Witching Hour - Dark History: The battle fought on the Lake Erie ice

Witching Hour - Dark History Lake Erie froze hard in the winter of 1838, and men fought a battle on it. On March 3, British troops cut off Patriot raiders on the ice off Pelee Island. The accounts never agreed on how many died.

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Witching Hour is our nightly local history and folklore feature. Ghost stories and legends are retold as stories people tell, not reported as fact. Sources are listed below the story.

Tonight's Witching Hour is dark history from the frozen west end of Lake Erie.

Raiders on the ice

By late February 1838, Lake Erie had frozen over. That month, a band of American Patriot raiders walked across the ice and seized Pelee Island. The provincial plaque on the island calls them American supporters of William Lyon Mackenzie's rebellion, the failed 1837 uprising in Upper Canada.

The march across the lake

Lt. Col. John Maitland, the British commander in the Western District, sent regular troops, militia, cavalry and a small party of First Nations allies across the frozen lake to take the island back.

On March 3, 1838, Capt. George Browne and his companies of the 32nd Regiment took a position on the ice to block the raiders' escape. When the raiders ran into them, there was a short, sharp fight, and the raiders fled.

Nobody agreed on the toll

The people who wrote it down never agreed on how many died. The diary of John Prince, who marched with the Essex volunteers, and Maitland's own report give lower counts for the British side than the plaque put up in 1974, which says Browne's force lost five and the raiders lost at least eleven killed.

The island is quiet now. In March 1838, for one day, the ice off its shore was a battlefield.