Pontiac – the charismatic Indian who routed the Redcoats

Posted in Historical articles, History, War on Monday, 3 March 2014

Click on any image for details about licensing for commercial or personal use.

This edited article about the Indian Wars first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 576 published on 27 January 1973.

Pontiac leads a rebellion,  picture, image, illustration

Pontiac's rebellion by Ron Embleton

The Indian war parties were out in the forest as the lone horseman galloped down the waggon track which served as a road. It was 200 miles or so from Fort Pitt to the white settlements along the Susquehanna River, and many lives depended on him. History does not record his name, but the message he carried was, for white men, women and children at least, the worst news imaginable.

Another Indian war had broken out, but this was not the usual Indian outbreak, which the 18th century frontiersmen were so used to facing. It was a combined assault by nearly every tribe in the East to drive the British colonists, or redcoats, not only out of their frontier settlements but into the sea.

The Indians, for once united, had found a leader for the most dangerous and determined uprising in the long history of the Indian Wars. He was an Ottawa and his name was Pontiac.

The rider reached the settlements, and the news was also being carried by other riders northwards and southwards. There was no faster way, for this was 1763, the very year that the Seven Years’ War had ended, making Britain mistress of Canada and much of India. Now her North American empire might crumble away and the French might make Canada their own again.

How had this sudden turn of fortune come about? Indians were always impressed by power and the British should have seemed all-powerful after their victory. The explanation was that the French had always tended to befriend the Indians, to trade with them, not grab their land, but most Britons and British colonists despised or hated the Red Men, and, worse, the colonists were eaten up with land hunger.

The Commander-in-Chief in North America was Sir Jeffrey Amherst, conqueror of Montreal and Canada after the death at Quebec of General Wolfe. He despised Indians, and had ordered that they be treated harshly. He even ordered that the habit of giving them presents should be stopped, though his handful of advisers who understood the art of dealing with them implored him vainly to think again.

Pontiac was one of the first to grasp the difference between French and British rule. He is a sadly shadowy figure. He was probably in his forties when he sprang to fame as the champion of his people, a man eaten up with a mission to destroy the British, but able to plan brilliantly, not simply start fighting and see what resulted. He was a handsome man and, even by Indian standards of eloquence, which were high, a wonderful speaker who could sway thousands. Most of all, he was a born leader.

Believing that France might aid him if he showed he could succeed, he formed a master plan. There were possibly only 7,000 male Indians east of the Mississippi that he could call on, plus 2,500 more of the pro-British Iroquois who joined him along with the Indians of Canada.

The Indians of the South tended to be hostile to their northern neighbours, but might join them if all went well. By 1762, journeying from his tribal home near Detroit in Michigan, he had gained the support of most tribes from Lake Superior to the lower Mississippi and he had given them stark, simple orders: they were to attack the fort nearest to them in May, 1763.

The plan succeeded sensationally. Of eleven British forts west of Niagara eight fell to the Indians. Most of their garrisons were massacred, a number of relief expeditions were almost wiped out, and an unknown number of frontier families were killed or forced to flee.

The most remarkable triumph was the capture of Fort Micilimackinac in northern Michigan. Outside the fort, Chippewa and Sauk Indians staged a game of lacrosse, watched by officers and men. Meanwhile, the Indians’ wives strolled into the fort with tomahawks and scalping knives under their blankets. Suddenly, a player hooked the ball over the stockade. In dashed the players after it, and snatched their weapons from their wives, and killed everyone in the fort except a few Frenchmen.

Pontiac was in command outside Fort Detroit, a key port as well as a vital military post. Indians were not used to siege warfare, but such was Pontiac’s leadership that they nearly succeeded in this one. As it was, the garrison commander, Major Gladwin, was warned before the first attack what was coming, and when 300 warriors strolled into the fort the next day with sawn-off guns concealed under their blankets, the 100 strong garrison was at the alert.

But the siege which followed took a year to lift completely and, only after terrible loss of life, was peace restored to the Northwest in 1766. Amherst had by then left America. His solution when he heard of the outbreak had been to suggest infecting the Indians with smallpox, but he returned to Britain before anyone could carry out this disgusting suggestion.

As other Indian tribes fell away during the long siege, Pontiac and his Ottawas had stayed on alone. He had inflicted a major defeat when the British came out to attack him, but when he heard that French help would never come, he raised the siege. He only finally gave in when it became clear that the British were masters of the situation.

His life ended tragically. The peace treaty he signed with Sir William Johnson, a trader, landowner and soldier, who was one of the only Britons to like and understand Indians, was a honourable one, but such was Pontiac’s fame that he was never really trusted. British agents stirred up feelings against him, and he was finally murdered in Illinois by an Indian who – so the story goes – was bribed by a British trader. No one has ever really discovered the motive for the killing, which ended the life of a great Indian, a master organiser, cruel, perhaps, but a great patriot, full of energy and intelligence. After Pontiac, the Indian way of life was doomed, for this mysterious figure was the last Red Indian who might have halted the tide of Anglo-American aggression. To today’s Indians he is rightly a hero.

Comments are closed.