Shadow soldiers: the Frasers: a family legacy: Captain Simon Fraser of the Stormont County militia was wounded and crippled near the St. Lawrence River during the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837. This once agile and adept explorer had scaled the Rocky Mountains and forded the wild rivers of Canada's West Coast to establish its first permanent white settlements

Esprit de Corps, Sept, 2008 by Mark Jodoin

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Hell's Gate in central British Columbia is an appropriately named topographical marvel. Its 115-foot wide channel turns the Fraser River Canyon into a fiendish, swirling collection of stone and water with sheer rock walls that virtually bar escape to all those who enter.

In 1808, 32-year-old Simon Fraser was advised to avoid the gorge's unfriendly rapids and the equally unwelcoming natives who lay in wait at its southern end. Disregarding several warnings of aboriginal mountaineers, he continued into the chasm that he would later describe as "where no human beings should venture."

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Fraser and two of his North West Company colleagues, aided by First Nations guides, slowly and carefully crossed makeshift scaffolds and rough-hewn bridges that hung hundreds of feet above the rock cut's foaming whirlpools. By fording this and other dangerous channels, he led an exploration considered among the greatest in the continent's history of settlement: the navigation of the Fraser River from its Rocky Mountain source to its mouth on the western coast of North America.

Fraser was a young Canadian colonial of soldierly descent whose lineage traced back to the Scottish Highlands in the 15th century. His ancestral clan, the Frasers of Lovat, took their roots from Guisachan and Culbokie in northeast Scotland, the former known in modern times for originating the Golden Retriever dog breed and the latter for its breathtaking scenery on the peninsula of Black Isle a few miles north of Inverness and the River Beauly.

The name Fraser likely dates back to a Norman, Pierre Fraser, who came to Scotland from France in the 9th century during the reign of the King Charlemagne. Over the next few hundred years, Frasers arrived from Normandy to settle several counties including Inverness. Sir Simon Fraser was granted lands by the Scottish king as the Lordship of Loveth, who in turn bequeathed them to Simon Fraser of Lovat.

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Both men fought, as did succeeding Fraser generations, in the Scottish Wars of Independence and the Highlander clan wars. Sir Simon was said to have saved the Scottish king, Alexander III, on three different occasions, a feat acknowledged by the three crowns found on the Lovat family shield. Ultimately though he was captured by the British and slowly, painfully eviscerated in the same gruesome manner as his comrade-in-arms, Sir William Wallace.

The Fraser clan's most notable battle came against the MacDonalds in the Battle of the Shirts in the middle of the 16th century in which 300 Frasers, including William of Guisachan, were ambushed by 500 MacDonalds in an engagement so fierce that survivors of each clan could be counted on two hands.

By the 17th century, the Fraser clan was split by the fall of the House of Stuart. Those loyal to the Stuarts included the Lord Lovat of the day, who had descended from Guisachan's William Fraser the Eighth. He had several sons--one whom was known as 'Young Culbokie' who fought in the Highlander front lines in the Battle of Culloden after which his ancestral home, Guisachan House, was burned to the ground. Another son, John, joined the 78th Highlander Regiment and immigrated to North America and eventually became a judge in Montreal. Another, Captain William Fraser--who fathered Simon the explorer--crossed the Atlantic aboard the SS Pearl to the colony of New York and settled in Albany in 1773.

Despite the severity of their treatment at the hands of the British after their defeat at Culloden, many transplanted Highlanders remained staunchly loyal to King George III from the very outset of the American Revolution. Fraser's arrival coincided with the rise of Yankee unrest in response to Britain's Stamp Act and the Tea Act and culminated with the Boston Tea Party in December of that year.

Captain Fraser had 10 children, the youngest of whom was Simon, who was born in May 1776 in Hoosick, New York, just across the colonial border from Bennington, Vermont. The American Revolution fulminated at the time of his birth: Virginia had drafted and accepted its Declaration of Rights, France had decided to aid the Americans against the British, and General John Burgoyne arrived in Canada in anticipation of all-out war.

The following summer was the crisis point for most Loyalist families when rebel forces scored victories over the British at Hubbardton and Bennington. Simon Fraser Sr. was captured, taken to Albany, and placed in jail. As his state of health diminished over the next three years, his wife and family were continuously harassed and stripped of their livestock and other possessions.

Captain Fraser died in prison in Albany in 1779 and five years later his widow sold their farm and escaped with her children to Canada, initially living west of Montreal at Coteau-Du-Lac on the north shore of the St. Lawrence; later they settled at St. Andrews near modern-day Cornwall. Unlike the scattered north shore settlements, Montreal was bustling with the rising fortunes of the fur trade as the inland and overseas shipping upon which it was dependent grew less hindered by war.