Pontiac's War

10 Key excerpts on "Pontiac's War"

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  Legends of American Indian Resistance

  • Edward J. Rielly(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Pontiac circa 1720–1769 Pontiac and other Indians talk with Major Gladwin, British commander of Fort Detroit, in 1763. (The Print Collector/Heritage-Images) Pontiac of the Ottawas was possibly the most influential Indian leader of his day, at least in the Midwest. A war (sometimes referred to as a conspiracy) is named after him, and his military and political efforts in the early 1760s had some impact, at least indirectly, on the coming American Revolution. Yet cur- rent knowledge of Pontiac’s life is circumscribed within the span of approxi- mately 20 years, and the date of his birth is at best a matter of educated guesswork. The paucity of knowledge concerning most of Pontiac’s life as well as the common terminology for his opposition to British rule during and after the French and Indian War (known in England as the Seven Years’ War) reflect the Euro-American perspective. Pontiac’s life, while historically significant, also serves as an exemplum of how Indian history has been largely filtered through a Euro-American lens. If a person or incident did not directly affect the descendants of Europeans, then little, if any, notice was taken by those soldiers and settlers who were pushing their way westward. The Indians’ oral tradition also played a major role in historical forgetfulness: A tradition that is largely devoid of written documents and depends on cultural continuity for transmission obviously falters when that continuity is disrupted, if not thoroughly eliminated. THE FRENCH VERSUS THE ENGLISH Early References to Pontiac The earliest surviving written reference to Pontiac is in a French document dated 1757. It purports to be a copy of a speech that Pontiac gave defending an alliance with the French, encouraging the French to make good on promises they had made to the Ottawas, and describing an attempt by George Croghan, a trader and British official with close Indian ties, to entice the western tribes away from the French.

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  The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero

  Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh

  • Gordon M. Sayre(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  The Middle Ground (1991), his influential study of Native American communities and French and English colonists in the Great Lakes region from 1650 to 1815. His title refers not to the mixture of races but to “a place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of villages” (x). White’s concept of middle ground is built on practices established between the natives and the French and only sporadically adopted later by the British and Americans. Although articulated in a cultural rather than racial paradigm, his analysis of the causes of Pontiac’s rebellion is really not very far from Parkman’s, as it turns on the assimilation of or resistance to native symbolic and material exchange by colonial traders and soldiers. For example, White explains how English officials often refused to compensate the native families of victims murdered by Europeans or by people from other villages, a judicial practice that helped prevent cycles of vengeance and maintain alliances and trading relationships and that the French had carefully cultivated since the early 1600s. White also explains that Jeffrey Amherst, the British general who led the administration of Indian affairs in the western territories from 1761 to November 1763, refused to honor the native customs of diplomatic gift giving as the French had done. Amherst “blustered into Indian affairs with the moral vision of a shopkeeper and the arrogance of a victorious soldier” (257); he insisted on a petty capitalist doctrine that Indians must be paid only for services rendered, not honored or conciliated with presents. The British indulged in an imperial fantasy that native people should play by the rules that governed subaltern classes in British society. Amherst’s subordinate, Major Henry Gladwin, who as commandant at the besieged fort of Detroit was Pontiac’s primary adversary, wrongly believed that he had no need for the Indians. And for a year, in 1763–64, British forces paid dearly for this mistake.

  The uprising of 1763 included coordinated attacks by warriors of many Indian nations: the Seneca in western New York, the Shawnee and Miami of Ohio, the Ojibway and Ottawa of northern Michigan, the Illinois of the land later named for them. Of course the region had seen large-scale conflicts and multiethnic fighting forces before—large French-organized attacks on the Iroquois had occurred in the late seventeenth century, for example—but this may have been the first time that so many tribes acted in concert without the direct instigation of a colonial power. The precise importance of Pontiac’s leadership in this process is uncertain. Parkman gave him a central role as Indian leader while suggesting that the French encouraged the revolt. Howard Peckham in his 1947 history of Pontiac’s war downgraded his importance and presented evidence of some French leadership, while in his 2002 book and in a 1990 article Gregory Dowd restores much of Pontiac’s stature and contends that the Indians acted independently of the French.1

  The question of Pontiac’s leadership elicits various answers from modern historians, but the answers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were colored by a pattern of anxiety about native conspiracies. The genesis of the conspiracy was presumed to be either the French or Pontiac, as if mere self-interest were not enough to motivate concerted attacks by “savages” on more than a dozen widely separated forts during the summer of 1763. British officers’ letters were filled with anxious conspiracy theories and rumors of red wampum belts passing among the tribes. Because the tribal identity of native warriors and the dynamics of their allegiances were difficult for the average white observer to ascertain, any band of Indians might appear to be conspiratorial. (In a like manner today, the ignorance of U.S. soldiers and leaders regarding Middle Eastern languages and Muslim sects makes it difficult for the Americans to distinguish terrorists from innocent civilians.) Moreover, many natives saw an advantage in frightening frontier traders by warning of an impending revolt by all the Indians. For example, James Kenny wrote in his journal in January 1763, “We hear that Bill Hickman a Delaware Indian has Informed Paterson and the Inhabitants about Juniata that the Indians intends to break out in a War against us Next Spring; but as we know him to be a Roague and a Horse thief, we judge his report to be more for Self Ends than Truth or Good Will to us, not but what the Mingoes I believe would set on the Western Nations to Strike us if they Could” (184).2

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  The Boundaries Between Us

  Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850

  • Daniel P. Barr(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  “We Speak as One People”

  Native Unity and the Pontiac Indian Uprising

  DAVID DIXON

  In the mid–nineteenth century Americans embraced an ideology that summoned them to expand their moral virtues and political institutions across the continent. The public eagerly heralded testaments supporting this notion of “Manifest Destiny” and insisted that any impediments to progress and civilization must be swept aside. It was during this time that New England historian Francis Parkman introduced The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada, an epic narrative concerning the Woodland Indian conflict that erupted in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War in America. In this classic account, Parkman places the Ottawa leader, Pontiac, as the central figure who magically orchestrates a powerful and united Pan-Indian Confederation intent on eliminating Anglo-American presence west of the Appalachian Mountains. Parkman could not have picked a better story to relate to an American public bursting with a sense of its own destiny to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

  As Parkman’s tale develops, the English are almost overwhelmed by a cunning and loutish foe who will stop at nothing to halt the progress of civilization. The Indians are whipped into a frenzy by the charismatic leadership of Chief Pontiac, who artfully organizes a confederation of all the tribes of the Northeast. The English, who have no ill designs other than to raise their crops and families in the austere wilderness, are completely caught off guard as the Indian horde rolls over the forts that are situated along the frontier to protect them. Only Forts Detroit and Pitt are able to withstand the ferocious onslaught. Though outnumbered, the garrisons at these two beleaguered outposts somehow manage to hold out against the barbaric menace that surrounds them. Through courage and determination the British and Americans finally prevail and defeat the bloodthirsty Indians. In this compelling and dramatic chronicle Parkman provides his readers with an instructive lesson: in the end civilization will always triumph over savagery.

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  War In The Early Modern World

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  He scorned the ability of Indian warriors, and was determined to secure by force the Great Lakes region, ceded by France in 1763, without consulting its Indian inhabitants. On the one hand, he severely reduced expenditures for presents to the Indians, which they considered to be the tangible sign of good will; on the other, he spread a number of inadequately garrisoned forts across the region, which provoked Indian hostility without overawing them. The result was the 1763 uprising known as Pontiac’s rebellion, which shook Britain’s grip on the region. In two years of war the Indians fought the British Empire to a draw. 36 Some eighteenth-century military commanders, such as John Burgoyne and Barry St. Leger, blamed their Indian allies unfairly for their lack of success. Some modern historians have also disparaged the Indians as unreliable allies and useless fighters. Often these writers fail to appreciate the qualities of Indian warriors, who had no interest in fighting in the European style. These critics also assume that the Indians were passive clay who could be “used”. 37 American Indians seldom served as mercenaries; they were not sepoys. Instead they fought for motives of their own and in their own way. They had to be convinced that their ally’s cause justified their participation. The Western Abenakis of Vermont were thus prepared to fight English settlers during the Seven Years’ War, whether or not the French Governor wanted them to. But they were not enthusiastic about participating in the American War of Independence

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  Michigan

  A History of the Great Lakes State

  • (Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Defeat was a bitter blow for Pontiac. He could not understand how his old friends, the French, could ally themselves to the British merely for trade, and he was convinced that his Indian allies had deserted him simply because he had not gained a quick victory. Never did Pontiac realize that by keeping the siege, even though victory was impossible, he was inflicting suffering and starvation among his people.

  In October 1764, Colonel John Bradstreet held a council with the Ottawa, Chippewa, Miami, Huron, and Potawatomi in which the Indians agreed to acknowledge the British king as their Father, and, in return, the British pledged to pardon Pontiac and remove illegal settlers from Indian territory. To encourage the Indians to abide by this agreement, a force of British soldiers under the command of Colonel Henry Bouquet was sent to Detroit from Fort Pitt.

  In 1766 Sir William Johnson hosted a meeting of Ottawa, Huron, and Chippewa at Oswego, at which their chiefs and headmen, including Pontiac, agreed to conform to the stipulations of the 1764 agreement. Resigned to life amid the British, Pontiac returned to the Illinois region where he was assassinated in 1769 at Cahokia by an Illinois Indian to avenge Pontiac's murder of an Illinois chief.

  Proclamation of 1763

  On June 8, 1763, in an attempt to avoid further Indian unrest in the new western holdings, the Earl of Shelburne, head of the British Board of Trade, offered a proposal for governing the area. In October the Crown implemented his report, which became known as the Proclamation of 1763. According to its provisions, all settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains was prohibited and any Indian land east of those mountains could only be sold to settlers by authorized British officials. As a result, a large region, including Michigan, was left as permanent Indian territory and remained under military rule until the passage of the Quebec Act in 1774.

  In England this policy angered a great many people and pleased very few. Fur‐trading companies wanted the area to remain undeveloped so that their business could continue undisturbed, but they demanded guaranteed right of entry into the area. Land speculators and developers demanded that the territory be opened for immediate settlement, regardless of Indian claims or potential danger. Philanthropists argued that the region should belong exclusively to its Indian owners, while clergymen and imperialists argued the necessity of spreading English civilization to every inhabitant of the new empire.

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  War and American Popular Culture

  A Historical Encyclopedia

  • M. Paul Holsinger(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  At times this meant that he wrote no more than six lines a day. 1 O WAR AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE His first historic publication, History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), chronicled the end of the great struggle between the British and their French and Indian enemies. Subsequent works recorded the century and a half prior to 1763, but each treated the subject in the same manner as Pontiac—as a series of dramatic events controlled by a group of fascinating characters. Certainly that is true of the often-brilliant Montcalm and Wolfe (1884), one of the most ex- citing and popular histories of the French and Indian War ever written. Latter-day historians have often noted that Parkman's histories, though in- tensely readable and romantic, are also "old-fashioned" and woefully inade- quate by today's scholarly standards. Nevertheless, as long as readers continue to care about the nation's past, Parkman's literary classics, with their beautiful prose, will probably remain popular with students of North American history. See: Doughty, Howard. Francis Parkman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Colin L. Hopper PONTEACH; OR THE SAVAGES OF AMERICA (Drama). Robert Rogers, the famous ranger of the French and Indian War, who is featured prominently in Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, Kenneth Roberts's 1937 novel Northwest Passage, and King Vidor's film of the same name, was also an important author in his own right. His five-act play Ponteach; or The Savages of America, pub- lished in 1766, not only offered the first account of Pontiac's rebellion west of the Appalachians after 1763 but also was the first drama written by an American to feature Native American characters. Surprisingly, it is Pontiac the great Ot- tawa chieftain and the Indians who receive the most compassion. British traders are seen as venal as they take pride in cheating or even killing the Indians with whom they trade.

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  Daily Life during the Indian Wars

  • Clarissa Confer(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Different groups made peace separately until the whole affair was over by 1765. Native resistance to the British Empire did not yield permanent possession of their lands. But it did force the British to back off their harsh attitude toward the Indians and to resume the accepted course of diplomacy. AMERICAN REVOLUTION Whatever breathing room the northeastern tribes gained from exerting their power during Pontiac’s War vanished a decade later when the “great Father across the ocean” got into a squabble with his North American “children.” The British attempts to downplay the impending conflict by putting it in terms of a family did little to mask the reality of a country again torn by war. The outbreak of what U.S. history records as the American Revolution brought new challenges to the first Americans. American Indians had a great deal more to do with the struggle to win independence from Britain than most Americans realize. It was the debts incurred from fighting the Indians and French that led Britain to tax her North American colonies. Likewise, the British attempt to avoid another costly war by enacting a dividing line between colonists and the Indian Country, known as the Proclamation of 1763, greatly enraged the colonists and fostered their spirit of rebellion. Early National Wars 49 Political Considerations Despite their indirect influence on the outbreak of war, few native groups wanted anything to do with it. Natives wanted to focus on their own concerns and issues. In native experience, squabbles among whites had a nasty tendency to turn out badly for everyone. However, it is exceptionally difficult to stay out of a conflict taking place in your homeland, especially when you have ties to one or the other of the combatants. When the Iroquois sent a delegation to Philadelphia to declare their neutrality in May 1776, Washington said “.

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  Pontiac's War

  Its Causes, Course and Consequences

  • Richard Middleton(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Nevertheless, Pontiac was by no means inactive during this period. According to Menominee tradition, he visited the Milwaukee some time in the fall of 1762 or early spring of 1763 for a grand council, where he introduced the Wisconsin peoples to Neolin’s vision of a Native America free of white intrusion, including apparently the French. “It is now in our power to force the whites back to their original settlements.” “We must all join in one common cause, and sweep the white men from our country.” Only then could they be “happy … having nothing more to do with the hated race.” The native peoples had no need of the European peoples, “as we have an abundance of game in our forests—our rivers and lakes teem with all kinds of fish, fowl and wild rice.” They could accordingly “live as did our forefathers” and be a happy people once more. 5 Two factors now altered opinion sufficiently to allow Pontiac to launch an attack early in May 1763. One was the news of peace between Britain and France involving the surrender of their country to their former enemy. There was a widespread belief that the terms which the British were promulgating at Detroit were not credible. As John Rutherford, an early captive, commented shortly, the Canadians “could not bring themselves to believe that Le Grand Monarch would ever cede their country to Great Britain and they still flattered themselves that if they could excite the savages to maintain the war against us for a little while, a reinforcement might come to their assistance from France.” 6 The native people in any case needed little encouragement to accept these views, following the promises of Kerlérec the previous year. Both groups accordingly concluded that the declaration by the British was a stratagem to conceal the arrival of a French army and fleet at Quebec and New Orleans

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  European and Native American Warfare 1675-1815

  • Armstrong Starkey(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter FiveIndians and the wars for empire, 1689–1763

  Imperial wars

  We now turn from a two-year period of war in New England involving settlers and natives to the protracted imperial struggle for the control of North America. Conflict between France and Britain now determined issues of peace and war in northeastern North America. King William’s War (1689–97), Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), King George’s War (1744–8) and the Seven Years War (1756–63) had their roots in Europe rather than America. Peaceful relations between frontier neighbours could be ruptured arbitrarily as the result of diplomatic breakdowns between London and Paris. Years of warfare might also end abruptly with peace treaties restoring the status quo ante bellum without regard for the sacrifices and interests of North American combatants. A prolonged period of peace and co-operation between Britain and France between 1713 and 1740 also meant diminished conflict on the frontier. From the European perspective, North American conflict was initially a sideshow, but by the Seven Years War, European armies and fleets would intervene on a large scale, transforming the nature of warfare and achieving decisive results.

  Nevertheless, European-Indian conflict in North America was also governed by motives independent of the policies of European cabinets. Expanding English settler populations pressed on Indian lands, reaching the Ohio River by 1760. Indians sometimes resisted this expansion by diplomatic means, invoking the protection of imperial powers, or retreated to more remote and secure regions. But they were also prepared to use force to protect their autonomy, security and rights to the land. Indian motives for war were no different from those voiced at the time of King Philip’s War. Now, however, Indian tribes could look to one or the other of the European powers as allies in their wars of resistance. Indians participated in the imperial wars of the era for motives of their own. Although they were a powerful military asset, Indian allies were reliable friends only as long as their allies recognized their interests. Thus, when the Iroquois found that an English alliance did not protect them from disastrous defeats at the hands of the French, they concluded a peace with the French in 1701 and pursued a policy of neutrality in the imperial wars until the Seven Years War. Indians also made war in times of imperial peace. The western Abenaki chief Grey Lock carried out a successful guerrilla war in 1723–7 which barred much of Vermont from settlement. He does not appear to have had any regard for imperial interests, but fought to protect his people’s independence.1

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  The Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775

  A Political, Social, and Military History [3 volumes]

  • Spencer C. Tucker, James R. Arnold, Roberta Wiener, Spencer C. Tucker, James R. Arnold, Roberta Wiener(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  New York: Macmillan, 1973. Peckham, Howard H. The Colonial Wars, 1689–1762. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Steele, Ian K. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. La Prairie, Battle of Event Date: August 1, 1691 English and Iroquois offensive against the French and their native allies in Quebec, part of King William’s War (1689–1697). After the May 16, 1691, execution of Jacob Leisler, New York’s rebel governor, the Iroquois complained of the colony’s political distractions and of its failure to prosecute King William’s War effectively. The Iroquois had been conducting raids along the St. Lawrence River Page 436 and Ottawa River. They believed that these assaults had exposed them to retaliation. The Iroquois therefore demanded that New York provide military supplies and take the offensive. New Yorkers, in turn, feared that they would be exposed to attack should the Iroquois indeed drop out of the war. On May 27, 1691, Gov. Henry Sloughter met with the Iroquois sachems (chiefs) at Albany. After the failure of the 1690 La Prairie campaign, no grandiose schemes were put forward. Albany mayor Peter Schuyler enjoyed a close relationship with the Iroquois, and he offered to lead a raid to spread alarm among the French and thus disrupt their war effort. Toward that end, Schuyler assembled a force of 120 Albany militiamen, 80 Mohawks, and 66 Mahicans. No other colonies were asked to participate. The target would be La Prairie, Quebec, which Schuyler’s brother John had attacked the previous summer. Schuyler’s forces set out on Lake Champlain by canoe and disembarked on the Richelieu River, some 10 miles from Fort Chambly. Schuyler left 27 men to guard the canoes. The remainder then proceeded toward La Prairie on foot through a sizable forest. Unlike the previous year, the French learned of the party’s approach. Indeed, Montreal’s Gov. LouisHector de Callières had already crossed the St.

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