Royal Scots of Canada Highlanders - Electric Scotland

26 5th ROYAL SCOTS OF CANADA
landers. The old Queens Rangers, the splendid provincial
regiment of light troops which was raised in New
York and New Jersey at the outbreak of the revolutionary
war, and which served through the war with such
distinction under I,ieut.-Col., afterwards Lieut .-General,
John Graves Sitncoe, the first governor of Upper Canada,
included a Highland company, recruited among
Scottish Highlanders resident in the revolted colonies.
This company was left flank company of the light infantry
battalion of the Queens Rangers, which corps,
also had a complement of mounted infantry and field
artillery. The Highland Company, which was lirst
commanded by Captain, afterwards the fampus Major-
General Aenas Shaw, distinguished itself greatly during
the war, the Rangers participating in nearly every important
engagement which took place up to the surrender
of Cornwallis' weakened army to the combined French
and United States forces. After the termination of the
war many of the officers and men of the old Queens
Rangers removed to Canada and settled on free grant
lands voted to them by the government, and when
Governor Simcoe, upon assuming the government of the
new province of Upper Canada, raised the new perirancr.t
provincial corps authorized by the Imperial Government,
and in honor of his old command of the Revolutionary
War called it the Queens Rangers, a number of his old
officers
and men joined the new corps.
There was also a "Highland Company" in
Quebec, in
1837. In 1866, the 9th Battalion, Quebec, had two English
speaking companies, one of them. Number 5, being
known as the Highland Rifles. Its officers were Captain
Herald Douglass, Lieut. H. R. Sewell and Ensign E.
F. H. T. Patterson. February 8th, 1867, these two English-speaking
companies were transferred from the 9th to
the 8th,
as Numbers 5 and 6 companies.
After the rebellion, there ensued another period of
depression in inilitary affairs in Canada. It was, so
far as military matters were concerned, the time of the
most inactive part of the era of torpor in England
which intervened between the Battle of Waterloo and the
Crimean War. With the Mother Country slumbering in
fancied security, with her armed forces gradually dwindling
away, and with the Anglo-Saxon race everywhere,
disposed to regard war as a grim spectre of the past,
never to stalk the surface of the earth again, it was
scarcely to be wondered at, that the people of Canada
refused to seriously consider the question of maintaining
an efficient national defensive force, and even treated tht
efiorts of those who wished to see some sort of a nai-.i