A U.S. historian who unearthed new evidence about the life of a War of 1812 heroine from New York has dismissed Laura Secord's famous midnight dash to save Canada from invasion as a mere "Sunday walk" in the woods compared to the exploits of Betsy Doyle, her American counterpart.

Catherine Emerson, official historian for Niagara County north of Buffalo, has unravelled a 200-year-old mystery surrounding Doyle, known to War of 1812 experts as the wife of a captured American artillery officer who bravely threw herself into the fighting but then disappeared from the historical record.

Doyle — better known by the given name "Fanny" because of a 19th-century scribe's erroneous writings — earned a respectable footnote in U.S. military history after briefly assuming her husband's role in the war and loading red-hot cannonballs into Fort Niagara's guns during a fierce November 1812 battle against allied British, Canadian and First Nations troops....