When, on the 23rd of July, Brown at last received Chauncey’s disappointing answer, he immediately stopped manoeuvring along the lower Niagara and prepared to execute an alternative plan of marching diagonally across the Niagara peninsula straight for the British position at Burlington.  To do this he concentrated at the Chippawa on the 24th.  But by the time he was ready to put his plan into execution, on the morning of the 25th, he found himself in close touch with the British in his immediate front.  Their advanced guard of a thousand men, under Colonel Pearson, had just taken post at Lundy’s Lane, near the Falls.  Their main body, under Riall, was clearing both banks of the lower Niagara.  And Drummond himself had just arrived at Fort Niagara.  Neither side knew the intentions of the other.  But as the British were clearing the whole country up to the Falls, and as the Americans were bent on striking diagonally inland from a point beside the Falls, it inevitably happened that each met the other at Lundy’s Lane, which runs inland from the Canadian side of the Falls, at right angles to the river, and therefore between the two opposing armies.

When Drummond, hurrying across from York, landed at Fort Niagara in the early morning of the fateful 25th, he found that the orders he had sent over on the 23rd were already being carried out, though in a slightly modified form.  Colonel Tucker was marching off from Fort Niagara to Lewiston, which he took without opposition.  Then, first making sure that the heights beyond were also clear, he crossed over the Niagara to Queenston, where his men had dinner with those who had marched up on the Canadian side from Fort George.  Immediately after dinner half the total sixteen hundred present marched back to garrison Forts George and Niagara, while the other half marched forward, up-stream, on the Canadian side, with Drummond, towards Lundy’s Lane, whither Riall had preceded them with reinforcements for the advanced guard under Colonel Pearson.  In the meantime Brown had heard about the taking of Lewiston, and, fearing that the British might take Fort Schlosser too, had at once given up all idea of his diagonal march on Burlington and had decided to advance straight against Queenston instead.  Thus both the American and the British main bodies were marching on Lundy’s Lane from opposite sides and in successive detachments throughout that long, intensely hot, midsummer afternoon.

Presently Riall got a report saying that the Americans were advancing in one massed force instead of in successive detachments.  He thereupon ordered Pearson to retire from Lundy’s Lane to Queenston, sent back orders that Colonel Hercules Scott, who was marching up twelve hundred men from near St Catharine’s on Twelve Mile Creek, was also to go to Queenston, and reported both these changes to Drummond, who was hurrying along the Queenston road towards Lundy’s Lane as fast as he could.  While the orderly officers were