Historian Catherine L. Emerson told the County Legislature this week that she and her staff have traced the post-War of 1812 whereabouts of Betsy Doyle, a local heroine of the war.

Doyle was lionized for hauling red-hot cannonballs to gunners at Fort Niagara during a November 1812 cannon duel with the British forces in Fort George on the other side of the Niagara River.

However, no one seemed to know what happened to her after that.

Emerson discovered that Doyle, with her four children in tow, survived what could have been a winter death march across New York State after Fort Niagara fell to the British in December 1813.

It was a 310-mile, four-month trek from Youngstown to an Army camp south of Albany, where Doyle worked as an Army nurse until her death in 1819.

“The War of 1812 bicentennial is right around the corner, and Niagara County is going to be right in the center of it on the American side. It’s a great opportunity for heritage tourism,” said Emerson’s husband, Robert L., executive director of Old Fort Niagara. “It’s stories like this that reach out and grab the public. It’s not the difference between the mortar and a howitzer.”

Emerson thanked the County Legislature for giving her two part-time deputy historians, Ronald F. Cary and Craig E. Bacon. “It gives us the critical mass to do cutting-edge research,” she said.

The research proves that Doyle was a real person, something some Canadian historians have questioned despite the mention of her cannonball exploit in the official report of the fort’s commanding officer, who compared her to Joan of Arc.

“Nothing much more was known about Betsy Doyle. Some historians called her a shadowy figure who didn’t really exist, and then they’d talk about Laura Secord,” Emerson told the Legislature.

Secord is a national heroine in Canada. A Massachusetts native whose Tory family moved to Ontario after the American Revolution, Secord was living in Queenston in June 1813, when she learned — it’s always been unclear how — of plans by an invading American force to attack the British at Beaver Dams, Ont.

Secord, who was 38 at the time, walked 20 miles from Queenston to a British-allied Indian camp, where the Indians led her to British headquarters. The next day, the British were waiting for the Americans at Beaver Dams and easily repulsed the attack.

“What we found [about Doyle]

makes Laura Secord’s 20-mile walk look like a Sunday walk,” Emerson told the Legislature.

It didn’t help Doyle’s reputation that a monument to her at Fort Niagara gives her name as “Fanny Doyle.”

“They got her name wrong for 150 years,” Emerson said. She blamed this on Oliver G. Steele, a local “historian” who in 1845 published a book about the early years of the Niagara Frontier.

In his preface, Steele warned his readers that if he didn’t know something about one of the incidents he described, he’d make it up. One of the things he made up was Doyle’s first name, calling her Fanny for some reason we’ll probably never know. Likewise, her husband, Andrew, somehow became known as Tom.

Doyle came to Fort Niagara in 1810, when her husband joined the Army there. It’s unknown how long they’d been married; in fact, until Emerson’s new research, it wasn’t known they had children.

War between the U. S. and Great Britain was declared in June 1812. The Americans made plans to invade Canada, but their first attempt was stopped on Oct. 13 at the Battle of Queenston Heights.

The tall monument to the British commander, General Isaac Brock, who died in the battle, can be seen easily from Lewiston.

Andrew Doyle, an artilleryman, was taken prisoner by the British and eventually shipped to England to stand trial for treason.

Because he had been born in Canada, he was regarded as a British subject by the British government, which did not recognize the American process of changing citizenship.

Andrew Doyle was never tried, however, and was released from prison in 1815 and returned to America. But he was unable to find Betsy, concluded she had died and remarried in 1819.

He lived on a farm in Massachusetts until his death in 1875 at age 87.

But Betsy hadn’t died, Emerson discovered after research in the National Archives. She was still at Fort Niagara when the post-Queenston Heights truce expired and the British began cannonading it from Fort George on Nov. 21, 1812. The Americans quickly returned fire.

The ammunition of choice was “hot shot,” iron cannonballs heated in a fire until red hot. The balls were then stuffed into the muzzle of the cannon, hopefully in such a way that they didn’t prematurely touch the gunpowder, causing an immediate explosion that would almost certainly kill the whole gun crew.

It was a dangerous business, but according to Col. George McFeely, the Fort Niagara commander, Betsy Doyle grabbed a pair of tongs and all day long hauled red-hot 12-or 18-pound cannonballs to the guns, loading them herself before running back for more.

The word of Betsy’s bravery got around, and some military officers who visited the fort in 1813 were eager to meet her. Unfortunately, one of them wrote an account describing her as disappointingly unattractive.

The British crossed the river in December 1813 and captured Fort Niagara. Their raiding parties torched homes and businesses from the Village of Lewiston to central Cambria.

The night before the fort fell, according to an account by an officer who talked to Betsy the following spring, Betsy joined the militia sentries on patrol outside the fort, put on a uniform and took a watch shift.

After the attack, Betsy and her children hit the road to escape on foot, probably following what now are Routes 93 and 77 to Batavia and then east to the Greenbush Cantonment, the Army camp in what is now East Greenbush, near Albany.

They didn’t arrive until April 1814. Not surprisingly, Betsy had a fever when she arrived at the camp.

She recovered from that and worked as a nurse until she became ill again and died April 2, 1819, an event reported in a letter from the camp commander to the Washington brass. The bitter author, Lt. Henry Smith, wrote that Betsy hadn’t been paid in a year.

“Her death was accelerated by the want of those necessities which her pay would have procured,” Smith wrote in a letter Emerson discovered in the National Archives. The War Department sent the money to Betsy’s orphaned daughter. What happened to the other children is unknown.

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