My grandparents knew this. They also knew, as did Pontiac, that even after his initial surprise attack had been frustrated, his forces so outnumber’d Gladwin’s garrison that he could take the fort by storm at his pleasure before it was successfully reinforced from Niagara. That reinforcement could not be far off. The siege had been sustain’d for weeks, months; already several groups of Indians, unused to long campaigns & anxious to lay in meat for the coming winter, had left for their hunting grounds. Why did he not strike?
Most of the New-French habitants inside & around the fort, uncertain of the outcome, were at pains to maintain a precarious neutrality, but a few of the younger, such as one “Alexis Cuillerier” (then 17, & an idolizer of Pontiac) volunteer’d in July to raise additional troops from among the Illinois to storm the fort. Pontiac’s reply, as my father recorded it, echoes his dark misgivings at Castines Hundred: If he were “Angélique’s” friend Major Gladwin, Pontiac declar’d to his young admirer, or “Antoine’s” friend Captain Rogers, he would order is troops to storm the walls, knowing that many of his troops would die, but that his superior numbers would carry the day. But the red man was not a troop; he was a brother, and one did not expend a brother. Attack’d by surprise, the red man would fight to the death. To avenge an insult or measure up to a high example he would undergo any privation, sustain any amount of accidental, unforeseen loss — as witness the bravery of his brothers at Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango. But to take a calculated loss: to make a move certain to cost the life of some of his brothers, however equally certain of victory — this was not in the red man’s nature. The siege was a mistake, almost surely doom’d to failure; but to storm the fort was out of the question. He was frankly improvising, perfectly aware that time was not on his side, that his authority diminisht day by day. Captain Rogers had already slipt thro with nearly 300 Rangers & 22 whaleboats of relief supplies for Gladwin; if any more got thro, the fort would be able to survive the winter, and the siege would have to be lifted. Perhaps the angel of the Delaware Prophet would revisit & readvise him? Meanwhile, here was Barbados rum taken by the Potawatomis from Fort St. Joseph…
The rest of the tale is not agreeable to tell. Pontiac’s angel never reappear’d. “Angélique” & “Antoine” had business back at Castines Hundred, and were not seen again in Detroit until 1767. By July, news reacht Lord Amherst in New York of the scope & seriousness of the war. Furious, he order’d that no Indian prisoners be taken; that women & children not be spared; that the race be extirpated. He put a thousand-pound bounty on Pontiac’s scalp. He commended the ingenious tactic of Captain Ecuyer at Fort Pitt, who made presents to the Delawares of infected blankets & handkerchiefs from the fort’s smallpox hospital — and he recommended (in a postscript to his letter of 7 July to Bouquet at that fort) much more extensive use of this novel weapon. He sympathized with Bouquet’s suggestion that the Indians be hunted down with dogs, and regretted that the distance from good English kennels made the plan unfeasible. When he learnt in September that Pontiac had destroy’d two relief expeditions en route to Detroit, he doubled the bounty, & fumed at the delay of his own relief. As autumn came on, one by one the Indian nations sued for peace; by October only Pontiac’s Ottawas held the siege. On 3 October, H.M.S. Michigan battled its way thro them to the fort with winter supplies. Two weeks later Pontiac order’d the siege abandon’d and, out of favor in his village, went off westward in November to the country of the Illinois, accompanied by young “Alexis Cuillerier.”
On 7 October George III actually issued his proclamation, but the settlers ignored it: the Indians’ front had weaken’d, and the British troops were too few & too busy to turn back the wagon-trains crowding over the mountains. On 17 November Amherst was relieved, by Major General Gage in Montreal, as Commander of British forces in America, and happily return’d to his English fields & kennels. Smallpox raged that winter among the tribes around Fort Pitt, in some villages killing one out of every three.
In the spring, “Alexis Cuillerier” show’d Pontiac a letter he claim’d to have taken from a French courier betwixt Detroit & Illinois: in the name of Louis XV, and despite the Peace of Paris, it warn’d the English to leave Detroit before they were destroy’d by the French army he was sending from Louisiana. It was my father’s 1st forged letter. I am loath to believe that Pontiac gave credence to its ancient fiction, or was meant to, tho he tried in turn to make use of it to rouse the Illinois & others to resume the war. But Colonel Bouquet’s counter-expedition that year, from Fort Pitt to Ohio, was Senecan in its ferocity: the English now scalpt, raped, tortured, took few prisoners, disemboweled the pregnant — even lifted two scalps from each woman, and impaled the nether one on their saddle horns, an atrocity that had not hitherto occurr’d to the Iroquois. The Delawares made peace; the Mingoes, the Shawnees, the Miamis, the Potawatomis, on what terms they could. On 25 July, 1766, the 7th anniversary of Sir William Johnson’s capture of Fort Niagara, Pontiac sign’d a treaty with that worthy at Oswego, officially ending his great Conspiracy, and retired to his ancestral home on the Maumee River, above Detroit, laden with gifts & very drunk.
That same year, my grandfather’s literate friend Captain Robert Rogers (now Major Rogers) publisht the 1st American play ever to deal with the Indians: a blank-verse tragedy in the Shakespearian manner called Ponteach: or, The Savages of America. I cannot prove that Andrew Cooke III wrote that play, but there are almost as many family touches in it as in Sot-Weed Redivivus. The unscrupulous trader M’Dole in Act I not only boasts to his associate:
Our fundamental Maxim then is this,
That it’s no Crime to cheat and gull an Indian…
but acknowledges candidly:
…the great Engine I employ is Rum,
More powerful made by certain strengthening Drugs.
“Ponteach” declares to the English governor in Act I:
[The French] we thot bad enough, but think you worse.
And in Act II:
The French familiariz’d themselves with us,
Studied our Tongue and Manners, wore our Dress,
Married our Daughters, and our Sons their Maids…
Chief Bear laments of the English invaders:
Their Cities, Towns, and Villages arise,
Forests are spoil’d, the Haunts of Game destroy’d,
And all the Sea Coasts made one general Waste.
Chief Wolf asserts:
We’re poisoned with the Infection of our Foes…
A wily French priest repeats in Act III a perversion of the gospel of the “Delaware Prophet”:
[The English] once betray’d and kill’d [God’s] Son,
Who came to save you Indians from Damnation—
He was an Indian, therefore they destroy’d him;
He rose again and took his flight to Heaven.
But when his foes are slain he’ll quick return,
And be your kind Protector, Friend, and King.
Be therefore brave and fight his Battles for Him…
Kill all you captivate, both old and young,
Mothers and children, let them feel your Tortures;
He that shall kill a Briton, merits Heaven.
And should you chance to fall, you’ll be convey’d
By flying Angels to your King that’s there.
Alas, we know the Angel who had flown! In Act V, Rogers sounds a pair of Shakespearian notes that (so testified my father) Andrew Cooke had taught him to admire: the Indians having been betray’d by British & French alike and the uprising collapsed, “Ponteach’s” son “Philip” remarks on the “game of governments”: