The first native-born poet in Western Ontario, Adam Hood Burwell was the earliest writer to mythologize the pioneer Loyalist past and the War of 1812. He was born near Fort Erie, Upper Canada (Ontario), to Loyalist parents-Adam and Sarah Veal Burwell-who had emigrated from New Jersey in the 1780s. Soon after the War of 1812 Burwell joined Col. Thomas Talbot's settlement on the north shore of Lake Erie, but farming did not appeal to him, and in 1818 (according to an August 1831 letter he wrote to John Macaulay) he had a vision that he was to be "a poet who should be a great man." He published poems under his pseudonym Erieus in local newspapers, and from 1821 to 1825 Scribbler (Montreal), Canada's first literary weekly, and the Canadian Review (Montreal) published a total of twenty-one of his poems.

The poems catch fire when he describes first hand the Talbot settlement or Niagara...