of its companionship? Um, well, okay. So I would not want a bird. Okay. So I'm a birder, but I would not want a bird as a pet. I really do like birds, but, and also guinea fowl are not, you know, indigenous to anywhere in North America or the Americas in general. That's true. However, the subject of today's news story is someone who did in fact, enjoy the company of these birds and wanted one as pets too. In fact,
00:04:03
Speaker
So an East Vancouver woman by the name of Ariel Reid decided to buy a pair of guinea fowl chicks, a happy reminder of the time that she spent in East Africa. However, we've all had those neighbors. Her neighbors complained to the city, citing that the birds were noisy.
00:04:30
Speaker
And a bylaw officer basically came by to inform her that she is not allowed to keep the birds, specifically citing a city bylaw that prohibits people keeping fowl or poultry other than chickens on their property. The whole chicken thing was a huge dispute when Vancouver City Council brought that in, I want to say in the 2000s.
Historical Canada and Local Figures
00:04:53
Speaker
Yes. But I did not realize how specific the laws were.
00:04:58
Speaker
Now, those laws specifically refer to keeping chickens for meat or eggs. However, they don't strictly apply when a person is keeping them for pets, which she argued with the bylaw officer who effectively told her, dispute it or take it up in court. So is it in court now? Oh, she did. Okay. She did.
00:05:25
Speaker
She did. And the thing that drew me to this is the judge's ruling that specifically he ruled that Reed kept the giddy fowl for the pure pleasure of their proximity that she was allowed to keep them. You're allowed to keep up to 12 exotic birds, I believe? 12. That's very precise. Yes.
00:05:50
Speaker
that's precise like why would you like i wouldn't want to have one how can you put up with 12 i don't know but by heavens uh bless you if you have 12 exotic birds as pets i'm i'm sure you're i'm sure your apartment is very noisy well now i'm thinking i should get an ostrich it would be an exotic bird as long as you're not eating its eggs or taking its meat you're fine
00:06:16
Speaker
I did find out recently that ostriches can be written by humans. I did not realize this until a friend of mine shared a video with me and I was very mortified to find out that you actually can ride them, which is
00:06:30
Speaker
Very much like, what was the video game? Super Mario Brothers 2 has this. You can ride an ostrich. Although having seen an ostrich at a zoo, they're very large birds. I don't know. You need to use a power drill to open up their eggs if you want to make yourself a scrambled egg. It could be the biggest scrambled egg you'd ever have in your life, but you need a power drill to get into it.
00:06:54
Speaker
Unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to, you wouldn't be able to hear in Vancouver as you're only allowed to collect the eggs from chickens. So what do you do with the eggs of your, you know, exotic birds?
Rehoming Guinea Fowl, Embracing Chickens
00:07:05
Speaker
I mean, you could do the thing that a lot of vegans advocate for, which is crush them up and feed them back to the bird. Yeah, okay, fair enough, fair enough. Although isn't that kind of cannibalism? Look,
00:07:21
Speaker
I guess it gets into the definition of what an egg is. Well, you see, when somebody is in denial about whether or not they're trans. Shut up, shut up, shut up. Okay, so the story has an unfortunate turn and a twist. While she was waiting for the
00:07:45
Speaker
for the court proceedings to go through. She still was left with a $250 fine that she was in the process of challenging and not wanting the birds to just go to some local pound that might not have any idea how to care for them. She did in fact rehome the birds to a farm in Pemberton.
00:08:06
Speaker
Oh, that takes a whole new meaning of sending your pet up province, I guess. We wouldn't use the term state here, right? No, but the euphemism definitely still holds. She literally did. However, if you think that her neighbors got off the hook, they did not. Because since she went to the trouble of constructing an outdoor coop, she now has four chickens.
00:08:34
Speaker
Well, it's only fair. Now they have to put up with klux and all that. And then she gets eggs out of it. She gets eggs out of it. She's in compliance with the bylaws and she has a handy dandy court order should she ever wish to get back her guinea fowl.
00:08:53
Speaker
What level of court did this go to, by the way? Since it's a city law, I assume it just went to the provincial court. Okay, that makes sense. You're not going to take a by-law to the Supreme Court, even the provincial Supreme Court. You can. You could. No, you totally can. This happened. But it is the city versus her, not the...
00:09:14
Speaker
not the like she's disputing the bylaw it's not like her neighbors could could keep her keep her going through lawfare on this one in particular did she have any connection to the duck lady that's actually rather topical for today she did not have any connection to the duck lady unfortunately however the connection being i was looking for stories about the duck lady may she rest in peace
00:09:37
Speaker
Uh, and that's how I stumbled upon this little, this little story. Yeah. For those of you who aren't familiar, why are they talking about the duck lady? The duck lady was this woman who recently passed away. Um, I had forgotten her name, unfortunately. Um, but she, uh, used to be very infamous and like you'd see around downtown or in Mount Pleasant.
00:09:58
Speaker
Um, she'd be carrying around her pet duck and she always had a pet duck and like she's had numerous pet ducks over her life. She maintained a website as well. And, um, she died at the age of 82. I didn't even think she was that old. Like I genuinely thought that she was in her fifties or sixties, but maybe it's because I've lived in Vancouver for so long and have become so familiar with her that, um, I guess I just didn't realize she was that old. Laura Kay Prophet, by the way.
00:10:27
Speaker
There we go. That's her name, Laura Kay Prophet. So rest in peace, Laura. You were one of my favorite people to just see on the streets whenever I was wandering around. And apparently she was a really nice person. So going back to Reed, um, she says she's unlikely to try to get her Guinea foul back since they've been rehoned saying I won the court case, but I lost my faith in my neighbors. And that's something you can't really get back.
00:10:56
Speaker
Well, at least it wasn't over a patio window that you never had installed in the first place, but that's probably for another day. Definitely another day. Yeah. Maybe one day we'll talk about the, uh, the patio because that is our CRTC mandated news segment.
Historical Inaccuracy in Laura Secord's Heritage Minute
00:11:14
Speaker
Okay. So, um, I'm going to play a clip from the clip. Yeah. I have an audio clip here. Um,
00:11:22
Speaker
It's very short and we'll dive right into it. So here we go. Okay. So that is from historical Canada's heritage minutes.
00:11:43
Speaker
episode on Laura Secord, Tamerack. When I say the name Laura Secord, what do you think of just trash tier Easter chocolate? Fair. It is topical that it is Easter and we will dive into the chocolates.
00:12:01
Speaker
However, that is not Laura Secord per se. It's a really strange connection. But one thing I'm going to point out is the clip makes an interesting decision and one that I disagree with and that is it said Canadian troops. Yes, this is yeah, this is a story from Upper Canada. So technically it is Canada.
00:12:25
Speaker
However, it was a British colony. So do we say that they're British or Canadian? This is a bit of an interesting thing because certain people really like to talk about things that predate Confederation with more emphasis on being Canadian than British.
Laura Secord's Early Life
00:12:45
Speaker
Those certain people being Canadian nationalists. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, you know, latching onto a Canadian identity. And for better or for worse, you know,
00:12:55
Speaker
I can see where they're coming from, but we'll talk about that a little bit later on. Let's talk about Laura Secord. Laura Secord, born Laura Ingersoll, and I'll talk about Ingersoll, Ontario a little bit later because she is connected to Ingersoll, Ontario, was born in 1775 in Great Barrington in what is now known as Massachusetts. Great Barrington being in western Massachusetts.
00:13:19
Speaker
Her father, Thomas Ingersoll, actually fought as a patriot in the American War of Independence. But 12 years after the war concluded, this was 1795. Laura was 20. He moved the family to around the Niagara area of Upper Canada in a town called Queenston, north of Niagara Falls. So Queenston is basically
00:13:45
Speaker
North of Niagara Falls and like to the east of St. Catharines, if you're familiar with the Southern Ontario Peninsula. When I say Upper Canada, Upper Canada is basically a modern day in Ontario. It covers the areas that hug the northern reaches of the Great Lakes. And then there's, what's that, sorry? It's upper as in elevation.
00:14:15
Speaker
But I always thought it was upper. Well, I'll get into that in a sec here, because like, lower Canada is Quebec. Yes. So the shore, everywhere from like, just went north of Kingston, all the way up to Quebec City, and thereabouts, that would be lower Canada. But I always thought that the St. Lawrence River was what dictated the names. But it's good fun. Sorry, what? But it's not. I actually, I actually knew that it's the Great Lakes.
00:14:43
Speaker
Well, fair enough. Well, at the end of the day,
Ingersoll Family Struggles and Settlement
00:14:46
Speaker
it all has to do with bodies of water. Yes. One thing I'm going to say is if you find yourself in the Niagara area and you want to go somewhere more interesting than Garbage, Las Vegas, because like when I've been to Niagara Falls, excuse me, the area just reminds me of Vegas and I don't particularly enjoy Vegas, but go like
00:15:08
Speaker
I have six kilometers north of Niagara Falls and just slightly south of Queenston there's a really cool butterfly conservatory. I went there with a friend back in 2018 and I had a blast so better time than going to like some nonsense casino. I'm not a gambler.
00:15:24
Speaker
Going back to Queenston itself, Queenston was rather interesting, considering Thomas was a patriot, because that was Upper Canada, which was, you know, popular at the Loyalists. They favored the crown. Yes, exactly. And the reason why he moved the family to Queenston,
00:15:46
Speaker
is he primarily chose to move there, do the availability of land. As a Mohawk leader, who I cannot remember the name of, unfortunately I didn't make a note of this, said that if he moved there, he could get 66,000 hectares of land, which is a substantial amount of land. Ludacris, I would say. Ludacris, yeah, it's all stolen too. Of course, of course. Available land densely populated by several First Nations.
00:16:15
Speaker
But here's the little catch that came to this. So he petitioned the Upper Canada Lieutenant Governor, John Simcoe, if you're from the Toronto area, you should be familiar with the name Simcoe, to acquire the land known as the Thames Valley. There's a river called the Thames in Southern Ontario, what a shocker. But the condition was- Does it run through fake London? You know what? I do not know.
00:16:41
Speaker
I actually did not check for that. That would be really funny if it did. Oh, you're looking this up. Yes, I'm looking this up. Do we have a fake Thames River running through our fake London? It does! Oh, good lord. Well, I did not know that the Thames River of the Thames Valley of southern Ontario runs through fake London.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yes, our Fake Thames River does in fact run through Fake London. I did not know this, and this makes London, Ontario even funnier to me because it has no... It has nothing in common with London, England. Entirely optional city as well. It doesn't need to be there. God.
00:17:29
Speaker
Well, here's the catch that came with him moving to the Thames Valley. He said he would be granted the 66,000 hectares of land. On the condition, he got 40 other families to settle there within seven years. So it's 1795, and he had seven years, so until 1802. Just remember this for later.
00:17:49
Speaker
Ingersoll himself was not seen in a very positive light as there was a problem in Upper Canada. Can't imagine why. Oh, yeah.
00:17:59
Speaker
reasons. Well, I'm about to tell you what it is. One of the things that was rather contentious in Upper Canada at the time was there was a term called late loyalists. And the idea here is people who would move after kind of finding out that, oh, you know, being a patriot in the American war is not really all that great.
00:18:21
Speaker
He himself was particularly unhappy with how loyalists were being treated after the American war. And they stuck around in the Boston, Massachusetts area. The original was 13 colonies. Yeah, 13 colonies. Like he just wasn't happy with that. And that's, you know, he wanted to get out even though he himself was a patriot.
00:18:45
Speaker
The thing that happened though is that even though he moved to the area, he didn't succeed in getting these 40 families to move into the Thames Valley. So by 1805, he
00:19:01
Speaker
left to go move in Port Credit, which is part of Mississauga in west of Toronto. It's, for me at least, home to a ghost station I've used before, some relatives of mine lived there, and a pretty decent song by the Constantines, if you're familiar with Canadian indie. I don't know if you've ever heard the Constantines, Tamarack.
00:19:20
Speaker
I have not. They're okay. I got to see them live once, and I'm going to say that they're not particularly great live from my first and only time I've seen them. I don't even know if they're still together to tell you the truth, but
00:19:35
Speaker
It was, Credit River's a decent song. In 1812, Thomas died, so he never got to hear about what his daughter later did, and that daughter being Laura.
Secord Family Financial Challenges
00:19:46
Speaker
However, his son, Charles, became a member of Parliament for Upper Canada. And this is where, again, this is
00:19:56
Speaker
We have fake London. We also have fake Oxford upon Thames. Again, on the fake Thames. But this is where the name Ingersoll Ontario comes from because Oxford upon Thames was then renamed to Ingersoll at the request of his son because he was in Parliament.
00:20:14
Speaker
To give you an idea of where Ingersoll is, it's about an hour east of Niagara Falls and about an hour and a half south of Toronto. So you can just take a freeway there. Or I think you can actually take a GO train to Ingersoll. Welcome to Shewinigan Moments, the podcast where we discuss Southern Ontario geography and GO Transit.
00:20:32
Speaker
I'm an advocate for better rail and one of the things I'll say that Toronto has going for itself despite the fact that its bus system is completely chaotic is that it actually has pretty decent transit and if they actually had better management of their entire city I would say that's better than TransLink because TransLink does kind of set a high bar for North America not by international standards very true very true so
00:20:58
Speaker
We'll talk about Laura, because we haven't started talking about men for the whole time, and I'm done talking about them. Because Laura is going to become a very important person later on, but not in her lifetime.
00:21:12
Speaker
Um, so Laura, two years after arriving in Queenston, Laura married James Seacord. Seacord himself came from a wealthy family of Hugenot, which are French Protestants. Um, but he was not born into wealth, uh, because his family were loyalists in the
00:21:30
Speaker
aforementioned war. Lands were granted to the family upon his marriage and he was given like 80 hectares of land in the Niagara area. So when he got married to Laura they received 80 hectares of land.
00:21:44
Speaker
One of the things I'm going to say about James Seacord, in particular Laura Seacord, but the Seacord name itself kind of bugs me. The reason why it bugs me is because I always thought the name was French. And I didn't know that Seacord was French until I was doing my research. And I was like, isn't it Seacord or something like that? And I wasn't too far off on this. It's actually Siqueur. But it got anglicized at some point and ended up becoming Seacord.
00:22:11
Speaker
So just a little as all things do. Well, like, it's like my last name. My last name was anglicized by the British. And then, you know, like this wonderful Irish spelling of my last name, you got mutated in the eighteen or seventeen hundreds.
War of 1812 and Canadian Identity
00:22:24
Speaker
I can't remember. And that's how my last name ended up being spelled the way it is. Despite getting 80 hectares of land,
00:22:33
Speaker
James and Laura struggled financially, and even though they had the operation of a general store in Queenston, they just weren't pulling in a lot of money. But apparently by 1810, so what was this? I think it was like 1805 they got married, I believe that's right.
00:22:53
Speaker
James claimed in writing, this is where we you will find this unsurprising, but some Canadians don't are not really aware of this. James claimed in writing that he was in easy circumstances and had two black servants. Of course, of course. Yeah, if anyone ever says that there was no slavery in Canada,
00:23:20
Speaker
Not post-confederation, but realistic otherwise. Slavery was banned in the British Empire if you were on the fucking island, but if you were not,
00:23:35
Speaker
It was fair game in the colonies. Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah. Like at some point we're gonna end up talking about slavery and its role in the British Empire and the Commonwealth because anyone ever tells you it didn't exist in Canada can just be told otherwise. But we do have an episode in the future about the Underground Railroad, which will end up diving a bit into this, but that's for another time.
00:24:05
Speaker
Leaning up to 1812, they had four children. And they do become very important to Laura as she becomes older.
00:24:14
Speaker
So Tamara, what do you know about the War of 1812? I know it is the thing that a lot of Canadian nationalists like to take pride into, particularly the torching of the White House and just generally defeating the American army as if that was an accomplishment done by Canadians, not British troops, but really Indigenous peoples.
00:24:42
Speaker
And it's like it was actually something that accomplished anything. Yeah, but we burnt the White House down. That's what that arrogant worm song had to say. Yeah. I got my history lessons from the arrogant worms. Strictly from the arrogant worms. Yeah. You know, we have rocks and trees and trees and rocks and rocks and trees and trees and rocks and rocks and trees and trees and rocks and rocks and trees and water. I can't remember the lyrics.
00:25:06
Speaker
I probably got pretty close to it though. So I don't want to go too much into the War of 1812, but to kind of give you the extreme Coles notes of all this here is the War of 1812, a spot between the United Kingdom
00:25:25
Speaker
and its holdings of British North America, which would be referred to as Canada now, and the United States, with Indigenous people in both countries being involved on their respective sides. So like, generally speaking, if you're Indigenous, Inter-Upper Canada, or Allura Canada, obviously you'd be aligned with the British, and then if you're in the 13 colonies, likely you'd be aligned with the Americans, for better or for worse. Specifically speaking, if you were a First Nation, you got involved with either the British or the Americans, you got screwed in this conflict.
00:25:55
Speaker
Getting in depth about this war, again, is not what we're here about. But again, what we're talking about is many Canadians like to wax poetically about having burned down the White House. Congrats. I don't care. And what's really interesting is, do you remember our favorite prime minister, Stephen Harper? I know he's not your favorite prime minister, but let's just say he's your favorite prime minister.
00:26:23
Speaker
Ah, yes, the one who looks like a sad clown. The one that probably eats kittens, as evident by that photo of him. The Stephen Harper-led Conservative government, upon the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, had a whole little tiny celebration. You would see Raw, Raw, Raw Canada ads and all that. I think the Canadian Mint put out a coin.
00:26:49
Speaker
But it's kind of funny because I think like five years earlier in 2007, nothing was ever said about the Constitution being properly formed because, hey, that was done by Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, who was a known communist because he hung out with Fidel Castro.
James Secord's Injury and Laura's Heroism
00:27:08
Speaker
Yeah, unfortunately, we don't celebrate people who do cool things. Like give us a constitution that isn't like, you know, horrible towards women and all that sort of thing.
00:27:19
Speaker
Heather, Heather, why would we celebrate a moment of real national development and the anniversary of it when we can celebrate some fake nationalism that adds a little bit of militarism on top, a little disting of militarism?
00:27:52
Speaker
In October of 1812, the American Army launched an attack on Fort George. The reason why they're jumping right into October 1812 is that this is the battle where James Seacourt was wounded, and him becoming wounded is incredibly important for this story. There's a lot of lore around the story of him getting wounded, but the story that supposedly is
00:28:05
Speaker
I don't even know where to go with this.
00:28:15
Speaker
was that Laura rushed to save James during this battle, offering to let the three soldiers surrounding James kill her instead as they had planned to bludgeon the wounded James. So I guess they were going to take some sort of object. Warfare back then. What's that? Warfare back then was really something else. As if it's not something else now? Fair point.
00:28:39
Speaker
Like, I don't
Laura Secord's 32-Kilometer Trek
00:28:41
Speaker
know. We can go to the Iraq war and talk about Abu Ghraib if we want to, like, you know, get into, like, some really fucked up things. But we're not a military podcast. We are not a military podcast. Go watch the lion's lift by donkeys. Watch. Listen.
00:28:56
Speaker
Listen, go listen to Lion's Life by Donkeys if you want that kind of content. Exactly. Captain John E. Will of the United States Army intervened during all this and sent the soldiers to court martial after being incredibly unhappy with this decision on their part to go and just bludgeon James to death. So as a result of Captain John E. Will, the C-Cords were able to return to their home, albeit it was ransacked.
00:29:21
Speaker
And they decided to go then leave that house and just recover elsewhere for the time being. I guess they got the house taken care of. And one of the things that I feel like is embellished, but there's just no evidence to support it otherwise. James and John surprisingly kept a friendship after all this. It was rather interesting to learn about this. Thank you for not letting your men bludgeon me to death. Yeah. Best friends forever.
00:29:50
Speaker
I imagine that it's a little bit different because the War of 1812 is really complicated. And again, I don't feel like getting into it, but it's just interesting. I don't even know where I'm going to go with this on this one here. And I have thoughts, but I don't feel like it's appropriate for what we're talking about here.
00:30:12
Speaker
Jumping to like almost seven months later, we end up with a third attack on May 27th in 1813 and Fort George was conquered and this meant that the Niagara area was captured and American soldiers were
00:30:30
Speaker
occupying the area. All men of military age, you know, on the oil sides were sent to be prisoners of war. James C. Cord himself was spared because he was still recuperating from the wound he had gotten the previous autumn.
Success at Beaver Dams and Mohawk Contribution
00:30:44
Speaker
So they kind of went like, well, we're not going to send you to prison. There's no reason. You're not, you're not able to fight us. You know, Laura, you can take care of him. I guess you're going to feed us.
00:30:53
Speaker
As Queenston is now occupied, so Queenston being the town that the Sea Cords live in, the U.S. soldiers began to reside in the homes that they invaded, right? Which is illegal under the U.S. Constitution, but hey, it's not America, so they can do whatever they want. If they didn't want soldiers staying in their house, they should have just joined America.
00:31:17
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. The Third Amendment would be applied here and you wouldn't have soldiers living in your house. Exactly. But this is how Laura Secord's home was occupied, and this would subsequently lead to Laura being involved in the war, but not just by being a hostess.
00:31:36
Speaker
Have you been to Southern Ontario? I have been there once. Just once, okay. To give me an idea of Southern Ontario, like these days it's a lot of farmland. There is like, you know, forested areas and that sort of thing. I will say like the area that is Southern Ontario now is nothing like what it was in the 1800s.
00:31:56
Speaker
Much of the area was not settled until around then. I think the earliest settlements do go back to the 1700s. But realistically, like any sort of human activity outside of indigenous peoples in the area was largely relegated to, like, sorry, en masse human activity, I should say, was largely relegated to lower Canada and, you know, what was then called York and now Toronto. It's
00:32:27
Speaker
a lot different now. So like when we talk about what Laura is about to do here, it's going to be a little bit foreign because having been to that area, it would be so strange to think that this was difficult. But we'll get into this now. So why did why did Laura not simply take the go train? Well,
00:32:48
Speaker
Does Thorhold even have it? You actually probably do have a go station there, who knows. Anyway, so what America is now occupying the sea cord home. This means that Laura was privy to all the invading soldiers' conversations. The real reason you don't want to quarter your soldiers in the homes of your presumed enemies. Yeah, exactly. Especially somebody who was, you know, previously fighting in said war. But, you know,
00:33:18
Speaker
People make great tactical decisions in battle, right? So, Jean 21st rolls around and she found herself privy to a conversation between American soldiers garrison in her home about a surprise attack plan on British troops stationed in Thorold. located west of Queenston.
00:33:41
Speaker
it's not clear how she became exactly like it's not clear how she came upon these plans but it's just
00:33:51
Speaker
I think she was like cooking dinner and she overheard the conversation. Like, if we've learned anything like throughout like modern conflicts is that if you, if you give soldiers an opportunity to not shut the fuck up, they will very much spend that opportunity not shutting the fuck up. Well, just look at all the people in the crane war who are on the Russian side, like, you know,
00:34:18
Speaker
taking selfies, taking selfies. And then, you know, you get the OPSEC people coming out and like going like, well, there are soldiers are stationed at this particular motorway overpass or whatever. Right. And it's just like, and then, you know, it gets down to the military command and then they get themselves Tomahawk. So, you know, it's it's pretty important. But it was for the gram. They got themselves Tomahawk for the gram. They got they got the engagement and then they got engagement.
00:34:48
Speaker
through presents. Because that's what awards are all about is gift giving. Yes. Because her husband was incapacitated from his injuries, Laura took it upon herself to make it aware to the trips in Thorold in order to give them warning. So she wanted to have them have advance warning that, you know, the Americans are about to go fuck some shit up.
00:35:12
Speaker
This resulted in her taking a trek through what is now St. Catharines in Pelham, which was then very heavily forested. And then finally meeting up with Allied warriors, 32 kilometers east, or sorry, west, excuse me. After 17 hours of travel, I almost said 17 days, 17 hours of travel. Like she just made- She just hoofed it. She hoofed it, took her 17 hours to go 32 kilometers. And he may be going like, God, that seems awfully slow because
00:35:42
Speaker
To go like was the average human walking speed like five kilometers. It's like, you know, it should have only taken on good roads Yeah, exactly. But like she's dealing with like, you know streams and
00:35:55
Speaker
uneven terrain, you know, like there are pathways, but like, you know, this is also June in on Southern Ontario, like it's not to say that it's going to be like covered in snow or anything, because it's the climate isn't that much different now it is then. But because of like all the terrain not being tamed and all that, like you're going to come across a lot of
00:36:19
Speaker
stuff left over from like the previous spring and winter, right? She's bushwhacking it basically. Yeah, it sucks. And like, I'm someone who goes hiking sometimes. And like, there have been some times where I've been like, wow, this path sucks. And like, you know, what should otherwise take me no more than an hour to go like three kilometers ends up being like, like
00:36:39
Speaker
three hours because you can barely get through all this mess. So eventually when she met with the Mohawkas previously mentioned, she was taken to James Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon was a British lieutenant. He was a member of the Family Compact. And boy, do I ever look forward to having an opportunity to speak about the Family Compact, because oh boy, yeah, Upper Canada politics.
00:37:05
Speaker
Also, to a certain degree, current Canada politics. Well, to be fair, the Family Compact kind of died out a couple decades later. They still have some influence and all that, but it's nowhere near... There's a lot of legacy shit, I will admit, with the Family Compact. And Ontario was never ruled by powerful, monied families ever again. Oh, Rob Ford. Oh, Rob Ford.
00:37:35
Speaker
His brother, I should say Doug Ford, but Doug Ford is something else, but Rob Ford, rest in piss. Her warning was taken seriously because Fitzgibbons knew that she was married to Seacorp. And just two days later on the 24th, I believe it was the 22nd by the time she had arrived,
00:37:59
Speaker
400 Mohawk warriors and 50 British troops or otherwise known as regulars were able to fend off 600 Americans in the battle known as Beaver Dams. And I'm sure the 400 Mohawk warriors got got most of the credit. We're going to talk about that.
00:38:19
Speaker
Oh, I know we will! I see the notes! I see the notes! Of the battle, 25 Americans were killed, 50 were wounded, and the rest were just simply captured. On the British side, it's actually kind of fuzzy, but it says that 5-15 were killed and 20-25 were wounded.
00:38:41
Speaker
They're in a fort that probably tracks. Yeah, and I think the reason why the numbers were so out of place is because it was 50 British troops and 400 Mohawk warriors. It's kind of vague here, but I want to say that maybe most of the deaths were on the Mohawk side. And they just didn't count because the British are racist. We're going to talk about that. I know, I can see the notes.
00:39:09
Speaker
But again, the Battle of Beaver Dam was pretty important in the grand scheme of things in the War of 1812. 450 British Allied fighters, troops, whatever you want to call them, they were all successfully fending off an attacking force that was 150 strong more than them.
00:39:33
Speaker
And they managed to fend them off and stem the tide. And as a result, Upper Canada is now Ontario, part of Canada. And the outcome of the War of 1812, again,
Delayed Recognition for Laura and Mohawk Warriors
00:39:46
Speaker
is obvious. Canada exists, although whether or not the annexation of Ontario and the rest of Canada is kind of contentious. Yeah, 600 American troops doesn't exactly sound like concentrated invasion force to me.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, but there wasn't that many troops to begin with in Upper Canada either. And not to say that there weren't troops. That's true. But it's not like you have today where you can have entire armies that are like, you can have a standing army that's like, the Americans have a ridiculously large standing army, right? But the population of Upper and Lower Canada was substantially smaller than the colonies of the United States, or I guess rather the Republic of the United States rather.
00:40:29
Speaker
What was interesting, though, is that some, unsurprisingly, some in American leadership did want the British to see the two candidates to them. And I guess that would also include the other colonies like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia. And we got to manifest that destiny. Okay, so I'm going to correct you on that manifest destiny did not exist for another 30 years.
00:40:50
Speaker
That's true. Yeah, like it was the 1840s when Manifest Destiny became a thing. So the war again is complex to dive into, but it officially concluded in 1815. Things were signed, Treaty of Ghent. We can get a, maybe might, we're going to Belgium and later this year, maybe we can talk about the Treaty of Ghent as a side thing. Oh, sure. Yeah. As for Laura, well, surprise, surprise. She was not mentioning any official records despite being responsible for warning the British.
00:41:20
Speaker
Canadian Paul Revere, my ass. And she kind of got, she got really screwed here because like the war left, once again, the seacord store in Queenston ruined. Her family was impoverished, so those two servants were probably not working for them anymore. And servants, you say? Yeah, servants. And James was left with his war pension, and he was renting out the hectares of land, so they were landlords, but like, boo. Yeah, I know.
00:41:50
Speaker
But Laura did manage to have two more children. So, you know, I think they had six children in total or seven. I think it was seven. In the interim, it eventually was acknowledged in 1818.
00:42:05
Speaker
What do you think, who do you think was acknowledged by 1818? I'm gonna go with not Laura Secord. Yeah, it was the Mohawks. The Mohawks were finally acknowledged by Fitzgivens in their contribution to the Battle of Beaver Dams. Because initially the credit just went to him, but Laura was once again left out. Like most, like again, 400 some odd Mohawk warriors like showed up, right? And they only had 50% of course they did the fucking work.
00:42:35
Speaker
Yeah, the Mohawks didn't so much contribute as they fought, they won the battle and also 50 British guys were there. Yeah, exactly. I would love to know, and I didn't look into this what the Mohawk were fighting with, I'm going to assume they were given rifles. It wasn't unusual for rifles to exist amongst indigenous peoples back then.
00:43:02
Speaker
At that time, yeah, they were probably armed. They were well armed, yeah. One of the things that I've seen as a historical anachronism in a lot of movies is they never had guns, and no, they frickin' did have guns. Yeah, what do you think the fur traders traded them for? Why do you think the Meiji Restoration happened in Japan? They went from swords to guns.
00:43:28
Speaker
Oh yeah. So like, guns really made swords obsolete, unless you've read or watched the Dune.
00:43:38
Speaker
Yes, British, British basically at this time had a love for two things which were very contradictory. One was colonizing the ever loving shit out of the rest of the world. And two was selling guns to the colonized peoples. Hey, remember, they always said that you make most of your money from the tools you sell not from the land you acquire.
00:44:03
Speaker
Exactly. In 1827, so just about nine years later, James petitioned the government for employment, so he wasn't doing very
Post-War Poverty for the Secord Family
00:44:13
Speaker
well. The sitting lieutenant governor, Peregrine Maitland, I have no idea how you're supposed to say that, M-A-I-T-L-A-N-D, Maitland, whatever. Maitland? Who the hell cares? The lieutenant governor is dead. Refuse this request.
00:44:31
Speaker
He's like, no, I'm not giving anything. But, yeah, we don't give handouts around here. Oh, yeah, well, here's the thing. Laura finally got something. She was given the opportunity to oversee the construction of Brock's monument, a structure built to honor a local of Queenston who died in the War of 1812 who did fight alongside James. So James knew, I wish I made note of the full name of Brock, but unfortunately it did not.
00:45:00
Speaker
but James Fottlawn's- Brought-type Pokemon trainer. Yeah, you know, Brock from the Pokemon Jam. The monument's still there, by the way. But she initially refused to engage with the project, but she relented and accepted it. I believe the reason why she accepted it was in that same year and finally Fitzgimmons acknowledged that she had a role in fending off the Americans. So it took
00:45:29
Speaker
what, almost 15 years for her to get any recognition, be it just Fitzgivens who's no longer in any control over things, to say that, yeah, Laura did tell us that shit was about to go down.
00:45:46
Speaker
When it's completely costless for him to do so, he decides to finally acknowledge that, oh yeah, this lady kind of gave us the heads up. Yeah, a decade after acknowledging that, well, I didn't really do all the work.
00:46:05
Speaker
Which is interesting because at this time it was less damaging to his commission to admit that he basically watched the Mohawks win the war for him than it was to admit that a woman gave him the heads up.
00:46:22
Speaker
Yeah, women can't do anything. Anyway, so during that same year, though, one of her daughters dies of typhus. So like, she's, her life becomes a series of tragedies. It's the 1800s. That was kind of just life. Yeah, typhus was pretty non unheard of back then.
00:46:42
Speaker
When the money was completed in 1831, she was not given keys to it, despite another acknowledgement. So she's gotten two of these now from Fitzgivens of her role in the war. She's gotten two acknowledgements. Again, only after it's costless for him to do anything and there's no expectations possibly attached. This is like the 1800s version of Forexposure. Yeah, exactly.
00:47:07
Speaker
But eventually in 1835, Lauren James had it with Living in Queensland and moved to Chippewa, which is where James took on the role of customs collecting. Chippewa is like south of Niagara Falls. So he's come full circle now. He was an American patriot and now he's a Canadian border guard.
00:47:26
Speaker
Yeah, basically, he became a cop. He's the asshole who checks your baggage when you come into Lester Pearson. Well, it was more like, what are you bringing in? Are you selling this shit in Canada? Okay, these are the tariffs you need to pay. So in 1841, James died of a stroke at the age of 67.
00:47:48
Speaker
This left her destitute. And when the war pension ran out, because back then, and I think it's still the case today, the pension that you had from your spouse at a limited time, I guess you were expected to pull yourself up by your bootstraps at the age of...
00:48:05
Speaker
old and endure, right? Or just die. Landlords just can't make it anymore, Heather. Not in Ontario, not in anywhere in Canada. It's real hard for them, you know? Yeah, that's true. Well, she did, was kind of made her sell most of her land. So the 80 hectares of land that she had
00:48:28
Speaker
uh received alongside you know james um like that was no more that was going bye-bye there were attempts to find her uh support um you know there was like a request to the lieutenant governor to get james's custom uh my customs position given to her son charles i believe any extensions on her pension were denied and then she was forced to move into a small cottage that was on her remaining parcel
00:48:56
Speaker
daughters and one of her daughters. Yeah, one of her daughters and two kids. So they she moved into this small cottage with her daughter and two kids. And this is where it gets a little bit more tragic, because she figured that she could become a school teacher, which is not unheard of for its
Recognition by the Prince of Wales
00:49:12
Speaker
time. That's what a lot of women would do is run schooling out of their homes.
00:49:16
Speaker
But that didn't last for very long because compulsory schooling was introduced in Upper Canada. I think it might've been Ontario by this point. And she wasn't really able to teach anymore. Just big government coming by and rooting the livelihoods of the little guy.
00:49:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So 19 years go by for living in this little shack. Jesus. Yeah, this is 19 years of no details. I'm certain she was up to things and trying to do anything she can to keep, you know, make ends meet. But 1860 rolls around and the Prince of Wales is in Canada doing his grand tour. Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII.
00:50:04
Speaker
learned of her story, excuse me, while touring Canada. And this is the interesting part. He was so moved by the story that he gave her a gift of a hundred pounds. And this is a little bit of an interesting thing for me, because when I read this, I raised an eyebrow. And the reason why I raised an eyebrow is if you know anything about Canadian currency,
00:50:33
Speaker
1860, the pound did not exist. We actually by that point did have a Canadian dollar. And, and it was, there was a way to convert pre existing Canadian pounds to Canadian dollars. But by 1857, Canadian pounds were no longer considered currency. So like you would
00:50:59
Speaker
You probably give up your money to the bank and then the bank would just give you Canadian dollars. Back then it was pegged to the American dollar. That's kind of funny. But the pound did not exist.
00:51:12
Speaker
I kind of think that Edward gave her 100 British pounds. And if that's the case, thanks to the Bank of England having ridiculous record keeping, going back to like, what, the 13th century, you're actually able to take- Jesus. Yeah, no, you can go back to the 13th, 14th century records and convert one pound into modern pounds.
00:51:38
Speaker
One pound in the 1400s would be worth so much today, right? But a hundred pounds in 1860 would work out to 10,000 pounds. And this is British pounds again. And converting to Canadian dollars is only $17,000. So not, not nothing, but also not going to turn around her fortunes. No, like $17,000 is not a small amount of money. But considering how fucked over she got,
00:52:08
Speaker
And you would think that she would get something a little more substantial considering like she managed to save an entire fucking country. Yeah. So this remained the only official acknowledgement in her lifetime.
Laura Secord: Suffragette Movement Symbol
00:52:24
Speaker
And she died in- Here have a hundo. Here have a hundo. Yeah, here you go. Here's a hundred. Here's a hundred quid. Don't spend it all at once. In 1868, at the age of 93, she died and was buried next to her husband.
00:52:38
Speaker
Um, she lived, still lived a long life. He did live a long life, but yeah. What do you think of Laura Secord? Uh, I think she really got fucked over in this whole thing. Yeah. Like, uh, but that's kind of unsurprising. Yeah. Like we can make, I'm certain there's other problematic things we could dig up about her, but it's also the 1800s and 1800s is just full of problematic things and people and
00:53:08
Speaker
yeah again i will i will direct you to the the uh the black servants when they were living well yeah yeah yeah so anyway um so when did she found this chocolate company okay we're gonna get into that because we need to talk about how she became a national symbol for chocolate
00:53:34
Speaker
So in the 1880s, during what was kind of like the 1880s is kind of when the suffragette movement started becoming more of a thing. There was this movement, like there was a push by upper class women to strengthen ties between women in Canada and women in the British Empire. And she was being touted as a hero akin to that of Paul Revere, like you mentioned earlier, and a symbol of the suffragette movement. I
00:54:04
Speaker
don't know anything about her personal politics other than, you know, I guess she's was fuck the Americans. I guess that's her politics. But pro pro hiking, pro nature, I think probably she would have been in favor of of better, better public trails through the wilderness. Well, that's the thing. In 2013, there was a trail that more or less follows the route she took from
00:54:32
Speaker
from Queenston to, what was the name of the town? Was it Ingersoll? Like, God, I forgot the name of the town because I lost my notes. But anyway, the town, basically the route that she took was turned into a trail. So 32 kilometer trail, it cuts through St. Catharines and all that sort of thing. A lot of schools are named after her, including one here in Vancouver. If you are going down Grandview, sorry, Broadway, excuse me, I think it intersects with the street just before Victoria.
00:55:01
Speaker
It's called Laura Secord Elementary. There's many schools named after her. And in 2003, the federal government, which I believe was still Crutchen, made her an official person of historical significance. Just extremely late and extremely dollar short. It only took 109 years.
00:55:24
Speaker
Yeah, actually a little bit longer, a little bit more than that. But yeah, it took 190 years for the federal government to kind of go, yeah, Laura Seacourt, she was badass when she's a historical figure. Meanwhile, she like, you know, caught the shaft in her lifetime.
00:55:40
Speaker
But, as they often do, let's talk about chocolate, shall we? Because, yes, so stupid. So it is Easter. Or rather, it'll be Easter on Sunday. It's Good Friday when we're recording this. In 1913, so a year after her walk, we finally get to the dam. A year? A century. A year after her walk. That's a century. A century after her walk. Excuse me. 1913. God.
Laura Secord in Canadian Culture through Chocolate
00:56:09
Speaker
Frank O'Connor, a Toronto businessman, founded Laura Secord Chocolates and opened a store in Toronto. The chocolates were sold in a box bearing a silhouette of Secord and ended up becoming one of the largest chocolatiers in the country. I'm going to say this, Purdie's is better. We have to stan our hometown here. Purdie's is like, if you ever, if you're in Canada, there's like,
00:56:39
Speaker
like there's two major chocolatiers that you can immediately think of. Laura Seacourt is out of Toronto, Pertes is out of Vancouver. There's other chocolates. We are intensely partisan on which is better. Well, like I'm going to be going shopping later and I'll probably grab a box of Pertes for myself because it's Eastern. I do like my chocolates. But why do you think
00:57:01
Speaker
a chocolate company was named after. Modern chocolate production, as we know, like the chocolate bar that you can get on the grocery store shelf, didn't really exist until long after her death. I think actually by the time she was recognized as a hero by anyone in Canada, that's when modern chocolate production actually started to be a thing. Yeah, it was a very delicacy thing.
00:57:31
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Chocolate is a really mechanical process. You have to use something, I think it's basically like a hammer mill of sorts in order to get the oils into this super smooth stuff. I've seen chocolate production, and there's no way this would have existed pre-industrial revolution. Chocolate did exist pre-industrial revolution, but not in any capacity that we have today.
00:57:59
Speaker
It is hard to make by hand. I have tried. I don't want to make chocolate by hand after having seen it done. So the reason why the Laura Secor chocolate company exists has nothing to do with herself. It's simply that O'Connor liked her for her heroism. I can never say that word to save my life.
00:58:18
Speaker
He has no connection to her. It probably helped that she was a symbol of the upper class suffragettes and those kind of would be your market at that time, no? Oh, women like their chocolate. Yes, and women also be shopping.
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I am going to go shopping later today. There you go. As our resident podcast woman representative. That's right. This guy would later become a senator after being appointed by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Probably Canada's least problematic Prime Minister. I'm gonna get canceled for that one. Maybe.
00:59:02
Speaker
I hope to discuss King on some episode one day because he is a character. He is such a character. I cannot wait to talk about one of his advisors. Oh, yes. I hope everyone likes dogs.
00:59:23
Speaker
most as a result of O'Connor. And I'm going to confirm this because I did this little informal survey. Most Canadians associate her with the chocolate and not her actual heroism. Like I called my mum last weekend.
00:59:40
Speaker
And I was telling her about what I was working on this week. And I asked her like, do you know who Laura Secord is? And she's like, oh, that's the chocolate lady. I go and ask somebody at work. And they said, oh, yeah, that's the lady who does chocolates. And it's not that unusual. There are lots of other polls out there that immediately associate Laura Secord with chocolate before associating her with the actual stuff that she did in 1812.
01:00:05
Speaker
So even after two informal acknowledgements by Fitzgibbon and getting tossed a hundo by the king, she still got- Oh no, it was the prince. It was the prince. He wasn't king until after Queen Vicky died. Eyes. Okay, yes. Fair, fair, fair. I should know this is someone who plays too much Victoria III. Oh Jesus. And also like the other thing is like,
01:00:35
Speaker
I can almost bet that she never had chocolate. Oh, probably not. Maple sounds like she basically, it sounds like she basically like did all of this and immediately after the war pretty much just ended up in poverty. Yeah. Like, you know, but poverty by, you know, upper-class standards. Yeah. Okay. Fair. Yeah. So that is the story of Laura Secord. What did we learn?
01:01:03
Speaker
Don't do anything nice for the British. Oh. Shit. Well, you know, my heritage has a lot of history with that one.
01:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, you of all people should have already known this, and honestly, this lesson is kind of self-evident. But yeah, don't do anything nice for the British, especially if it happens to be the mid-1800s. You're gonna get screwed over by it. Yeah, like, basically, Family Compact sucks. They take all the credit. They screw over indigenous people. They screw over women. Land back. I don't know.
01:01:45
Speaker
Land back, the Mohawk, look, the Mohawk defended that land. They obviously need to be granted all of southern Ontario. Yeah, just for the record, I'm white and Irish. I'm like, so I am a colonizer or the daughter of colonizers. I don't know how we're going to talk about this, but basically fuck the British. Like seriously, fuck the British.
01:02:10
Speaker
If you live in the United Kingdom, I'm pretty certainly sure of the same sediments, but just so you know, I love you and all, but fuck the British. Yeah, as a trans person in particular, I'll add to that. It'll all turf island. Oh, boy. So yeah, that is the episode, Tamarack.
01:02:31
Speaker
I'm excited to do more episodes of this. We have lots of content available to us. In fact, the next episode is one you will be particularly interested in. Yeah, it's on the BC fast ferry scandal. They totally did. It is definitely about the BC fast ferry scandal and nothing else. All right, well, that's a podcast. My name is Heather.
01:02:55
Speaker
My name is Tamarack. All right, we're going to play the opening sequence because we don't have an outro at the moment, so. We do not have an outro. This is actually the outro. We're just going to mumble about the outro. Exactly. Goodbye, everybody. One, two, three. Shoinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, Stolo, and Tsawatuth First Nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.