London in accordance with his original design.
Talbot remained in the service of the Lieutenant Governor until June
1794, when as Major of the 5th Regiment he departed for England under
orders for Flanders, carrying with him special letters of recommendation
from Simcoe to Dundas and to Mr. King, the Under Secretary of State. He
had been employed in various confidential missions. In 1793 he had been
sent to Philadelphia to await news from Europe, when war with France was
believed to be imminent. On the 22nd August, 1793, we find Talbot in
"the most confidential intercourse with the several Indian tribes," as
Simcoe expresses it, at the Miamis Rapids, where he had met the United
States Commissioners and the Confederated Indians to consider the
boundary question. In April, 1794; Simcoe was himself at the Falls of
the Miami, and he repeated the visit during the following September,
going by way of Fort Erie. This visit was a prolonged one; for we find
that in October he met an Indian Council at Brown's Town in the Miami
country. It is probable Talbot accompanied him in his capacity as
military secretary. The construction by Simcoe of the fort at the foot
of the rapids of the Miami in the spring of that year was an audacious
step, which might easily have produced a new war between the United
States and England, although Simcoe believed it had had the opposite
result, and prevented war. All disputes between the two nations were
however concluded by the treaty of 1794, usually called the Jay Treaty.
Provision was made for the abandonment of the frontier posts hitherto
occupied by English garrisons. Forts Niagara, Detroit, Miami and
Michilimackinac received American garrisons in 1796 or shortly
thereafter; English troops were stationed in new forts at St. Joseph's
Island, Malden, Turkey Point, Fort Erie, Toronto, etc. The English flag
floated no longer south of the great lakes. During the year 1796, Simcoe
went to England on leave of absence, and he never returned to Canada.
COLONEL TALBOT.
The Honorable Thomas Talbot received his company and his majority in the
same year, 1793. He was Colonel of the Fifth Regiment in 1795, at the
early age of twenty-five. After eight years of military service on the
Continent, partly in Flanders and partly at Gibraltar, he was still in
1803 a young man with every prospect that is usually considered alluring
to ambition. Suddenly, to the amazement of his friends and the public,
he
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