PONTEACH, OR THE SAVAGES OF AMERICA
Pontiac, or Ponteach, was a Native American leader who made war upon the British in what became known as Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763 to 1766). One of the earliest accounts of Pontiac is a play, written in 1766 by the famous frontier soldier Robert Rogers of the Rangers. Ponteach, or the Savages of America is one of the only early dramatic works composed by an author with personal knowledge of the Indigenous nations of North America. Important both as a literary work and as a historical document, Ponteach interrogates eighteenth-century Europe’s widespread ideological constructions of Indigenous peoples as either innocent and noble savages, or monstrous and violent Others.
Presented for the first time in a fully annotated edition, Ponteach takes on questions of nationalism, religion, race, cultural identity, gender, and sexuality; the play offers a unique perspective on the rebellion and on the emergence of Canadian and American identities. Tiffany Potter’s edition is supplemented by an introduction that critically and contextually frames the play, as well as by important appendices, including Rogers’ ethnographic accounts of the Great Lakes nations.
TIFFANY POTTER teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia.
Ponteach, or the Savages
of America
A Tragedy
ROBERT ROGERS
Edited by Tiffany Potter
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9895-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9597-8 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rogers, Robert, 1731–1795
Ponteach, or the savages of America: a tragedy / Robert Rogers;
edited by Tiffany Potter.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9895-5 (bound). ISBN 978-0-8020-9597-8 (pbk.)
1. Pontiac’s Conspiracy, 1763–1765 – Drama. I. Potter, Tiffany, 1967– II. Title.
PS829.R6P6 2010 812’.1 C2010-904476-2
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing programm of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.
For my parents, Leslie and Fern Potter
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text and Publication History
Introduction: Staging Savagery and Fictionalizing Colonialism in Robert Rogers’ Ponteach: A Tragedy
Ponteach: or the Savages of America. A Tragedy
Appendix A:
Excerpts from Robert Rogers’ A Concise Account of North America (1765)
Appendix B:
Excerpts from The Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy (1763)
The Vision of Neolin, the Delaware Prophet
Pontiac’s Speech to the War Council
Pontiac’s Speech to the French
Appendix C:
Contemporary Reviews of the Work of Robert Rogers
Appendix D:
Contemporary Reports on the Life of Robert Rogers
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Robert Rogers
Engraved by Thomas Hart, 1776
William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan
Pontiac
Artist and year unknown
Ohio Historical Society
America
Theodore Galle, ca. 1580 (after Jan Van der Straet, ca. 1575)
Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Print and Photographs
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
1766 Title Page, Ponteach: or the Savages of America. A Tragedy
McGill University Library
1765 Title Page, A Concise Account of North America
McGill University Library
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every edition has one author, one editor, and a large number of hands unseen in the final product. I hope to acknowledge here the many contributions, institutional and personal, that have helped to bring Rogers’ play farther into the light. First, I am grateful to the students in my courses on eighteenth-century drama and on gender and indigeneity at the University of British Columbia; many of my students have offered fascinating comments on and engagements with Ponteach in the classroom and in their papers, and they have come up with several of the important questions I attempt to address in this volume. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the excellent work of Niki Parassidis, Kimberley Read, Carly Ryan, and Nancy Street, students in my 2008 majors’ seminar, each of whom contributed an original annotation to this edition. I would also like to thank Peter Sabor, who first sold me on the pleasures of scholarly editing, and David Oakleaf, whose gift of a copy of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative started me in such an exciting direction.
For their help in confirming the continuity of the print run of Rogers’ play, I offer thanks to the librarians at Mount Allison University; McGill University; the Toronto Reference Library; Boston Public Library; the John Hay Library, Brown University; the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library; the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress; Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Huntington Library; the University of Virginia; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Lilly Library, Indiana University; Special Collections at Michigan State University; Special Collections at the University of Vermont, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the British Library; and the Trustees at the National Library of Scotland. For permission to reproduce the illustrations in this volume, I thank the New York Public Library, McGill University Library, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and the Ohio Historical Society. For research on the Ogden family, I am grateful to the scholars and volunteers at Fairfield Museum and History Center in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Editing forgotten plays is to some degree a labour of love, but the love is certainly helped along by good funding. This edition emerged from a larger three-year investigative project on gender and indigeneity funded by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am most grateful to SSHRC for their support of literary and historical scholarship in Canada. I also wish to acknowledge the support of the Department of English at the University of British Columbia for funding conference travel related to this project.
At the University of Toronto Press, I wish to thank my editor, Richard Ratzlaff, and the two exceptionally engaged and informed anonymous readers. Their criticisms and suggestions have added enormously to this volume; errors, of course, remain my own.
And finally, as ever, I thank most of all my family for their support in everything that I do. I owe my start to my parents, Les and Fern Potter, and I am grateful every day for my brilliant husband Ken Madden and our equally brilliant daughter Sloane. They remind me every day in exactly the right ways how much and how little my work matters.
Vancouver, British Colu
mbia
2010
A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND PUBLICATION HISTORY
This edition is based upon the first and only printing of Ponteach, published in London by J. Millan in 1766. ESTC currently lists twenty-nine extant copies held by public institutions. To prepare this edition I reviewed the single copies held by McGill University and the Toronto Public Library, as well as a digital version of the British Library copy, all of which appear to be from the same print run. In correspondence with the extremely helpful librarians at the other holding institutions I have confirmed that all surviving copies share the same typographical errors, page breaks, and graphic additions and hence seem to be from the same print run. McGill University provided the copy text for this edition.
Because I believe that a scholarly edition of a largely unavailable text should resemble the original as much as possible (to allow for all types of analysis, including comparisons of non-standard spellings and syntax), this edition replicates the McGill copy as closely as I can manage. I have maintained old spellings and the eighteenth-century conventions in the capitalization of nouns (insofar as Rogers’ printers follow them). I have altered only obvious typographical errors, indicating these emendations and the original forms in the notes.
Ponteach was ‘printed for the Author; and Sold by J. Millan, opposite the Admiralty, Whitehall’ (title page). John Millan was one of the best known of the Whitehall booksellers, printing and selling books for some fifty years until his death in 1784. After his death, the new owners of the shop, Thomas and John Egerton, repeatedly mention in their advertisements of collections for sale that they are ‘successors to Mr. Millan.’ Millan seems to have printed more historical, military, and non-fictional material than literary texts, notably an annual volume titled Millan’s Universal Register of Court and City Offices which recorded the names of members of groups from the Royal Society to physicians authorized to practice in London. Millan published all three of Rogers’ books, all in small octavo dress. The Journals of Robert Rogers sold for 5s, and Concise Account of North America for 4s (published concurrently). Ponteach sold for 2s 6d, less than for Rogers’ other publications, but slightly more than typical for plays printed at the time. By comparison, in 1766 Thomas Francklin’s The Earl of Warwick: A Tragedy (which was staged and went to multiple editions) sold for 1s 6d, and the second edition of popular playwright Arthur Murray’s farce The Citizen sold for 2s 1d. Poet George Cocking’s The Conquest of Canada or the Siege of Quebec sold in its first edition in 1766 for 1s 6d. It is unclear how many copies of Ponteach were sold.
PONTEACH, OR THE SAVAGES OF AMERICA
INTRODUCTION: STAGING SAVAGERY AND FICTIONALIZING COLONIALISM IN ROBERT ROGERS’
PONTEACH: A TRAGEDY
Robert Rogers’ 1766 Ponteach: or the Savages of America. A Tragedy is the first play published in Britain about specifically North American subject matter by an author born in the American colonies.1 Though the play has been read as functionally about England rather than North America, merely an ‘obvious political allegory … through which Rogers provides a loyalist critique of revolutionary rhetoric’ (Tanner and Krasner 7, 5), I find it impossible to conclude anything other than that Ponteach is inescapably about colonial America and its self-construction. The play’s aggressive efforts to remove Ponteach from realms of mere metaphor humanize him to a specific purpose: only a fully human, complex Indigenous character can communicate the tragedy of the dehumanizing colonial relationship that Rogers reports.
Rogers is best known to history as the great military leader of Rogers’ Rangers, the most successful fighting unit in the French and Indian War of 1754–63. His fame is also partly the result of good self-promotion: he was first the author of an influential Concise Account of North America (which included a reasonably accurate and nation-specific sixty-page description of the ‘Customs, Manners, &c. of the Indians,’ reprinted here as Appendix A), and an autobiographical account of his American military experiences, sold as The Journals of Major Robert Rogers (which included a summary of the successful strategies he employed in training his troops and directing their tactics in battle). Ponteach2 is less well known, receiving only a one-page mention in John Cuneo’s 300-page standard biography of Rogers. While Rogers’ historical documents are widely referenced and discussed, his play has been almost ignored critically, arguably because the play is widely perceived to be only adequate as art.3 The play’s importance, though, is not that it was very nearly the first published American play, or even in its entertainment value, as it was never staged4 and is not well appreciated as a literary text. Its value is as a representation of a political speech act, and though it did not actually receive a production, it attempts to render for the first time for the English-speaking stage a knowledgeable representation of one of the Indigenous cultures of North America.5 More importantly, it asserts for that culture a humanity that transcends eighteenth-century Europe’s often-accepted ideological constructions of innocent noble savages or monstrous and violent mimics of almost-humanity. As Stephen Greenblatt suggests, until the late twentieth century, there was a long-standing tradition of writing and reading Indians as transparent: ‘either as Hobbesian pagans in a state of nature, condemned to lives that are solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, or as mute, naïve, miserable victims, condemned only to deception and enslavement.’ He suggests that modern criticism gives ‘the encounter between Europeans and American peoples a remarkable specificity and historical contingency. The Indians have lost the transparency of allegory, gaining instead the density of historical subjects struggling to come to terms with figures from a perplexingly different culture’ (viii). Rogers’ play makes a very early gesture towards exactly this epistemological shift in its rendering of the Ottawa war chief Pontiac as Ponteach, a complex, articulate human being driven to acts of violence and war both by his own excess ambition and a continuum of personal snubs and cultural encroachments that threaten his family and his community.
Rogers seems to have been moved to the dramatic arts by a review of his Concise Account in Critical Review, which noted that ‘the picture which Mr. Rogers has exhibited of the emperor Ponteack is new and curious, and his character would appear to vast advantage in the hands of a great dramatic genius’ (November 1765). Perhaps in response to such encouragement, Rogers wrote a dramatized version of the most notable individual figure in the broader historical and ethnographic accounts he had published, fictionalizing Pontiac extensively, most blatantly in giving him two sons,6 and having the two sons fight over women, eventually leading to both their deaths.
Rogers had completed only a basic public school education in New Hampshire, however, and the play’s formal structure and relatively accomplished blank verse leave some doubt as to whether his was the only hand involved in its production. Allan Nevins and Howard Peckham both suggest that Rogers must have had the assistance of another, more conventionally educated figure, and Rogers’ personal secretary Nathaniel Potter is the most logical candidate for co-author or editor. Potter had been educated at New Jersey College (Princeton). Nevins calls Potter ‘educated and rather clever, but disreputable’ and provides manuscript evidence that British Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson asserted in 1767 that Potter ‘had been hired because Rogers was so illiterate as to require someone to do business for him’ (102). Though the evidence of Rogers’ own journals and letters seems to contradict Johnson’s assessment, there is little suggestion of rhetorical flourish either. Francis Parkman is correct in the summary that ‘his books and unpublished letters bear witness that his style as a writer was not contemptible’ (1: 162–3). Potter and Rogers had a falling out around 1767, but this would not seem to preclude collaboration on Ponteach. John Cuneo also nominates John Campbell as a possible collaborator (174–7). Campbell was a prolific and competent writer who had also been commissioned by Lord Bute to write a justification of the Peace of Paris, which would have given him a certain amount of detailed knowledge of America, though he had n
ever been there. No author was listed on the title page of the printed text of the play, and though it was uniformly attributed to Rogers upon publication (Nevins 101), some form of collaborative endeavour seems likely.
Even with growing interest in North America and ‘Indians’ by the 1760s, even with the English cult of sensibility in full swing, and even amid the beginnings of the vogue for melodrama on the English stage, Ponteach was ill-received. All evidence indicates that it was never staged, and Rogers’ decision to have actually occur onstage two unprovoked murders and scalpings (by English hunters), several violent deaths, an attempted rape by a priest, and an extended scene of torture (initially including an innocent woman and her breastfeeding child) was something that, according to The Gentleman’s Magazine could be viewed or read only with ‘abhorrence’ and ‘disgust’ (February 1766). Monthly Review was particularly personal in its criticism, calling Ponteach ‘One of the most absurd productions we have ever seen,’ and noting that in ‘turning bard and writing a tragedy Rogers makes just as good a figure as would a Grub-street rhymester at the head of our author’s corps of North American rangers’ (January 1766). Contemporary reviews of all of Rogers’ publications are reprinted in this volume in Appendix C.
In addition to the artistic shortfalls such reviews pointed out, there were some odd historical inaccuracies as well that should be noted. The most significant of these is perhaps the apparently completely fictional story of Ponteach’s two sons, Philip and Chekitan, but a second set of historical inaccuracies comes in the representation of the role of the Mohawks in Pontiac’s Rebellion. As Rogers’ own Concise Account acknowledges, the Mohawks and the Five Nations maintained ongoing hostilities with the Great Lakes Nations. Not only were they not traditional allies, but the Mohawks were a part of the long-standing Covenant Chain that established peaceful relations between the Five Nations and the British, and were at no point part of the rebellion (though the westernmost of the Five Nations, the Senecas, had a vital role). One step beyond this broad slippage lies Ponteach’s representation of Hendrick, styled ‘Emperor of the Mohawks’ in the dramatis personae. The Mohawk leader Theyanoguin was known to the English as Hendrick, but he had been killed in battle in 1755 in the French and Indian War, long before the events of Rogers’ play. In a play that seems in so many ways desperate for the appearance of accuracy, and that offers so much lightly veiled political commentary, such errors might seem surprising, but in fact there are both internal and external reasons for Rogers’ depiction of Hendrick and the Mohawks. The first is fairly simple: the likely involvement of one or both of Nathaniel Potter and John Campbell in the composition of the play. Either man would have known that the tragic subplot of the second-generation Ottawas and Mohawks might appeal to the tastes of mid-eighteenth-century audiences (particularly in the language of sensibility and the elements of the melodramatic), and the star-crossed lovers plot requires families or nations in conflict. Other issues of marketing might also have overwhelmed desires for accuracy: the Mohawks were the Indigenous nation best known to most Londoners, and with their loyalty to the British in the war, they were widely depicted as heroic figures in Britain. A character named Hendrick, in particular, might have been considered to have sure appeal to audiences, given the recognizability of the Mohawk ‘Hendricks’ of the two previous generations. Londoners might have been expected to recall the famous Mohawk ‘King Hendrick’ who was one of the ‘Four Indian Kings’ whose visit created a sensation in London in 1711. English audiences could imagine such a man, because they or their parents might have seen him or his portraits. Adding further complexity is the subsequent slippage in the identity of ‘Hendrick’ in historical accounts. As Barbara Sivertsen has shown, there were actually two different Mohawk sachems who were called Hendrick Peters by Europeans. The two have been conflated by generations of historians, but as Dean Snow has documented, the sachem known to the Mohawks as Tejonihokarawa was a member of the Wolf Clan born around 1660, while the Hendrick Peters also known as Theyanoguin was a member of the Bear Clan born in 1692.
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