OTTAWA — A man American history books revile as a colonial-era war criminal, who coldly slaughtered civilians and prisoners, is about to be honoured with a life-size bronze bust beside the National War Memorial.

Lt.-Col. John Butler, leader of Butler's Rangers during the American Revolutionary War, is among 14 people chosen from 400 years of Canadian military history who are portrayed in bronzes to be unveiled Sunday by Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean.

The 14, known as The Valiants, will be commemorated in life-size statues and busts as part of a $1.1-million project financed by the federal government and private donations.

While he gets a statue here, Butler gets a bad rap south of the border, where history blames him and his son, Walter, one of his officers, for two brutal massacres on the frontier.

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.

Even popular culture in the U.S. has whacked the colonel. Writer Stephen Vincent Benet, in his short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, plays on the Butler legend. At one point, the Devil conjures up a grisly jury to sit in judgment in a dispute over the soul of Jabez Stone.

Butler's son is the first juror: "There was Walter Butler, the Loyalist, who spread fire and horror through the Mohawk Valley in the times of the Revolution."

David Bercuson, a University of Calgary historian and author who was on the committee that helped select the 14, says Butler fought in a style that arose from what Americans call the French and Indian War.

"They took no prisoners when they raided," he said. "It was a brutal tradition of striking terror into the heart of the enemy, burning, shooting, turning prisoners over to the Indians."

So, hero or villain?

Historian Jack Granatstein said there's 250 years of patriotic fervour layered over the truth of Butler's career.

"The question is, 'Was someone like Butler a key player in the founding of British North America?' That's probably the key."

The 14 run the gamut of four centuries of military heroics.

They include Frontenac, the legendary governor of New France; War of 1812 heroine Laura Secord; Gen. Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps in the First World War; and Lt. Hampton Gray, a Second World War pilot killed in the attack that won him the Victoria Cross.

The selections were a bit tricky, said Granatstein.

"It's a Canadian sort of thing," he said. "We have to have a woman or two, we have to have an ethnic; there must be regional representation.

"It's like building a cabinet."

Two seemingly obvious choices, Gen. James Wolfe and Gen. Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, the dead heroes of the battle of Quebec, were omitted.

"There was a sense that we didn't need them in this one," said Granatstein.

Bercuson, though, argued that they weren't Canadian, they were professional soldiers who fought where they were told to fight.

"Both of these guys were generals of colonial armies," he said. "If they had survived the battle, they would have come to some kind of terms and they would have gone home and fought another battle somewhere else, maybe in India, maybe in Africa. Who knows?

"They certainly weren't Canadians."