Pontiac’s Uprising

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Introduction
With the fall of Quebec and De Vaudreuil’s capitulation of Montreal, Canada passed from the dominion of France to Britain and for a time came under military rule. In the West, around the shores of the Great Lakes and the country watered by the Ohio, though small English garrisons occupied the forts of the region, the French still held posts on the Wabash and the Mississippi and had a considerable settlement at New Orleans. About the Lakes and in the Ohio Valley discontent smouldered among the Indians, many of whom bewailed the fate of their old allies, the French, while they feared the English, whom they dreaded as likely to drive them from their hunting-grounds and treat them with injustice or neglect.

Their fears in this respect were worked upon and disaffection among them was fomented by French traders from Montreal and St. Louis; the results of which were presently seen in the rising of all the Western tribes under the wily leadership of Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa warriors, who sought to exterminate the English and restore the supremacy of the French and Indian races. The incidents of this conspiracy of Pontiac are related in an edifying paper by the Hon. E.O. Randall, of Columbus, Ohio, contributed to the Transactions of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society and here, by kind permission, reproduced.

This selection is by E.O. Randall.

Time: 1763
Place: Detroit

The conquest of Canada left the Indians of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys subject to British domination. The red men were repulsed but not conquered. They were scattered over a vast territory; their total number between the Mississippi on the west, the ocean on the east, between the Ohio on the south and the Great Lakes on the north was probably not in excess of two hundred thousand and their fighting warriors not more than ten thousand. [1] Fort Duquesne was in November, 1758, captured from the French by the British forces under General John Forbes. The military posts of the French in the East, on the waters of Lake Erie and the Allegheny, viz., Presqu’île, Le Boeuf and Venango, passed into the hands of the British soon after the taking of Fort Duquesne. Most of the Western forts were transferred to the English during the autumn of 1760; but the extreme Western settlements on the Illinois, viz., Forts Ouatanon, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Chartres and Cahokia, remained several years longer under French control. In the fall of 1760 Major Robert Rogers was directed by the then British commander, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to traverse the Great Lakes with a detachment of provincial troops and, in the name of England, take possession of Detroit, Michilimackinac and the other Western forts included in the surrender of the French.

[1: Estimate of Sir William Johnson in 1763: Iroquois, 1950; Delawares, 600; Shawnees, 300; Wyandots, 450; Miamis and Kickapoos, 800; Ottawas, Ojibwas and other wandering tribes of the Northwest “defy all efforts at enumeration.” The British population in the colonies was then about 1,000,000; the French, something like 100,000.]

Major Rogers, with two hundred rangers, left Montreal, ascended the St. Lawrence, crossed Lakes Ontario and Erie and reached the mouth of the Cuyahoga [2] on November 7th. No body of troops under the British flag had ever before penetrated so far west on the Lakes. Rogers and his men encamped in the neighboring forest. Shortly after their arrival a party of Indian chiefs and warriors appeared at the camp and declared they were envoys from Pontiac, “ruler of all that country,” and demanded, in his name, that the British soldiers “should advance no farther” until they had conferred with the great chief, who was rapidly approaching. That same day Pontiac himself appeared; and “it is here,” says Parkman, “for the first time, that this remarkable man stands forth distinctly on the page of history.”

[2: Rogers called this river Chocage. Rogers’ camp was on the present site of the city of Cleveland.]

The place and date of birth of Pontiac are both matters of dispute. There seems to be no doubt that he was the son of an Ottawa chief; his mother is variously stated to have been an Ojibwa, a Miami and a Sac. Preponderance of evidence, as the lawyers say, seems to favor the Ojibwas. Authorities also vary as to the date of his nativity from 1712 to 1720. [3] Historical writers usually content themselves with the vague statement that he was born “on the Ottawa River,” without designating which Ottawa River, for many were so called; indeed, the Ottawas were in the habit of calling every stream upon which they sojourned any length of time “Ottawa,” after their own tribe. The Miami chief Richardville is on record as often asserting that Pontiac was born by the Maumee at the mouth of the Auglaize. [4] In any event, Pontiac, like his great successor, the incomparable Shawano chief, Tecumseh, was a native of Ohio.

[3: Parkman says he was about fifty years old when he met Major Rogers, which was in 1760.]

[4: Chief Richardville also asserted that Pontiac was born of an Ottawa father and a Miami mother. The probability of this tradition is allowed by Knapp and accepted by Dr. C.E. Slocum, of Defiance, a very careful and reliable authority. Dodge says some claimed Pontiac was a Catawba prisoner, adopted into the Ottawa tribe.]

The Ottawas, Ojibwas and the Pottawottomis had formed a sort of alliance of which Pontiac was the virtual head. He was of a despotic and commanding temperament and he wielded practical authority among all the tribes of the Illinois country and was known to all the Indian nations of America. Pontiac, conscious of his power and position, haughtily asked Major Rogers, “What his business was in that country?” and how he dared enter it without Pontiac’s permission? Rogers informed the chief that the war was over, the French defeated, the country surrendered to the British and he was on his way to receive the posts from the French occupiers. Pontiac was wily and diplomatic. He received the news stolidly, reserved his answer till next morning, when his reply was that as he desired to live in peace with the British, he would let them remain in his country as long as “they treated him with due respect and deference.” Both parties smoked the calumet and protested friendship. Rogers proceeded on his errand. On November 29, 1760, the French garrison at Detroit transferred that historic and most important Western station to British possession.

[Detroit was first settled by Cadillac, July 24, 1701, with fifty soldiers and fifty artisans and traders. So it had been the chief Western stronghold of the French for one hundred fifty years. Detroit at this time (1760) contained about two thousand inhabitants. The center of the settlement was a fortified town, known as the “Fort,” to distinguish it from the dwellings scattered along the river-banks. The Fort stood on the western bank of the river and contained about a hundred small wood houses with bark or thatch-straw roofs. These primitive dwellings were packed closely together and surrounded and protected by a palisade about twenty-five feet high; at each corner was a wooden bastion and a block-house was erected over each gateway. The only public buildings in the enclosure were a council-house, the barracks and a rude little church.]

Continued.

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