John Richardson Canadian

In July of 1812, John Richardson became a gentleman volunteer of the 41st Regiment at the the age of fifteen. With this regiment he witnessed the fall of Fort Detroit and fought at Frenchtown. He later wrote some vivid accounts of fighting alongside the First Nations. "No other sound than the measured step of the troops interrupted the solitude of the scene, rendered more imposing by the wild appearance of the warriors, whose bodies, stained and painted in the most frightful manner for the occasion, glided past us with almost noiseless velocity...some painted white, some black, others half black, half red...with no other covering than a cloth around their loins, yet armed to the teeth with rifles, tomahawks, war clubs...and scalping knives. Uttering no sound, intent only on reaching the enemy unperceived, they might have passed for the spectres of those wilds, the ruthless demons which War had unchained for the punishment and oppression of man." Though Richardson didn't approve of certain aspects of native warfare, he greatly admired Tecumseh whom he had known since childhood. He fought alongside the Shawnee chief in the seige of Fort Meigs. Richardson was captured at Moraviantown where Tecumseh was killed, and spent eight months as a prisoner of war. After the war of 1812, Richardson remained attached to the military, serving with the British Auxiliary in Spain from 1834 to 1837. He went on to be one of Canada's first novelists and much of his material came from those experiences as a young man in the war. After a brief stint as an editor in Brockville and Montreal, Richardson moved to New York where he died in 1857 at the age of sixty.