Ponteach, or the Savages of America

by Tiffany Potter

  38 Castillo argues, ‘The sons of Ponteach also reflect some of the difficult choices faced by Rogers as a first-generation Creole; the pacific Chekitan is a loyal son and subject, while the warlike Philip is a vision of the darker, fratricidal side of the brewing American revolt’ (223).

  39 Colley documents effectively several historical contexts analogous to this depiction of British brutality, noting that some Britons emerged from the experience of the Seven Years’ War ‘convinced that Native Americans were irredeemably bestial, cruel to captives and cruel in essence. But other Britons recognized – on the basis of what they read in letters or print – that their own regular troops in America (like French and colonial troops there) sometimes behaved not much differently’ (Captives 186).

  40 For an intriguing point of comparison on the depiction of an Indian human nature with more in common than different from that of Europeans, see Peter Williamson’s French and Indian Cruelty (1757). Frequently revised and reprinted, and widely read over the next hundred years, Williamson’s captivity narrative acknowledges from its title page Indian ‘cruelties,’ but frequently also criticizes both the English and French for their own brutality, notably in deceitful trade and the use of alcohol to manipulate Indian partners.

  41 Dowd offers a specific historical context. He notes that many Indigenous women were kept as mistresses or even prostitutes in colonial garrisons, and that ‘sexuality emerged as a definite issue between Britons and Indians. When Miamis took Fort Miami in 1763, they deployed a ruse involving the Indian lover of the garrison commander. And in the first violence of the war, on the St Clair River far north of Detroit, Ojibwa women would use seductive gestures very effectively to entice willing British boatmen into the gun sights of hidden Ojibwa warriors. In these instances there are hints that Indians resented a British assumption of sexual access to Indian women’ (88).

  42 Galle’s image is after a drawing by Jan Vander Straet. For detailed discussion of this particular metaphor in American culture, see Annette Kolodny’s Lay of the Land.

  43 Ellison argues that particularly in eighteenth-century America, discourses of sensibility fostered an increased acceptance and even valuation of ‘tenderhearted manhood’ (12), but in making her argument, she also notes the long association of derogatory uses of language of femininity when describing men.

  44 It is ironic that Rogers chooses a Mohawk woman in whom to locate his metaphor. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Mohawks were the most politically powerful Indigenous nation in North America, through a combination of their historical dominance among the Iroquois and neighbouring nations (noted by Rogers in his Concise Account) and their successful alliance with the British (noted in Ponteach). While Rogers may have been relatively accurate in the general outcomes his play expects – and renders in metaphor through Monelia – the Mohawks were among the least vulnerable Indigenous groups in 1766.

  45 Nussbaum summarizes ideas of race in the eighteenth century thus: ‘Concepts of race and its signifiers were sufficiently incoherent and inconsistent to make launching of a stable identity for English people versus the non-English fraught and complicated, though not impossible. In sum, inconsistencies and confusion are characteristic of racial discourse and related cultural practices in mid eighteenth-century England rather than the exception’ (139). For a detailed historical overview of eighteenth-century ideas on race, see Nicholas Hudson’s ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought.’

  46 As Butler puts it, ‘The personal is thus implicitly political inasmuch as it is conditioned by shared social structures, but the personal has also been immunized against political challenge to the extent that public/private distinctions endure’ (523).

  47 Butler herself applies her theory of compulsory performance of bodily difference to questions of race only sparingly; however, her sense that ‘it’s not so much a double consciousness – gender and race as the two axes, as if they’re determined only in relation to one another, I think that’s a mistake – but I think the unmarked character of the one very often becomes the condition of the articulation of the other’ (quoted in Bell 168) seems exactly at the crux of Rogers’ metaphors of race and power in Ponteach.

  48 That these children are all fictional makes the more clear their metaphorical function, as they all end the play threatened, contaminated, and eventually dead, much like Rogers expected their nations to be without changes in colonial management.

  1 In the eighteenth century the term desert was not yet limited to an arid climate, but indicated uninhabited wilderness, including forest land.

  2 Cylindrical beads made from polished whelk shells. Wampum was generally threaded or woven into belts, often up to six feet in length. Wampum belts were widely used as currency between Europeans and eastern North American Indigenous groups, but because they were sturdy and travelled well, they were traditionally more significant as a mode of communication and as a memory aid in cultures of oral tradition. A wampum belt painted red, for example, could be sent as a summons to war. See Rogers’ description in the excerpt from A Concise Account of North America, reprinted in this volume.

  3 Gunpowder.

  4 Hesitate or startle.

  5 While no specific Ogden can be identified from this reference, it seems possible that it refers to the Ogden family of New Jersey. They were among the earliest settlers to the area, and might have been known to the playwright(s) in several ways. One of the soldiers closest to Rogers’ in his famed efforts to save his men after the attack on St Francis was a Captain Ogden. Perhaps more likely is a link through Nathaniel Potter, who attended New Jersey College at a time when the Ogden family was prominent because of the legislator John Ogden, who was in turn the father of Aaron Ogden, later New Jersey’s fifth governor, who graduated from New Jersey College in 1773. The two men would likely not have known one another, but the Ogden family was certainly affluent and well known, and the legislative connection would make a nice pun on ‘stately house.’

  6 This particular mode of dishonest trade is described in satirical detail in Washington Irving’s 1809 A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker

  7 In 1761, Lord Egremont, one of George III’s ministers, wrote to General Amherst to complain that ‘The Indians are disgusted & their minds alienated from His Majesty’s Government by the shamefull manner in which business is transacted between them and our traders, the latter making no scruple of using every low trick and artifice to overreach and cheat those unguarded ignorant people in their dealings with them, while the French by a different conduct, and worthy of our immitation, deservedly gain their confidence’ (Nester 53).

  8 G.M. Wrong and others report that some traders spiked rum with laudanum, as ‘drugged rum was a great ally of trade’ (89).

  9 M’Dole distinguishes between the furs of larger animals, such as the beaver, and the pelts of smaller animals. In Concise Account, Rogers notes that ‘the fur of [the skunk or pole-cat], with that of the Ermin, Otter, and Martin, make up what they call the small peltry’ (189).

  10 Perhaps an allusion to the fact that a substantial number of servants in North America were ‘convict servants’: persons convicted of a crime in England (usually theft) and then transported to America.

  11 Four ounces, or a quarter pint, a substantial amount of rum, even if not augmented with laudanum.

  12 Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures reports that in 1765, a pound of beaver skins traded for 2s 6p or a half-pound of powder.

  13 See Rogers’ Concise Account in this volume: ‘if any quarrels happen, they never make use of oaths, or any indecent expressions, or call one another by hard names; but, at the same time, no duration can put a period to their revenge; it is often a legacy transferred from generation to generation, and left as a bequest from father to son, till an opportunity offers of taking ample satisfaction, perhaps in the third or fourth generation from
those who first did the injury’ (177).

  14 A mild curse, referring to Jove or Jupiter, the Roman sky god, head of the gods, and ironically – given the rest of this scene – disburser of justice.

  15 Outside of times of war, in most states the formal laws at least declined to distinguish on the basis of race in terms of murder and other crimes. North Carolina’s laws of 1715 note, for example, that ‘whatever white man shall defraud or take from any of the Indians his goods, or shall beat, abuse, or injure his person … shall suffer such other punishment as he should or ought to have done had the offense been committed to an Englishman,’ and Georgia’s ‘Murder of Free Indians’ Act of 1774 states, ‘to murder any free Indian, in amity with this province, is, but the law of the land, as penal, to all intents and purposes whatsoever, as to murder any white person.’

  16 Orsbourn here repeats from his own point of view what M’Dole has said of the Indians in Ii (see note 13).

  17 A reversal of conventional typifications of North American Indians as cannibals. Such descriptions were typically false, though the Ottawa did practise occasional ritual cannibalism. The 1766 text clearly reads ‘soop’ (possibly as in liquefy), rather than the perhaps more intuitive ‘scoop.’

  18 ‘Come in for snacks’ is a colloquialism meaning to claim a share or portion. The hunters could be hanged if their actions were discovered.

  19 Though of course there were no tigers in North America, many accounts and government documents use the word, probably to refer to the mountain lion or other large cat. For example, Carolina’s 1696 act requiring Indians to bring in skins as back payment for European clothing and other ostensible gifts of the past requires each adult Indian man to provide ‘yearly, one wolf’s skin, one tiger’s skin, or one bear skin, or two cat skins.’

  20 Corrected from Hon.

  21 Is your gun ready and charged with gunpowder?

  22 If the hunters are killed by the countrymen of those they have murdered, they will not face English justice and the risk of death by hanging.

  23 Amounts paid for the scalps (as evidence of the killing of an Indian) varied widely over time, geography, and circumstance, but Honnyman’s estimate seems reasonably apt, given, for example, Pennsylvania’s 1764 proclamation offering $134 ‘for every male above ten years, scalped, being killed.’ Live captives were worth $150 (male) or $130 (female). During King George’s War, Sir William Johnson offered substantial bounties for scalps, including half-bounties for the scalps of children. Johnson would later be instrumental in reaffirming the Covenant Chain, the alliance between the Iroquois nations and the English.

  24 Many Indigenous nations, including the Five Nations and Great Lakes Nations, used body and face paint, often made from bear’s grease, to signify status and to mark important events, including battle.

  25 Though there was a brief scholarly vogue in the 1970s for arguments that scalping was introduced to North America by Europeans, James Axtell argues convincingly that such arguments are misplaced, and that there is substantial evidence that North American Indians had traditions of scalping that predate European contact. Axtell, however, does make clear that both Indians and Europeans used the practice in North America, including the 1688 example of the French governor of Canada offering ten beaver skins for every enemy scalp – Indian or Christian; in 1696 the Council of New York offered six pounds for every Indian or French scalp (Axtell and Sturtevant 470).

  26 Corrected from Repo se.

  27 As Rogers himself notes in Concise Account, most Algonquian nations shared the custom of burying people with valuable items such as pipes, tobacco, bows, and arrows ‘that they might not be in want of any thing when he comes to the other country.’ See page 171, this volume. Orsbourne’s comment thus affirms either his ignorance or his disrespect of such customs.

  28 John Milton’s Paradise Lost famously identifies Satan as the inventor of gunpowder, but he is driven from heaven after losing the war with the angels.

  29 In this context, either dragging meat on the ground to attract animals to the hunt, or spreading gunpowder on the ground to ignite a fire.

  30 Corrected from myScruples.

  31 Cockum’s phrasing alludes to the language of class: ‘insolence’ suggests misbehaviour by an inferior; ‘encroaching’ suggests moving into inappropriate space owned by another; and to be ‘familiar’ is to be intimate, but with the negative implication of unwelcome intimacy or intrusion in this case. In the eighteenth century ‘miscreant’ conveyed not merely bad behaviour, but also often the religious implication of disbelief or paganism.

  32 This was a common complaint about the treatment of Indigenous nations in the colonial period. In 1762, Colonel Henry Bouquet had ordered that because the ‘use of rum and all strong liquors is destructive to the Indians and attended with the most pernicious consequences, all Indian traders and others are expressly forbid’ to sell liquor to Indians. Pontiac’s spiritual leader, the Delaware Prophet Neolin, claimed that in his vision the Master of Life had specifically ordered his followers to cease drinking to excess and also to end trade with the English.

  33 Corrected from Ponteack.

  34 Corrected from By.

  35 King George III had become king in 1760. He and his ministers were disturbed by stories of mistreatment of North American Indians. Nester’s account of Pontiac’s Rebellion documents several correspondences asserting that ‘His Majesty’s interests may be promoted by treating the Indians upon the same principles of humanity and proper indulgence’ as settlers (53).

  36 For Rogers’ account of Ponteach’s sense of his own status, see Concise Account in this volume: ‘his whole conversation sufficiently indicated that he was far from considering himself as a conquered Prince, and that he expected to be treated with the respect and honour due a King or Emperor by all who came into his country or treated with him’ (181).

  37 Of course, this confidence turns out to be misplaced. Almost simultaneously in the late spring and early summer of 1763, several forts were attacked and breached in the beginning of Pontiac’s Rebellion. On 4 June 1763, for example, a group of Ojibwe (also called Cherokee) men played lacrosse outside Fort Michillimackinac; when soldiers came to watch the game, warriors entered the fort and killed almost all of its occupants. See Act IV scene iii for reference to a similar event.

  38 The names are obviously indicative of values. Sharp likely alludes to his being a sharper or cheat, as in ‘card sharp’ (which later evolved to ‘shark’). Historians such as Gregory Evans Dowd have read the character of Sharp as a specific attack on Major Henry Gladwin, a fellow officer under whom Rogers served in 1763. The Navarre Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy also lays blame for the attack on Detroit on insult Pontiac believed he had had from Gladwin (17).

  39 This quotation actually appears to originate in Terence’s classical Roman play Andria from the second century B.C.E., and was known in the eighteenth century from sources like Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Wit without Malice (in which it is used ironically: ‘Charity and beating begins at home’ (V ii). Sir Thomas Browne also used the exact phrase in the 1642 Religio Medici: ‘Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world: yet is every man his greatest enemy.’ Gripe’s biblical sourcing could simply be incorrect, or may allude to Paul’s advice to widows with children in 1 Timothy 5:4: ‘Let them learn first to show piety at home.’

  40 Catchum misrepresents the intention of Paul’s advice in 1 Timothy 5:8: ‘But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’

  41 Vulgar or rude.

  42 To take up arms. This is the opposite of ‘bury the hatchet’ (below) meaning to end hostilities and lay down arms.

  43 There is no period here in the 1766 printing, perhaps indicating interruption.

  44 Throughout these scenes relationships are described in familial terms that carried quite different significance for Europeans and the Ottawa. See Introduction, pages 50�
��1 for detailed discussion.

  45 Rather than sharpened, in preparation for violence.

  46 Commonly recorded as Ostenaco or Outacity, one of three Cherokee men who travelled to England in the summer of 1762, escorted by Henry Timberlake. The names of the other two men are less consistently reported, but the anglicizations of their names are The Pouting Pigeon (Tohanohawighton) and The Stalking Turkey (Kanagagota). Though the three were not particularly pleased with their reception, they did eventually meet King George III. For highlights of the visit, see The Gentleman’s Magazine ‘Historical Chronicle’ for June, July, and August 1762.

  47 A type of pipe with a long, ornamented stem and a bowl made of clay or stone. It is used as a signifier of agreement among many North American Indian nations. To smoke the pipe signifies peace or friendship; to refuse to smoke communicates disagreement or a rejection of offered terms. See Concise Account 173–4, this volume.

  48 Wampum belts. See note 2.

  49 A maker of hats. Beaver skin was a luxury material used in fashionable hats in England in the eighteenth century.

  50 A bonus in addition to the regular pay of a position. In modern terms, a ‘perk’ of the job.

  51 Sharp misrepresents English policy; in fact such valuable goods as furs were the property of the Crown, though not necessarily the king personally. Many artefacts from this period are held by royal descendants and beneficiaries, however, so some goods did clearly reach the king directly. No period ends this sentence in the 1766 printing.

  52 Philip’s name may allude to Wampanoag sachem Metacomet, called King Philip by Europeans, and the leader of several nations in what became known as King Philip’s War (1675–6).

  53 The two fictional sons of Ponteach. There is no record that the historical Pontiac had sons who were involved in his rebellion. See Introduction note 6.