About four p.m. Captain Bullock, with two flank companies of militia and 150 men of the 41st, advanced, and after firing a volley in the face of a dense smoke, charged the enemy's right, which broke in great confusion. A general advance was ordered, and, with wild warwhoops by the Indians and white men, the heights were rushed, Wadsworth's veterans were stampeded, the redan retaken at the point of the bayonet, and Scott's command forced to the scarp of the cliff overhanging the river.
The American soldiers, to quote United States historians, now "fled like sheep," and scuttled off in all directions. Some raced headlong down the main road, seeking shelter under the muzzles of Holcroft's guns; some sought refuge in the houses; others raced to the landing only to find the boats no longer there. Not a few, hot pressed by Brant's avenging Mohawks, threw themselves over the precipice, preferring suicide to the redman's tomahawk. Others plunged into the Niagara, essaying to swim its irresistible eddies, only to be blown out of the green water by Holcroft's grapeshot or sucked down by the river's silent whirlpools.
One boat, with fifty struggling refugees, sank with its entire crew. Two others similarly laden were beached below the village, with only one dozen out of one hundred souls still living. The river presented a shocking scene. On the face of the water men, many maimed and wounded, fought and struggled for survival. This pitiful spectacle was actually taking place under the eyes of several thousands of American soldiers on the Lewiston bank, who, almost impossible to believe, and to their lasting disgrace, refused to join, or attempt even to succour, their comrades--deaf to all entreaty--allowing them to perish. Every room and shack at Queenston was an improvised hospital or morgue, filled with the mangled bodies of the quick and dead.
Cruikshank says 120 wounded United States officers and men were taken, of whom thirty died at hospital in Queenston and Niagara, while 140 more were ferried across to Lewiston. Lossing, the American historian, solemnly records the "fact" that "less than 600 American troops of all ranks ever landed at Queenston," and that "of these only 300 were overpowered"--some of the United States histories of the colonial wars need drastic revision--yet 958 American soldiers were taken prisoners by the British; "captured by a force," so officially wrote Colonel Van Rensselaer, after the battle, "amounting to only about _one-third_ of the united number of the American troops." Captain Gist, of the U.S. army, placed their own killed at 400.