Friday, January 30, 2015

1812 bicentennial It's over and we didn't even notice.



I was going to wrap two and a half years of intermittent coverage of the War of 1812 bicentennial with note of the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, the one unfortunately fought after the peace treaty had been signed (at Ghent, Belgium, 24 December 1814)..

Turns out the battle wasn't at the beginning of February as I had somehow told myself, but on January 8, 1815. Missed it entirely..

So it's over. Military re-enactors may be out again this summer, but maybe not the crowds.

Update, February 6:  Andrew Stewart assures us it may be over, but it ain't over:
Maybe not quite over, if, in fact, Mokomanish's raid on the upper Wabash River took place in spring 1815, as Theodore Karamanski, author of "Blackbird's Song: Andrew J. Blackbird and the Odawa People" (Michigan State University Press 2012), believes (p 20). Alan Corbiere thinks it took place in 1812: http://activehistory.ca/2014/10/mookomaanish-the-damn-knife-odaawaa-chief-and-warrior/. This might not seem that important, but it was to Aboriginal people who were in the war to fight for their homeland in Michigan and who had not yet heard of Ghent. Plus, with Assigninack's canoe surviving today as a legacy of that raid, which Alan Corbiere describes, and Garth Taylor in an article in The Beaver (1986) before him, it becomes one of the war's most vivid actions.
Assigninack's Canoe at Museum of Canadian History

Images:Top: eighteentwelve.ca.  Assigninack's canoe:  from the Corbiere Active History link above.
 
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