Pioneers on the Niagara Frontier

A view of historic Fort Niagara

When the Shaws of Scotland and Ireland first arrived at Niagara Falls, they lived in a world sharply different from our own. The jagged cliffs, thundering waters and rolling hills surrounding Fort Niagara strongly resembled the wilderness described by James Fenimore Cooper in his novel The Last of the Mohicans. The Niagara frontier was an endless canopy of trees -- a sunlit wood of startling beauty haunted by murderous Mohawks, brutish Redcoats, and fierce French couriers du bois. Except for a few small settlements and log cabins, the Niagara region remained largely unpopulated, and the military situation was extremely tense.

The Shaws arrived in waves, many of them as soldiers who fought near Fort Niagara in the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. The name of Shaw may be found not only amongst the lists of American patriots, but also amongst the lists of United Empire Loyalists and Rangers who fought for King George, later settling on the northern shores of Lake Ontario.

If the Shaw family history that follows illustrates one thing clearly, it illustrates that American and Canadian history are not so simple as the movies might have us believe. The Shaw Clan were a large family, with branches in Scotland, Ireland and England, and the clan's colorful members have shown throughout history a striking tendency to follow their own interests and personal whims, sometimes completely disregarding the neat categories into which we might like to place them.

To say, for example, that all the Irish Shaws came to Niagara during the 1840s, or that all Irish Shaws are somehow related to George Bernard Shaw, or that they all wanted to find work on the Erie Canal, is just plain wrong. What one finds, instead, is a richly textured fabric of colorful individuals woven together by fate, often working at cross-purposes, yet somehow combined into a design so rich that one might think that the Shaws were trying to weave their family history itself into a Clan tartan.

Though we who live in the 21st Century have but dim memories and photographs of our ancestors who lived in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, though we may only see their shadows and silhouettes through the glass of time, still we find in these puzzling patterns and images a striking truth that speaks to the present: Life is flowing onward, ever onward. Like Niagara Falls itself, life ends, and yet it never ends.


If the author has done his job well, the perceptive reader will catch in the following pages a glimpse of more than just the memorabilia and bric-a-brac of a single Scotch-Irish family in upstate New York. One may glimpse here the "Maid in The Mist" -- the Holy Grail -- that brought so many people to America. This is not just the story of the incredible magnetic force of nature that drew so many Scots and Irish to the Niagara region. It is also a reflection on the divine madness of love that inspired so many young people of the 19th Century to take the plunge into the river of life and venture all of their hopes and dreams upon the water.

Every single one of the Shaws, and every single pioneer in American history had the courage to face an uncertain future beyond a new horizon -- which is roughly the equivalent of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. This is the story of how the Shaws did it -- and where the river carried them.