It was a house divided against itself, and it turned a deaf ear to Brock’s appeal.  “To the great influence of American settlers over the members of the Lower House,” he attributed this defeat.  A court-martial revealed the fact that one of the best known militia regiments was composed almost entirely of native Americans!  The United Empire Loyalists thronged to his banner.

Undaunted by the cheap prudence of Prevost, a hostile Legislature, and the difficulties that beset him, Brock took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and all but single-handed—­“off his own bat,” as Dobson explained it to an admiring crowd in the barrack-room—­wrought like the hero that he was for the salvation of his country.  He became a machine, a machine working at high pressure eighteen hours out of twenty-four.  He had developed into a very demon for work.

With an empty treasury and no hope of reinforcements—­every soldier England could spare was fighting in Spain—­he raised flank companies of militia to be attached to the regular regiments.  The Glengarry sharpshooters, four hundred strong, were enlisted in three weeks.  A new schooner was placed on the stocks.  He formed a car-brigade of the young volunteer farmers of York and removed incompetent officers.

Fort George, constructed of earthen ramparts, with honeycombed cedar palisades which a lighted candle could set fire to, with no tower or block-house, and mounting only nine-pound guns, he knew was incapable of resistance.  It invited destruction from any battery that might be erected at Youngstown on the American side, while confronting it was Fort Niagara, built of stone, mounting over twenty heavy guns, containing a furnace for heating shot, and formidable with bastions, palisades, pickets and dry ditch.  The tension at Niagara was trying.  Two officers of the 41st were expelled for killing dull care by dissipation.  A Canadian merchant schooner was boarded in mid-lake by an American brig, taken to Sackett’s Harbour and stripped.  The Americans were pouring rations and munitions of war into Detroit.  If Brock’s hands were shackled, he knew the art of sitting tight.  He made another flying trip to Amherstburg, taking one hundred men of the 41st, in the face of Prevost’s standing orders to “exercise the strictest economy.”  Handicapped on every side, doing his best and preparing for the worst, he wrote Prevost that his “situation was critical,” but he “hoped to avert dire calamity.”

The river bank between Fort George and Queenston for seven miles was patrolled night and day.  A watch was placed on Mississaga lighthouse from daylight to dusk, and beacon masts, supporting iron baskets filled with birchbark and pitch, were erected on the heights to announce, in event of hostilities, the call to arms.