Ponteach (character), 5, 34–9, 43, 50–4, 199–200
as ‘doomed Indian,’ 43, 49
and English ‘Brothers,’ 50–1
on French and Indian War, 33
as hero, 29–31, 38–40
language and truth, 40–1
and Neolin, 12–13
and racialized identity, 34–5, 39–42
as noble savage, 36, 38
Pontiac (historical), 11–12, 13, 20–5, 56, 180–2, 195–7
ambition, 36
early life, 22
on French versus English, 24–5, 195–6
leadership in Rebellion, 13–14
meetings with Rogers, 17, 21–3, 180–2
as most famous Indian, 31
and Neolin, 10–13, 191
sons of, 5
speeches and rhetoric, 23–4, 35, 116, 195–7
Pontiac’s Rebellion, 8–15, 21, 23–5, 54, 74
casualty estimates, 8
Pontiac’s leadership of, 13–14
Potter, Nathaniel, 5–6, 20
Rogers, Robert, 3–6, 15–20, 21–3, 28, 34, 52–3, 55, 207–9
critique of colonial practices, 35–6, 42–4, 46, 51–3
on colonialism as theory, 43–5
depictions of Indigeneity, 32–4
financial and legal struggles, 15–16, 18–20
literacy of, 6
meetings with Pontiac, 17, 22–3, 180–2
military career, 15–18, 19–20
national identity, 3, 34, 41. See also Indians; and published works by individual title
Rogers Rangers, 3, 16–17, 21
Sayre, Gordon, 35
scalps, 70
Senecas, 7, 10, 13, 14
Siege of Detroit. See Pontiac’s Rebellion
Tanner, Laura, 3, 4, 38–9
theatre, eighteenth-century, 26–31
in North America, 28–9
music in, 26–7
popularity of tragedy and comedy, 27–8
republican tragedy, 28–9
in South America, 4
Theyangoguin (‘Hendrick Peters’), 7, 94
White, Hayden, 36
White, Richard, 21, 25, 32–3, 42, 50–1
wildlife, North American, 185–90
1 Though, of course, the political entity of the United States of America did not exist per se in 1766, Rogers was born in the colonies, and so is widely referred to as an early American writer, though his works were published in London. His case offers an excellent example of the transatlantic nature of colonial culture at this time, where texts circulated around Britain and the East Coast of America rather than being necessarily English or American. Published in January 1766, Ponteach is the second play published by a North American-born writer, after Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of Parthia, which appeared late in 1765 (though it had been written in 1759). Godfrey’s play is an exoticized Orientalist imagining, leaving Ponteach as the first English-language play about explicitly North American experience.
2 Not to be confused with another soldier’s later dramatic effort, General Alexander Maycomb’s 1838 Pontiac, or the Seige of Detroit.
3 Robert E. Morsberger, for example, sets up his discussion by asserting that ‘Except for a few scenes, the play has almost no artistic value, but parts of it are most interesting in connection with Rogers’ attempts to get support and authority for his project to seek the Northwest Passage’ (246). For the record, I disagree: given the operatic nature of the tradition of heroic drama in which the play clearly locates itself, I find Ponteach to be perhaps not Dryden, but certainly entertaining and informative, two criteria for successful theatre by most eighteenth-century criteria.
4 The record is unclear, but most scholars agree that Ponteach was never staged. Tanner and Krasner assert without documentation that it ran in London for one night only. Montrose J. Moses argued in 1918 that there might have been one amateur production. The play was, however, reimagined as a musical presentation in 1977. In Ponteach: A Melodrama for Narrator and Piano, Lejaren Hiller uses speeches by Ponteach and other characters to exemplify character types in historical conflict, including the Trader, the Hunter, the Colonel, the Governor, and the Priest. The music is based on the Ojibwa war song ‘Scarlet is its Head,’ with allusions to other Ojibwa and Ottawa music, and recognizable British melodies such as ‘The British Grenadiers’ and ‘Do You Know the Muffin Man.’
5 Outside of the English-speaking stage, there are other examples of knowledgeable theatrical engagements with both North and South American Indigenous cultures. In colonial Spanish America, for example, early miracle plays and even some Golden Age Spanish tragedies were translated and performed in Native languages, and Native performances such as the Mayan Rabinal Achi could be performed in ways that offered a response. See Dennis Tedlock’s Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice.
6 Though Pontiac was old enough to have adult sons by the time of Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, there is no indication in the historical record that any sons were present. The record on Pontiac’s descendents is unclear. Peckham’s still-standard 1947 biography of Pontiac notes that Pontiac ‘definitely’ had two sons in 1769, but their names are not known. He suggests that ‘one of them was probably Shegenaba, who gained some prominence in 1775’ by returning captive Ezekiel Field. Another source names Kasahda and Nebahkohum as sons of Pontiac. None of these men are named in documents pertaining to the rebellion, and none seem to have taken on leadership roles in the Ottawa communities. One of Pontiac’s (much younger) wives, Kan-tuck-ee-gun was living at Maumee as late at 1815, with one son, Otussa. Another of Peckham’s sources, though, identifies a Tuss-saw as Pontiac’s nephew in 1825. Shortly thereafter the same source lists Tuss-saw as Pontiac’s grandson, who was dictating a biography of Pontiac. The notes from this dictation have not been found (Peckham 316–17).
7 Johnson wrote to Amherst in 1763 that the withdrawal of gifts would be read to signify ‘contempt, dislike, and an Inclination to reduce them so low as to facilitate Designs of extirpating them’ (cited in Dowd 71).
8 For the evidence on attribution, see the preface to the Burton edition of the Journal, pages 7–8. The Burton edition also includes reproductions of handwriting samples from the original manuscript and from other documents by Navarre. For a discussion of the limitations of the document as a historical source, see Dowd, 6.
9 The French. Earlier readers, including Peckham, have widely read Neolin’s vision as anti-European (‘twisted’ by either Pontiac or the presumptive recorder Navarre to favour French over English), but Dowd makes a persuasive case for a differentiation between French and English (96–9).
10 I have used the words ‘dream’ and ‘vision’ with reference to Neolin throughout this discussion because they are the ones used in the standard translation of Navarre that I cite and are standard in discussions of Neolin (‘reverie’ and ‘rêve’ in Navarre’s original French). Dowd notes that Neolin was purported to have had his first vision while seated before a fire (101). Thus it seems important to recognize that that ‘dream’ may not offer exactly the correct impression, and that it may more appropriately be seen as a shamanic vision.
11 See Nester, 136.
12 See Dixon, 246, and Calloway, 90–1, for fuller discussion of this implication of Pontiac’s War.
13 I follow the standard placing of Rogers’ birth at Methuen, Massachusetts, as listed by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and biographers John Cuneo and Allan Nevins, though the Dictionary of National Biography locates Rogers’ birth at Dunbarton, New Hampshire.
14 In his firmly laudatory biography of Rogers, Nevins summarizes Rogers’ testimony: ‘The general impression to be gained from the answers of Rogers to their questions is that he had been temporarily led astray, in part by native dishonesty, in part by a rural want of judgment, but had early forsaken his evil course in alarm’ (41n). Given later accusations against Rogers of treason and fraud, this seems overly optimistic.
15 Though the narrative in Concise Account is fairly detailed, it is worth noting that Rogers makes no mention of Pontiac in the Journals written at the time of the journey, though he does describe a meeting and smoking of the calumet with ‘a party of Ottawa Indians just arrived from Detroit’ (Rogers, Journals 155).
16 Hay was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. In 1774, Governor Haldimand sent him to Illinois country to report on conditions there. In 1776, likely because of his experience and the fact that he spoke a Huron language, he was appointed deputy Native American agent and major of the Detroit militia. In 1778, he was captured in Vincennes and taken as a prisoner of war to Virginia, and was exchanged in New York in 1781. Hay was appointed Detroit’s last lieutenant-governor in 1782, and died in office 2 August 1785 (Thwaites and Kellogg 130).
17 For a concise overview of Ottawa and Ashinabeg leadership traditions that White pursues in detail, see Dowd, 9–17.
18 As Peckham records, the document survives only in a bibliographical summary, as the original was burned in a fire at the New York state capitol in 1911 (48n).
19 See Dowd, 55–6, for example. Such scepticism is most firmly based in the fact that though Rogers’ Concise Account describes in some detail a meeting with Pontiac, his Journals do not mention Pontiac at all, though they do cover the relevant time period.
20 The Farquhar version that Rogers revises emphasizes the potential for individual success once away from the social strictures of England:
Our ’prentice Tom may now refuse
To wipe his scoundrel Master’s Shoes,
For now he’s free to sing and play
Over the Hills and far away.
…
Courage, boys, ’tis one to ten,
But we return all gentlemen
All gentlemen as well as they,
Over the hills and far away.
Over the Hills and O’er the Main,
To Flanders, Portugal and Spain,
The queen commands and we’ll obey
Over the Hills and far away.
21 The 1760s in particular were not a pinnacle in the history of theatrical tragedy. Richard Bevis writes off the entire decade thus: ‘Few tragedies of the 1760s repay study’ (207).
22 If conservatism of form was fairly typical of the English stage, it was nearly universal on the American stage in the colonial period. Relatively few purpose-built theatres existed: Odai Johnson and William J. Burling’s documentary history of the colonial America stage lists twenty-four purpose-built theatres in America before 1776: three in Annapolis, five in Charleston, five in New York, three in Philadelphia, three in Williamsburg, and one each in Baltimore, Norfolk, Halifax NC, Newport RI, and Petersburg VA. Though productions occurred in other venues such as schools, assemblies, and great rooms, the choices tended firmly to the tried and true. The most performed play in colonial America was Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with thirty-five productions, followed by George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Strategem, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. With the exception of John Home’s 1756 Scottish heroic Douglas, none of the ten most-produced plays were written after George Lillo’s 1731 The London Merchant.
23 Of course, there is no safe way to generalize about staged Roman tragedy in classical times. No play survives of the genre in which we can be absolutely certain what happens at the end. Instead, theories of Roman tragedy also consider historical narratives that attempt to represent historical events dramatically; such narratives were never intended for the stage. Even in Lucan’s version of the Cato narrative in Civil War, only ten of twelve projected books were completed. Later Cato stories that include his battlefield suicide are likely descended from Plutarch’s narrative (a Roman author, writing in Greek, likely consolidating earlier, now non-extant sources), some 200 years after the death of the historical Cato the Younger.
24 In the Behn version of the story, Imoinda is also of African descent; Southerne is the first of a series of playwrights to make her white.
25 Richard White asserts in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians that ‘Robert Rogers’ Ponteach made Pontiac the most famous Indian of the eighteenth century’ (496).
26 Parallels among the mid-eighteenth-century Oroonoko adaptations and Ponteach abound. They all raise questions about English ideas of race, difference, and humanity. In John Hawkesworth’s 1759 Oroonoko, evil lieutenant-governor tries to rape Imoinda, with some of the same symbolic implications as the Priest’s attempted rape of Monelia. A rape is planned but not carried out in Francis Gentleman’s Oroonoko (1760), and both are clear in their anti-slavery tenor. John Ferriar’s adaptation, The Prince of Angola (1788), is the most blunt. In his preface, Ferriar announces that his goal is to shock white people out of their insensitivity to the evils of slavery: ‘We talk of the destruction of millions, with as little emotion, and as little accuracy of comprehension, as of the distances of the Planets’ (i).
27 For an exceptionally useful overview of the role of American Indians in the perceptions and shifts of the identities of Britons in Britain and in America, see Colley, 137–202.
28 Rogers writes near the beginning of his Concise Account, ‘Certain I am, that no man besides has traveled over and seen so much of this part of the country as I have done … I may say that the long and particular acquaintance I have had with several tribes and nations in both peace and war, has at least furnished me materials to treat the subject with propriety’ (iv–v, vii).
29 Telling, for example, is that his comments on political geography in Concise Account frequently use language of possession rather than merely occupation. See, for example, pages 174–6 on the Five Nations and Great Lakes Mississaugas. He also explicitly rejects contemporary arguments against an Indigenous sense of private property in his description of the Nippisongs: ‘there is such a thing as private property among them, which they transfer to one another, by way of bargain and exchange, and if taken out of the compass of fair dealing, the aggressor is stigmatized, and punished with disdain’ (Rogers 157).
30 Whether Rogers knew of it or not, the most significant effort at eradication occurred during the siege of Fort Pitt, when Captain Simon Ecuyer and William Trent (in a tactic later approved by Amherst and Bouquet) presented to two Delaware leaders two blankets and two handkerchiefs that had been intentionally contaminated with smallpox. Smallpox subsequently broke out among the Delawares and Shawnees, though historians debate whether the blankets or another vector might be the cause. This contamination was a deliberate contradiction of the traditional European rules of war, which specifically precluded killing enemies by poison. For detailed discussion, see Dowd, 190 and 211, and Nester, 112–15.
31 Gordon Sayre analyses this scene and other major speeches in conjunction in his discussion of the historical Pontiac as part of his argument that ‘scenes of dramatic encounter between Native American and Euro-American people – at frontier treaty councils, in theatres, or in open-air spectacles – supports a definition of cultural and racial identity as performative’ (Indian Chiefs 16). He argues that ‘Pontiac offers our best opportunity to examine how a Native American leader adopted the rhetoric and ideology of European and colonial politics. Pontiac was savvy enough to employ imperial ideology against itself’ (133).
32 Rogers’ Concise Account intimates this ambition as well: ‘He often intimated to me, that he could be content to reign in his country in subordination to the King of Great Britain, and was willing to pay him such annual acknowledgement as he was able in furs, and to call him his uncle’ (181, this volume). On the implication of that particular model of familial relationship, see pages 50–1.
33 Ponteach’s atypical complexity of characterization is my point here, but Hayden White does argue that even the noble savage is not as straightforward in its implications as we might assume. White argues that the ideological effect of the term ‘noble savage’ is ‘to draw a distinction between presumed types of humanity on manifestly qualitative grounds, rather than such su
perficial bases as skin color, physiognomy, or social status’ (17). Ania Loomba presses this further, noting that the idea of the noble savage ‘represents a rupture, a contradiction, a point at which the seamless connections between inferiority and the external characteristics are disturbed’ (103).
34 The Jesuit Relations were reports from North America published annually in France from 1633 to 1673. Different accounts were collected, translated, or republished through the eighteenth century in England, though the fully collected texts were not available in English until Reuben Gold Thwaites’ edition of 1902, which also includes allied documents from as early as 1610.
35 See, for example, The Tatler 50 (27 April 1711) for a fictionalized account of the opinions of London held by one of the famed ‘Four Indian Kings’ who visited London in 1710. For a later example, see The Gentleman’s Magazine 35 (1765) on the visit of three Cherokee Chiefs to London.
36 The earliest and most famous being Mary Rowlandson’s account of 1682, though hundreds of captivity narratives were published between 1682 and the mid-nineteenth century. For a useful overview of the genre and its cultural implications, see Kathryn Derounian-Stodola and James Levernier’s The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900.
37 The traders Murphey and M’Dole are not so violent, but establish from the play’s opening scene that for British characters, ‘Our fundamental Maxim then is this, / That it’s no Crime to cheat and gull an Indian … A Thousand Opportunities present / To take Advantage of their Ignorance’ (I i). The Governors Sharp, Gripe, and Catchum similarly exploit their belief that the Ottawas ‘are ignorant of the Worth / Of single things, nor know they how to add / Or calculate, and cast the whole Amount.’ Sharp adds, ‘How thankful should we be that we have Schools, / And better taught and bred than these poor Heathen’ (I iv). Susan Castillo suggests there is potentially further significance to this discussion of trade by characters with respectively Irish and Scottish names, noting that the names evoke ‘two nations on the periphery of English empire, as were (Rogers may be implying) England’s American Colonies’ (216). The use of names typical of other British colonies may attempt to assert equality, rather than hierarchy, among those who were identified as not-English.
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