Canada To Honour Man Reviled In U.S. History

Butler was a Loyalist living in New York state who stuck with the British Crown when the revolution broke out. After the war, he moved to the Niagara region, where he died in 1796. Butler raised his regiment of raiders and set about terrorizing the enemy in the tradition of the time. By all accounts, he was a hard man and his Indian allies were harder. They get the blame for the actual killings; Butler is fingered for doing nothing about it. "When he would come across revolutionary troops, he would slaughter without much mercy," said Arthur Sheps, a historian at the University of Toronto. Sheps added, however, that there were atrocities on both sides and that more sophisticated American university textbooks make that point without heaping all the blame on Butler. But popular history has branded him as a killer, Sheps said. "It goes to show that our heroes are other people's villains," he said. http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2006/11/04/pf-2231521.html [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on November 6, 2006]

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