The next two years they spent establishing new identities for themselves & cultivating young Pontiac, whose influence was growing rapidly amongst the Ottawas & their neighbours. Grandfather took the role of an habitant trader from Lake St. Clair named Antoine Cuillerier. Andrée, in order to free herself for a certain necessary flirtation in Detroit, pretended to be, not his wife, but his daughter Angélique. And my father Henry Burlingame IV — by then a stout lad of fourteen — happily play’d the rôle of his mother’s young brother, Alexis: his 1st involvement in the family enterprise, to which he took like a duck to water.

As they had expected, the fall of Fort Niagara inclined many Indian leaders, if not to the surly but victorious British, at least away from the French, toward neutrality. When New France surrender’d at Montreal in September 1760, and Lord Amherst claim’d for Britain a territory twelve times its size, my family began their counter-campaign. The British refusal to provide ammunition on credit for the hunting season, they explain’d to Pontiac, was the 1st step of a plan to exterminate the Indians altogether; only solidarity among the nations could withstand them. Pontiac agreed, but set forth his doubts: just as using the white man’s rifles & drinking his spirits had made the Indians less than Indians, so he fear’d that real political alliances & concerted military campaigns in the white man’s fashion, while they might be the only alternative to extinction, would if successful transform the Indians into red Englishmen. Very well to preach the taking up of firearms to fight firearms, to the end of returning to the noble bow & arrow: he could not seriously believe that, once taken up wholesale, they would ever be laid down, any more than he himself would ever again in his life be able to remain sober in the presence of alcohol.

Thus he brooded, here in this hall, a little drunk already on Baron Castine’s good Armagnac, on the night before setting out with the “Cuilleriers” for Detroit. And till the hour he lost consciousness (Andrée reported next morning to Andrew) he could not decide whether to lead his people away, westward, across the Mississippi, or to begin at Detroit the campaign of resistance about which he had such divided feelings. “Angélique” had recognized in these vague insights a rudimentary tragical vision and, much moved, had taken the rôle of another sort of angel: that of the Delaware Prophet’s vision. The red men, she had told Pontiac, were doom’d in any case to become other than they were. If, in order to preserve artificially their ancient ways, they retreated forever from the whites who multiplied and spread like a chancre on the earth, they would lose by the very strangeness of the land they retreated to; they would be themselves a kind of invader from the east — and their loss would be without effect upon the whites, who would press on in any case. If on the other hand they banded together, stood fast, and fought to the end, they would at worst die a little sooner, at best just possibly contain the white invasion for a few generations: if not east of the Alleghenies, at least east of the Mississippi. And if such resistance meant inescapably some “whitening” of the red men, as Pontiac wisely foresaw, this was a knife that cut both ways: their host, for example (Baron Henri Castine II), was not Madocawando of the Tarratines, but neither was he the old Baron of St. Castine in Gascony. More than once, Pontiac & his brothers had eaten brave captives to acquire their virtues; did he imagine that the whites could swallow whole nations of Indians without becoming in the process somewhat redden’d forever?

What ensued is more remarkable than clear. The ménage went west: the “Cuilleriers” to establish themselves at Detroit & befriend the just-arrived British garrison of that fort; Pontiac to preach the Delaware Prophet’s amended vision & to pass war-belts among the Shawnees, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Delawares, & disaffected Senecas. Andrew particularly befriended the young aide of Amherst’s who had brot the English garrison from Fort Pitt: Captain Robert Rogers, a New Hampshireman with whom one could discuss Shakespeare. “Angélique,” finding unapproachable the British commandant Major Gladwin, made a conquest of his close friend the fur trader James Sterling, and so kept Pontiac inform’d of the situation in the fort.

By 1763 the plan was ready: Pontiac’s people would take Fort Detroit early in May, and its fall would serve as both signal & encouragement for each tribe along the Allegheny & Ohio rivers to rise against the fort nearest it. From there the programme would be improvised: if all went well, the rest of the Iroquois might join the Senecas, take Fort Niagara, and sweep east across the Finger Lakes to the Hudson & south into Pennsylvania toward the Chesapeake, allying what was left of the once-fierce Susquehannas as they went. The Hurons would move with the displaced Algonkins up the west bank of the St. Lawrence, the Miamis & Shawnees & Illinois down the Mississippi Valley, whilst Pontiac & his Ottawas, in the heart of their beloved Lakes, laid down their rifles at last & took up their bows for peaceful hunting…

Henry, Henrietta: it might have workt, you know! Even nipt in the bud it came near to working! At this point Andrew & Andrée fall silent; I have only their son’s account, my father’s, for what happen’d, and (as shall be seen in another letter) it must be read with large allowance for his peculiar bias. And there is, of course, the historical record, already embellisht by romantical tradition. Pontiac’s conspiracy was betray’d, possibly by “Angélique Cuillerier” via her “lover” James Sterling; Major Gladwin forestall’d Pontiac’s surprise attack from within the fort by not admitting him, on the appointed day, to the conference he had requested; the “storm” turn’d into a desultory siege. Even so, the Potawatomis quickly took Fort St. Joseph to the west; the Senecas, Shawnees, Delawares, & Miamis, in less than one week, captured all three forts between Niagara & Fort Pitt: Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango. As of the summer solstice, Lord Amherst still had only the dimmest idea of the scale of the uprising; ignorant of Indians in general & of the western nations in particular, he could not imagine that the troublesome Senecas were not at the bottom of it; that the Allegheny-Ohio rumblings were but an echo of Pontiac’s main thrust at Detroit; that what was threatening to delay his long-awaited relief from the American command & his return to England was not another drunken redskin riot, but a full-scale Indian War for Independence! All that remain’d, all that remain’d was to take Detroit by storm before the garrison was reinforced, then to move quickly & concertedly against Forts Pitt & Niagara. There the line might be held.

For — unknown to most white & all red Americans, unknown perhaps even to Jeffrey Amherst & George Washington (but not to canny Ben Franklin & the “Cuilleriers”) — Pontiac had a powerful, unsuspected ally: George III of England, whom my father call’d “wiser in his madness than most kings sane.” Even before the British conquest of Canada, the King & his ministers had foreseen, in unlimited westward colonization of America, two distinct threats to the mother country. In the short run, given the expense & difficulty of transporting goods over the mountains, manufacturing towns were bound to be establisht in the Ohio Valley & along the Great Lakes, in competition with British industry. In the long run, & in consequence, such unimaginably expanded colonies—20, 30 times larger than Britain, and anon more populous, richer, even more powerful — would not be content to remain colonies forever. Even before Pontiac, the newly-crown’d King had consider’d declaring the crest of the Appalachians to be the western limit of white settlement. A determined Indian stand from, say, Frontenac at the head of the St. Lawrence down to Fort Pitt at the head of the Ohio, even if it lasted only a few months, would be sufficient occasion for George to make such a proclamation as if in the interests of the colonials themselves.