(fl. 1830s -1850s), strongman and figure of legend. Said to have lived at Cashion’s Glen, GC. Remembered for a feat of strength in carrying a cannon when he was in Montreal as a member of the Glengarry militia during the suppression of the Rebellion of 1837-1838. Sometimes referred to as a giant; height is variously stated at somewhere around 6 feet 6 inches. The weight of the cannon is variously given as 600, 700, and 800 pounds. Since a feat of this sort is likely to have been performed more than once, and in various ways, we need not be surprised at some variation in the story. The earliest known printed reference to the story is in a report in the Montreal Evening Pilot of 20 Jan. 1859 on a somewhat bibulous banquet given recently at Williamstown by the Sandfield brothers. At that time the cannon itself was said to be preserved at Williamstown, and the name of the soldier was given as Lewis Chisholm rather than Lewis Grant. Pringle in 1890 reported that in Montreal at the time of the Rebellion Lewis Grant, who belonged to Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield’s regiment, “carried a brass three-pounder field piece on his shoulder when the regiment marched past the inspecting General.”

     There is a balanced and important account of the Lewis Grant story in the autobiography of John Grant of GC and Faribault, Minn., the contractor, who remembered Lewis Grant from the period about 1845 to 1855. Lewis Grant and his brother Duncan, who was called Duncan the Shark, lived in the same South Branch neighbourhood as John Grant’s family. It would seem that Lewis and Duncan remained bachelors for a long time. John Grant tells a story of how, sometime after Lewis had married, the boys of the neighbourhood played a prank on Duncan, who slept in the barn, by putting a wasps’ nest in his bed. The story of Lewis, as John Grant remembered it, was that he was supposed to have marched through the principal streets of Montreal carrying a 600-pound cannon on his shoulders. John Grant agreed that Lewis could support this weight, but doubted whether he could easily march with it. John Grant remembered that he himself, and his brother Donald Grant and his cousin D.W. Grant, had each performed the feat of lifting a 600-pound weight, but he believed it beyond the strength of most men.

     It is said that about 1855 Lewis Grant stopped an outbreak of violent feuding between the Grants and the MacIntoshes at Martintown by seizing the leaders of both factions and shaking them into submission. In a story told by Rhodes Grant, however, Lewis Grant was one of the leaders in a great battle (“The date is uncertain, probably in the 1850s”) between the Grants and the MacIntoshes.

     According to a fairly detailed version of the cannon story published by Roy F. Fleming in the Standard-Freeholder of 23 July 1949, Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield made a bet with a rival colonel to the effect that he could find a man who could carry a 700-pound cannon for half a mile. Six GC soldiers lifted the cannon onto Grant’s padded shoulders, and Grant then carried the cannon for a full mile through Montreal streets. In another detail of the story Lewis Grant is said to have presented or shouldered arms with a 400-pound or 500-pound cannon barrel before performing his feat of carrying the larger cannon through the streets of Montreal. (Fleming; Rhodes Grant, i, 98) There is a printed reference dating from about 1885 to Allan Roy McDonell, of the 2nd Concession of Kenyon, who lifted a great wooden cannon when the Glengarry soldiers were at Beauharnois during the rebellion. (Ross, Lancaster, 209)

     In the 19th century, it was a part of the heroic image of the Highland men that they were of extraordinary strength and stature. The legend of Lewis Grant must be seen in the context of the strange cult of Highland supermen. Far less defensible among the enlightened than it was a century ago, the cult is far from dead today, at least among the Scots, though its expression may be restricted much more narrowly than once to those who will “understand.”

     Not much reliance can be placed on the similarity of name, but it may be noted that the Standard-Freeholder, 11 Jan. 1933, noted the death at Potsdam, New York., of Alexander L. Grant, a sailor on the Great Lakes, born 16 May 1854, the son of Lewis and Catherine McDonald Grant.

Autobiography of John Grant (1840-1928) as described in his entry this dictionary * Pringle 260; Macdonell, Sketches, 290, cites Pringle * Sir Archibald Cameron Macdonell, Early History of the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders (1921) * Grant-MacIntosh Martintown feud: “There Were Giants in Glengarry,” clipping (ND) from Standard Freeholder containing story reprinted from the Ottawa Citizen; also, Rhodes Grant, i, 78-79 * The late Dr Elinor Senior found the Evening Pilot reference to the cannon story and cites it in her “The Glengarry Highlanders and the Suppression of the Rebellions in Lower Canada 1837-38,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 56:227 (Autumn 1978) 152. She very kindly gave me a copy of her notes from the Evening Pilot article * Fraser (1890) 120 * GC strongmen (no refs. to Lewis Grant): see Bibliography of Glengarry 52, 155. Fleming’s article is subtitled “Strong and Able Men Produced in County.”