CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Laura Secord and the Walk to Beaver Dams

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Laura Secord is among the best-known heroines in Canadian history, although for most of her life few people outside her own community knew her name. Born Laura Ingersoll in Massachusetts in 1775, she came to Upper Canada in the 1790s, when her father moved the family north to take up land. She soon married James Secord, a merchant from a Loyalist family, and they settled in the village of Queenston on the Niagara River, where they raised their children. Because the river formed the border with the United States, the family’s home stood directly in the path of the fighting when war broke out in 1812.

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The war reached them quickly. In October 1812, at the Battle of Queenston Heights, James Secord was badly wounded, and Laura went out to the battlefield to find him and bring him home. By the following spring, American troops had occupied much of the Niagara area. In June 1813, Laura learned of a planned American attack on a British outpost at Beaver Dams. Accounts differ on how she found out, although the traditional story holds that she overheard American officers talking at her own house. With James still unable to travel, she set off herself early on the morning of June 22 to warn the British commander, Lieutenant James FitzGibbon.

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Her route covered about 30 kilometres and took most of the day, leading through fields, woods and swampy ground in the summer heat as she kept away from the main roads. It was a demanding journey for a woman of 37 with children at home. Near the end of the journey, she came upon a camp of Indigenous warriors allied with the British, and they led her to FitzGibbon. Two days later, an American column was ambushed near Beaver Dams by Indigenous warriors, most of them Mohawk, and it surrendered to FitzGibbon after several hours of fighting. Historians still debate how much difference her warning made, since Indigenous scouts may already have told the British that the Americans were coming.

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Recognition came very slowly. After James died in 1841, Laura struggled with money, and for a time she ran a small school in her home. FitzGibbon wrote statements in later years confirming her walk, but her requests for a reward brought little result. Then, in 1860, when the Prince of Wales toured Canada, she added her story to a list of veterans presented to him, and he later sent the 85-year-old widow a gift of £100. She died in 1868, and monuments to her appeared in the decades that followed. Her home in Queenston has also been restored as a museum. In 1913, a hundred years after the walk, a Toronto candy maker named his new chocolate business after her, and her name has been familiar in Canadian homes ever since.