"They are white men, we are Indians;
What a gulf their stares proclaim!
They are mounting. we are dying:
All our heritage they claim.”

W. D. Lighthall.

AN excellent guide through the story of this county “in the days of Auld Lang Syne” is the Rev. R. B. Nelles, a Haldimand “Old Boy.”

Haldimand has no very large towns. In fact, Dunnville is its only town, and Cayuga, its picturesque county seat—on the Grand River—ranks as a village, but it is a thriving village, like several others in the county, within which there is now little wild land.

The Grand River flows through Haldimand, and the greater part of the county was included in the grant made by Governor Haldimand in 1784 to the Mohawk Loyalists. But Chief Brant had many friends in the Loyalist corps known as “Butler’s Rangers,” and he invited some of these men to settle on the banks of the Grand River, giving them lands on 999-year leases. The Loyalists, Nelles and Young,, with their sons, thus obtained grants in Seneca Township. John Huff obtained lands in North, and John Dochstader in South, Cayuga. Captain Hugh Earl, who had wedded a sister of Brant’s, received 1000 acres in Dunn Township for himself and his three daughters. Nor was this all. After about ten years, Brant concluded that it would be advisable to sell part of the reservation to raise money for such necessaries as guns and powder and blankets, and, obtaining the consent of the Government to this step, was appointed agent for his tribe. In 1810 an American, Can by, agreed with Dochstader to purchase a block of nearly 20,000 acres for about as many dollars. The money was to be secured by mortgage, but as late as 1835 was still owing to Dochstader’s “Indian children.” A few years later the Indians parted with a great portion of Moulton Township—the estate was for a time in the possession of Lord Selkirk—but they received only a small amount of the sale price, and Mr. Nelles states that the mortgage executed to the trustees of the Indians still stands in the registry office against the land.

The little township of Sherbrooke was patented to\ William Dickson, on the extraordinary stipulation that it was to be paid for ‘‘in professional services” when required. Finally the Government stepped in and took from the Indians, for their own sakes, the power to sell or lease their lands. Shortly after 1830, however, the Government decided, with the consent of the chiefs, to sell the remainder of their lands in Haldimand County, excepting a small part of Oneida Township, which is still an Indian reserve, and to invest the proceeds for the benefit of the Indians. The result was that in 1832 the county generally was opened to white settlers. Many of the first actual settlers in Haldimand we/e Germans or of German descent.

As already mentioned, a few families had come in under the Indian regime. The nearest settlements of their own race were at Ancaster and Niagara, and in many respects they lived like their red neighbours, trusting for food chiefly to Indian corn and to the fish and game to be obtained from the streams and woods. The building of the first mill in the district was, of course, an event. The first erected in the county was at Can-borough village, soon after the War of 1812. Men and women alike dressed much in homespun, coloured with indigo or butternut bark. Neighbours were too far apart to interchange visits frequently, except when winter’s snow had turned the forest tracks into fair roads.

To those who treated them well the Indians were not dangerous neighbours, bat in the case of real or fancied wrongs they were ready to wreak vengeance with their own hands. Once a certain Captain Clinch of Niagara, on the way to visit John Dochstader, was carrying a keg of rum in his sleigh. This caught the attention of three Delawares, whom he met in the wood?, and one seized the horses’ heads, another held the indignant officer himself, whilst the third filled an iron kettle with the liquor. Then each in turn took “a long pull” at the rum before releasing Clinch. In a rage he drove on "to John Huff’s,” borrowed a fowling-piece, loaded it with slugs, and drove back to where the three Indians sat carousing on a log. Firing his piece, he wounded one of the red-men severely, then turned and went on his wa3r. But when Dochstader heard the story he sent a swift runner to beg Joseph Brant to give him aid, for he knew that the Delawares would not rest till they had taken vengeance on Clinch. Brant hurried to the rescue with two hundred braves; and he was not a moment too soon, for he found Dochstader’s house surrounded by the angry Delawares.

His force was strong enough to overawe them, and Clinch was escorted out of the Reserve by some of the Mohawks. But he had had his lesson, and never ventured to re-enter it.

As a pendant to this picture, it is only fair to give another one. It happened that Salmon Minor, one of the first white settlers in the county, who had promised to pay a rent in wheat for his lands, was for some years unable to raise the crops he had hoped for. At last he had a good yield, and went at once to the Indian Council to pay up the arrears. For a time the red-men sat silent; then the old chief rose and said, “You owe us no wheat. Indian never went to your house and came away hungry. Indian eat all the wheat in the house.” And when the tribe agreed to sell that part of their lands they stipulated that Minor’s farm should be secured to him.

In 1833 the Grand River Navigation Company, organised to improve navigation below Brantford, began to build dams and locks and short canals. Until one of these dams was constructed at Dunnville, Gifford’s Ferry, in South Cayuga, was the only place in the county where teams could cross the river. Opposite, on the North Cayuga side, stood Windecker’s Tavern, an old house (now swept away) with an immense fireplace, which seemed to give a cheery welcome to many a tired traveller. One of the stockholders in the navigation company, David Thompson, built grist-mills and sawmills and a distillery at Indiana, in Seneca Township. He did a large business in lumber also, but when he died his little village lost its short-lived importance. York, two and a half miles away, .settled first by an Irish gentleman, Richard Martin, owed its origin to the water-power furnished by the company’s dam and to deposits of plaster in the neighbourhood.

Rainham and Walpole, originally part of Norfolk County, began to be settled early. About 1791 the Hoovers, a Swiss family from Pennsylvania, crossed the Niagara and Grand Rivers, "towing” their horses behind their boats, and settled beside Lake Erie, near where the village of Selkirk now stands. A few others came into these townships before the War of 1812, but some got discouraged and others deserted to the Americans. Still worse, in Walpole Township a band of men, sympathising with the invaders, made their headquarters near the Nanticoke River, and used to make raids on their Loyalist neighbours. They were responsible for the murder of a somewhat overbearing military settler, Captain Francis. At last a company of militia was sent to drive them off. All escaped save one, who was found hidden in a sap trough, and he and a squatter of disreputable character, after whom Peacock’s Point was named, were executed at Burlington.

On a December night in 1837 two men coming ashore from a skiff asked for shell er at the Hoovers' house. In the morning they left for Buffalo, but the wind drove blocks of floating ice inshore, and off Dunn Township they were seen by a man named Overtrott, hopelessly entangled. He put out, seemingly, to their rescue, but he suspected that they were rebels trying to escape, and when he got them ashore he delivered them up to the authorities. One of the pair was Samuel. Lount, upon whose head a large price had been set. Overtrott obtained this money, and with it the scorn of his neighbours; whilst Lount, snatched from his threatening grave in Lake Erie, died a few weeks later by the hangman’s hand.

Haldimand County (set apart for judicial and municipal purposes in 1850) was famous for the heat of its political contests and for the length and frequency of its election trials. John Brant, the first man elected to the Assembly in Haldimand, was unseated on a technicality growing out of his father’s long leases. In 1851 there was a three-cornered contest, in which George Brown was one of the defeated candidates, and William Lyon Mackenzie --the ex-rebel leader—was victorious. Twice afterwards he sat for the county, but resigned in 1860.

Haldimand men came of a stock who in politics or war could feel fierce joy in battle, and some families had a military record of many generations. The family to which the historian of Haldimand belongs is a remarkable instance of this. William Kelles, a Loyalist settler in the county, had fought in 1776; his son took up arms in 1812; his grandson fought against the rebels in 1837; his great-grandson marched against the Fenians in 1866; one of his great-great-grandsons saw service during the North-west Rebellion of 1885, and, lastly, another, Lieutenant W. H. Nelles of Strathcona’s Horse, laid down his life in South Africa in 1901.