Terror at Snake Hill: The Fenian Raid at Ridgeway

Dave Jenkinson is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Education at the
University of Manitoba.

Though this book’s title suggests that its contents are a contemporary
mystery/adventure, its subtitle clarifies that the work is more
accurately labelled historical fiction. The story’s central factual
happening is the Battle of Lime Ridge at Ridgeway, Ontario, which
occurred Saturday June 2, 1866, during the Fenian invasion of the
Niagara Peninsula, a battle in which the author’s great-grandfather
was a participant. Plato’s main character, 17-year-old Peter James
(P.J.) Plattow, is a recently returned American Civil War veteran.
Because P.J. had enlisted in the Union Army against his father’s
wishes, he now finds himself no longer welcome on the family farm and so
goes to work for a Mennonite neighbor, Samuel Janzen, who happens to
have a daughter, Nancy, almost 16. The book’s villain, one of the
Fenian raiders, Sergeant Travers Baloo, is P.J.’s former
comrade-in-arms. P.J., however, despises Baloo because of Baloo’s
despicable and cowardly habit of looting the battlefields’ dead and
wounded. Though the book’s character development is rather limited,
the level of action is high; it includes, in addition to numerous combat
scenes, episodes in which P.J. and his friends go on spying missions,
get captured by Fenians, and have to escape. The title’s “Snake
Hill” is the location of an abandoned War of 1812 fort. Nancy,
P.J.’s romantic interest, having taken refuge at Snake Hill during the
fighting, is discovered by Baloo, an event that leads to a climactic
fight sequence between Baloo and P.J. If middle-school readers will
ignore an unattractive cover, they will find Terror at Snake Hill an
acceptable read that unobtrusively informs while entertaining.