This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.
CHRONICLES OF CANADA
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
In thirty-two volumes
Volume 15
THE WAR CHIEF OF THE OTTAWAS
A Chronicle of the Pontiac War
By THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS
TORONTO, 1915
CONTENTS
I. THE TIMES AND THE MEN
II. PONTIAC AND THE TRIBES OF THE HINTERLAND
III. THE GATHERING STORM
IV. THE SIEGE OF DETROIT
V. THE FALL OF THE LESSER FORTS
VI. THE RELIEF OF FORT PITT
VII. DETROIT ONCE MORE
VIII. WINDING UP THE INDIAN WAR
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHAPTER I
THE TIMES AND THE MEN
There was rejoicing throughout the Thirteen Colonies, in
the month of September 1760, when news arrived of the
capitulation of Montreal. Bonfires flamed forth and
prayers were offered up in the churches and meeting-houses
in gratitude for deliverance from a foe that for over a
hundred years had harried and had caused the Indians to
harry the frontier settlements. The French armies were
defeated by land; the French fleets were beaten at sea.
The troops of the enemy had been removed from North
America, and so powerless was France on the ocean that,
even if success should crown her arms on the European
continent, where the Seven Years' War was still raging,
it would be impossible for her to transport a new force
to America. The principal French forts in America were
occupied by British troops. Louisbourg had been razed to
the ground; the British flag waved over Quebec, Montreal,
and Niagara, and was soon to be raised on all the lesser
forts in the territory known as Canada. The Mississippi
valley from the Illinois river southward alone remained
to France. Vincennes on the Wabash and Fort Chartres on
the Mississippi were the only posts in the hinterland
occupied by French troops. These posts were under the
government of Louisiana; but even these the American
colonies were prepared to claim, basing the right on
their 'sea to sea' charters.
The British in America had found the strip of land between
the Alleghanies and the Atlantic far too narrow for a
rapidly increasing population, but their advance westward
had been barred by the French. Now, praise the Lord, the
French were out of the way, and American traders and
settlers could exploit the profitable fur-fields and the
rich agricultural lands of the region beyond the mountains.
True, the Indians were there, but these were not regarded
as formidable foes. There was no longer any occasion to
consider the Indians--so thought the colonists and the
British officers in America. The red men had been a force
to be reckoned with only because the French had supplied
them with the sinews of war, but they might now be treated
like other denizens of the forest--the bears, the wolves,
and the wild cats. For this mistaken policy the British
colonies were to pay a heavy price.
The French and the Indians, save for one exception, had
been on terms of amity from the beginning. The reason
for this was that the French had treated the Indians with
studied kindness. The one exception was the Iroquois
League or Six Nations. Champlain, in the first years of
his residence at Quebec, had joined the Algonquins and
Hurons in an attack on them, which they never forgot;
and, in spite of the noble efforts of French missionaries
and a lavish bestowal of gifts, the Iroquois thorn remained
in the side of New France. But with the other Indian
tribes the French worked hand in hand, with the Cross
and the priest ever in advance of the trader's pack.
French missionaries were the first white men to settle
in the populous Huron country near Lake Simcoe. A missionary
was the first European to catch a glimpse of Georgian
Bay, and a missionary was probably the first of the French
race to launch his canoe on the lordly Mississippi. As
a father the priest watched over his wilderness flock;
while the French traders fraternized with the red men,
and often mated with dusky beauties. Many French traders,
according to Sir William Johnson--a good authority, of
whom we shall learn more later-were 'gentlemen in manners,
character, and dress,' and they treated the natives
kindly. At the great centres of trade--Montreal, Three
Rivers, and Quebec--the chiefs were royally received with
roll of drum and salute of guns. The governor himself
--the 'Big Mountain,' as they called him--would extend
to them a welcoming hand and take part in their feastings
and councils. At the inland trading-posts the Indians
were given goods for their winter hunts on credit and
loaded with presents by the officials. To such an extent
did the custom of giving presents prevail that it became
a heavy tax on the treasury of France, insignificant,
however, compared with the alternative of keeping in the
hinterland an armed force. The Indians, too, had fought
side by side with the French in many notable engagements.
They had aided Montcalm, and had assisted in such triumphs
as the defeat of Braddock. They were not only friends of
the French; they were sword companions.
The British colonists could not, of course, entertain
friendly feelings towards the tribes which sided with
their enemies and often devastated their homes and murdered
their people. But it must be admitted that, from the
first, the British in America were far behind the French
in christianlike conduct towards the native races. The
colonial traders generally despised the Indians and
treated them as of commercial value only, as gatherers
of pelts, and held their lives in little more esteem than
the lives of the animals that yielded the pelts. The
missionary zeal of New England, compared with that of
New France, was exceedingly mild. Rum was a leading
article of trade. The Indians were often cheated out of
their furs; in some instances they were slain and their
packs stolen. Sir William Johnson described the British
traders as 'men of no zeal or capacity: men who even
sacrifice the credit of the nation to the basest purposes.'
There were exceptions, of course, in such men as Alexander
Henry and Johnson himself, who, besides being a wise
official and a successful military commander, was one of
the leading traders.
No sooner was New France vanquished than the British
began building new forts and blockhouses in the hinterland.
[Footnote: By the hinterland is meant, of course, the
regions beyond the zone of settlement; roughly, all west
of Montreal and the Alleghanies.] Since the French were
no longer to be reckoned with, why were these forts
needed? Evidently, the Indians thought, to keep the red
children in subjection and to deprive them of their
hunting-grounds! The gardens they saw in cultivation
about the forts were to them the forerunners of general
settlement. The French had been content with trade; the
British appropriated lands for farming, and the coming
of the white settler meant the disappearance of game.
Indian chiefs saw in these forts and cultivated strips
of land a desire to exterminate the red man and steal
his territory; and they were not far wrong.
Outside influences, as well, were at work among the
Indians. Soon after the French armies departed, the
inhabitants along the St Lawrence had learned to welcome
the change of government. They were left to cultivate
their farms in peace. The tax-gatherer was no longer
squeezing from them their last sou as in the days of
Bigot; nor were their sons, whose labour was needed on
the farms and in the workshops, forced to take up arms.
They had peace and plenty, and were content. But in the
hinterland it was different. At Detroit, Michilimackinac,
and other forts were French trading communities, which,
being far from the seat of war and government, were slow
to realize that they were no longer subjects of the French
king. Hostile themselves, these French traders naturally
encouraged the Indians in an attitude of hostility to
the incoming British. They said that a French fleet and
army were on their way to Canada to recover the territory.
Even if Canada were lost, Louisiana was still French,
and, if only the British could be kept out of the west,
the trade that had hitherto gone down the St Lawrence
might now go by way of the Mississippi.
The commander-in-chief of the British forces in North
America, Sir Jeffery Amherst, despised the red men. They
were 'only fit to live with the inhabitants of the woods,
being more nearly allied to the Brute than to the Human
creation.' Other British officers had much the same
attitude. Colonel Henry Bouquet, on a suggestion made to
him by Amherst that blankets infected with small-pox
might be distributed to good purpose among the savages,
not only fell in with Amherst's views, but further proposed
that dogs should be used to hunt them down. 'You will do
well,' Amherst wrote to Bouquet, 'to try to inoculate
the Indians by means of Blankets as well as to try every
other method that can serve to extirpate this Execrable
Race. I should be very glad if your scheme for hunting
them down by dogs could take effect, but England is at
too great a Distance to think of that at present.' And
Major Henry Gladwyn, who, as we shall see, gallantly held
Detroit through months of trying siege, thought that the
unrestricted sale of rum among the Indians would extirpate
them more quickly than powder and shot, and at less cost.
There was, however, one British officer, at least, in
America who did not hold such views towards the natives
of the soil. Sir William Johnson, through his sympathy
and generosity, had won the friendship of the Six Nations,
the most courageous and the most cruel of the Indian
tribes. [Footnote: For more about Sir William Johnson
see _The War Chief of the Six Nations_ in this Series.]
It has been said by a recent writer that Johnson was 'as
much Indian as white man.' [Footnote: Lucas's _A History
of Canada, 1763-1812_, p. 58.] Nothing could be more
misleading. Johnson was simply an enlightened Irishman
of broad sympathies who could make himself at home in
palace, hut, or wigwam. He was an astute diplomatist,
capable of winning his point in controversy with the most
learned and experienced legislators of the colonies, a
successful military leader, a most successful trader;
and there was probably no more progressive and scientific
farmer in America. He had a cultivated mind; the orders
he sent to London for books show that he was something
of a scholar and in his leisure moments given to serious
reading. His advice to the lords of trade regarding
colonial affairs was that of a statesman. He fraternized
with the Dutch settlers of his neighbourhood and with
the Indians wherever he found them. At Detroit, in 1761,
he entered into the spirit of the French settlers and
joined with enthusiasm in their feasts and dances. He
was one of those rare characters who can be all things
to all men and yet keep an untarnished name. The Indians
loved him as a firm friend, and his home was to them
Liberty Hall. But for this man the Indian rising against
British rule would have attained greater proportions. At
the critical period he succeeded in keeping the Six
Nations loyal, save for the Senecas. This was most
important; for had the Six Nations joined in the war
against the British, it is probable that not a fort west
of Montreal would have remained standing. The line of
communication between Albany and Oswego would have been cut,
provisions and troops could not have been forwarded, and,
inevitably, both Niagara and Detroit would have fallen.
But as it was, the Pontiac War proved serious enough. It
extended as far north as Sault Ste Marie and as far south
as the borders of South Carolina and Georgia. Detroit
was cut off for months; the Indians drove the British
from all other points on the Great Lakes west of Lake
Ontario; for a time they triumphantly pushed their
war-parties, plundering and burning and murdering, from
the Mississippi to the frontiers of New York. During the
year 1763 more British lives were lost in America than
in the memorable year of 1759, the year of the siege of
Quebec and the world-famous battle of the Plains of Abraham.