Niagara

The Niagara River joins Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, but its great cataract interrupts the water route between them. Travellers must carry their boats and goods around the falls, making the portage a vital passage to the upper Great Lakes. The peninsula was home to the people whom the French called the Neutral nation; warfare in the middle of the seventeenth century dispersed their communities.

The French built forts at the river mouth to protect their access to the portage. In 1759 British and Haudenosaunee forces besieged Fort Niagara, and the French surrendered after a relief column was defeated. Following the American Revolution, Loyalists settled on the peninsula and Newark served briefly as the capital of Upper Canada. The War of 1812 again made the river a contested frontier: Fort George and the settlements nearby lay in the path of armies crossing between the two lakes.