Battle of Scajaquada Creek Bridge
Near Buffalo, New York
On August third, eighteen fourteen, a British force of roughly six hundred men crossed the Niagara River with orders to seize American troops and supplies at Black Rock and Buffalo. Waiting for them at the bridge over Scajaquada Creek was Major Lodowick Morgan with only two hundred forty American riflemen. Badly outnumbered, Morgan's men opened fire and held the bridge long enough to force the British to wade the creek under fire, slowing the assault.
The delaying action allowed time for reinforcements to mass, and after a sharp fight the British withdrew back across the Niagara. It was a small engagement by the War of eighteen twelve's standards, but the bridge defense prevented what could have been the destruction of the American supply base on the frontier, protecting the very towns whose burning by the British the year before had set off a cycle of cross-border raids.
