In his report on the year’s campaigns, Gage credited Bouquet’s “firm and steady Conduct . . . in all his Transactions with those Treacherous Savages” with restoring order in the west. He admitted that Bradstreet had suffered more severe problems but nonetheless felt justified in observing that “the Country is restored to it’s former Tranquility; and that a general, and it’s to be hoped, lasting Peace is concluded, with all the Indian Nations, who have lately taken up Arms against His Majesty.” 17 And yet the peace was neither so general nor so secure as Gage suggested, and it had less to do with firm and steady conduct than with the fact that the French commander in the Illinois Country had refused to provide the Indians with ammunition and arms. The French traders who had been supplying powder and shot had exhausted most of their stock and expected to be well paid for what they had left. Under these circumstances, most Indian groups north of the Ohio and east of the Wabash found it difficult to go on believing in the return of Onontio, who seemed so indifferent to their efforts. They simply found it more convenient to exchange their French father for a British one, and to trade their pelts and hides for British goods that were cheaper and more plentiful than those of the French anyway.
This willingness to bury the hatchet was far from universal. From the Scioto Valley to the Mississippi, significant leaders and their supporters remained unsubdued. Bradstreet’s destruction of Pontiac’s peace belt had only solidified the Ottawa chief’s support among western Indians who still believed that the French king could be reawakened. In the Illinois Country, a half-German Catholic Shawnee named Charlot Kaské was rising to prominence as a war chief far more determined to resist the British than Pontiac. Thus the peace agreements of 1764 did not eliminate resistance so much as shift its center of gravity westward. Bringing Pontiac to terms and establishing control in Illinois therefore preoccupied Gage and Johnson in 1765, and neither task proved easy.
The expense of Bouquet’s and Bradstreet’s expeditions made it imperative to assert British authority over the far west by diplomatic means. Bouquet and Bradstreet both advised Gage that no fewer than three thousand men would be needed to pacify Illinois militarily, and that was simply too great a financial burden to bear for the commander in chief, whose budgets were already running 150 percent above authorized levels. The problems Major Loftus had encountered trying to ascend the Mississippi dictated, moreover, that the initial attempts to be made to reach the Illinois Country had best come by way of the Ohio. In January 1765, Gage accordingly sent a message to Pontiac, inviting him to help arrange a peaceful transfer of power from French to British occupation in the west, in effect asking a man who was still his enemy to become his partner. To follow up on this initiative, Gage authorized two separate diplomatic missions to the Illinois Country. The first party to make the attempt, led by Lieutenant John Ross of the 34th Regiment and an interpreter, Hugh Crawford, crossed overland from Mobile to the lower Ohio and reached Fort de Chartres in mid-February. They found the commandant, Captain Louis Groston Saint-Ange de Bellerive, to be most cooperative. The local Indians, by contrast, proved remarkably hostile. Ross and Crawford fled for their lives in April.18
While Ross and Crawford were paddling furiously down the Mississippi, the leader of the second mission, George Croghan, was still a month away from leaving Fort Pitt. Delay and misfortune had plagued him from the start. Upon his return from London, late in 1764, the tireless Irishman had pressed Gage to let him try to open the Illinois Country. Sir William Johnson strongly endorsed the scheme. Gage, of course, had no way of knowing that Croghan intended not only to make peace but to scout the region for his colonizing scheme and corner its fur trade for his business partners in the Philadelphia firm of Baynton, Wharton and Morgan. Gage was, however, well aware of Croghan’s reputation as an Indian diplomat and late in 1764 allowed him two thousand pounds to purchase Indian presents. Croghan, as always, took the bottom line as his starting point. By late winter, when he left Philadelphia, he had spent nearly five thousand pounds on diplomatic gifts for the journey, virtually all of which he had bought either from Baynton, Wharton and Morgan, or from himself (after first setting up a penniless cousin as a merchant, to front the transaction). In addition to these supplies, which would be transported to Fort Pitt at Crown expense, Baynton, Wharton and Morgan shipped out an additional twenty thousand pounds’ worth of goods to accompany the expedition and reprime the pump of the western trade. This occasioned the first disaster of the trip.
Before the firm’s pack train had crossed Cumberland County on the Forbes Road, the local Scotch-Irish settlers learned that its panniers contained large numbers of skinning—in their view, scalping—knives. Following a Paxtonite policy of direct action, the frontiersmen organized themselves into a mob, blacked their faces, and destroyed or stole eighty horse loads of supplies; then they closed the road and besieged Fort Ligonier, to which the packhorse drivers had fled to save their lives. This left Croghan, already at Fort Pitt, in a particularly embarrassing position. Why, Gage angrily inquired, had massive quantities of Indian trade goods, including weapons and ammunition, been labeled as Crown property and directed for delivery to him—at a fort where the Indian trade was still under official embargo? 19
Croghan brazened it out. In the face of massive evidence to the contrary, he denied that he had any private interest in Baynton, Wharton and Morgan’s venture. He had, he maintained, merely permitted them to ship certain items to Fort Pitt to be stored until the embargo was lifted. With Johnson arguing vigorously in his defense, Gage finally let Croghan off with a reprimand, but it took all of March and April to convince him that the Irishman should be allowed to proceed. By then the expedition’s military liaison, Lieutenant Alexander Fraser of the 78th Regiment, had lost patience and left for Illinois on his own. Croghan had advised Fraser to stay at Fort Pitt until he could confer with the Mingos, Delawares, and Shawnees downriver, and arrange safe passage through their country. The Shawnees, he explained, particularly had to be cultivated; as the nation located farthest west in the Ohio Country, they had the strongest ties with the peoples of the Wabash Valley and the Illinois, with whom the British had not yet made contact. Shawnee goodwill was thus crucial, but far from certain: the most incorrigible of the rebellious tribes, they still had not brought in the captives they had promised Bouquet the previous fall. But nothing could dissuade Fraser, who recruited a boatload of volunteers to row him down a thousand miles of dubious water and left Pittsburgh on March 22. Croghan stayed on at Pittsburgh, writing disingenuous letters, making preparations, and waiting for the chiefs of the Ohio nations to appear.
Unlike everything else that spring, George Croghan’s Indian conference went remarkably well, once it finally convened on May 7. The Shawnee delegates not only brought in their prisoners and agreed to dispatch ambassadors to make a formal peace with Sir William Johnson, but assigned ten chiefs to accompany Croghan as a gesture of good faith. But Indian diplomacy remained, as ever, a ticklish and time-consuming business, and it was May 15 before Croghan and his two bateaux, laden with gifts, were afloat on the Ohio. By then Lieutenant Fraser was already in Illinois—with his neck on the chopping block.20
He had reached Fort de Chartres on April 17, not long after Ross and Crawford fled. Chances are good he would have been killed straightaway if Pontiac had not arrived at the fort just ahead of him. The Ottawa chief, notwithstanding the uncertainty Bradstreet had created at Detroit the previous year, was once again ready to make peace. Pontiac was not, in fact, the domineering civil leader that Gage and Johnson and the other British officials imagined him to be, but only one of many war chiefs. He was also a visionary whose views had long since been rejected by most of his own people in favor of peace and open trade. Bradstreet’s rashness had enabled Pontiac to retain a following among western Indians who kept their faith in Onontio’s return, or at least hoped to stall the British advance short of the Illinois Country. But in the months since Bradstreet’s blunder, Pontiac’s own faith in the French ha
d faded. In contrast to the polite refusal of Captain Saint-Ange and other officials to deal with him, Gage’s message of January had offered him the chance to become the most powerful Indian leader in America, for the letter promised him a kind of supreme chieftainship of the western Indians in return for his help in gaining control of the Illinois Country. Thus Pontiac listened closely to Fraser’s unpracticed oratory, with its unmistakable offers of peace and partnership; heard Saint-Ange say, once again, that the French father wanted his Indian children to end their war; and replied that he was willing to bury the hatchet. That was all there was to it. Less than a week after Fraser’s arrival, everything seemed settled. The delighted lieutenant, unaware of the tenuousness of his position, bought brandy and ordered a bullock slaughtered for a feast in Pontiac’s honor. A delegation of chiefs set out to meet Croghan and escort him to the settlement of Kaskaskia, south of Fort de Chartres, where Pontiac and Fraser would await him, while wampum belts were prepared to confirm the peace.
But the politics of Indian resistance were more complex, and the peoples of the Illinois Country more divided, than a lieutenant infatuated with his own success could have dreamed. In early May it was not George Croghan but Charlot Kaské who came to Kaskaskia, and his coming set Alexander Fraser’s scheme on its ear. He had been to New Orleans to seek aid from Charles Philippe Aubry, the French officer deputed to govern Louisiana until its permanent Spanish governor should appear. Aubry had discountenanced further hostilities and refused to make a gift of arms and ammunition, but he did permit a convoy of trade goods, which included a substantial supply of gunpowder, to accompany Charlot Kaské back up the Mississippi. Aubry intended to help the traders of the Illinois dodge the importation duties that the Spanish were sure to impose when Louisiana changed hands. In actuality, however, he helped Charlot Kaské, for the convoy gave the chief an opportunity to misrepresent his true position. Saying that the governor had encouraged resistance to the British, and pointing as evidence to the kegs of powder in the boats, Charlot Kaské instantly undercut Pontiac’s agreement and put the lives of Fraser and his party in extreme peril. Fraser’s—for that matter, Pontiac’s—hopes now rested entirely on Croghan’s arrival. But once more Croghan did not come. The chiefs who had gone to the mouth of the Wabash to await him returned, angry at being sent on a fool’s errand. By the end of May, Pontiac could no longer protect Fraser and confessed that he and his few remaining followers would soon have to return to their villages. Fraser therefore wrote hasty letters to Croghan and the commandant of Fort Detroit, attesting to Pontiac’s cooperation; handed them over to the Ottawa chief; and took to his canoe. He fled down the Mississippi on May 29.21
But Pontiac lingered at Kaskaskia, delayed by the unexpected arrival of yet another British emissary, Pierce Acton Sinnott. Sinnott, representing the southern Indian superintendent, John Stuart, had come from West Florida without any inkling of the state of affairs in Illinois. The ablest Indian diplomat would have found his prospects slim, but the inexperienced and “fractious” Sinnott—who a contemporary described as “a stranger to the art of pleasing”—fared even worse than Lieutenant Fraser. Within a few days he, too, ran for his life; but not before he had a chance to open a letter from George Croghan, which an Indian messenger brought on June 14. That letter, written at a camp near the mouth of the Wabash a week earlier, revealed that Croghan’s party would soon reach Kaskaskia. News of Croghan’s impending arrival could hardly have filled Pontiac with hope, but he decided to remain a few days longer anyway. The next news to arrive explained that Croghan would not be coming, after all. He had, Pontiac learned, encountered unexpected obstacles within a few hours of sending his letter of June 7. Perhaps only Pontiac could have seen that what befell Croghan on June 8 would give him one last chance to readjust the balance that had lately weighed so heavily against him.22
Croghan’s trip down the Ohio had been a leisurely, calm one, lulling the agent and his companions into a false sense of ease. Even if they had been on their guard, however, they could scarcely have stood off a sudden, early morning assault by eighty Kickapoo and Mascouten warriors, followers of Charlot Kaské. The attack left three Shawnee chiefs and two of Croghan’s servants dead. Only three men in the party escaped injury; Croghan himself sustained a dangerous hatchet wound in the head. The survivors expected to be tortured to death after the attack, and almost certainly would have been, had not one wounded Shawnee ambassador spoken up. Playing to the hilt his role as a doomed man, he taunted his captors with threats of his own. They were dead men, he said; his people, who had become friends with the British, would fall with fury on the Kickapoos and Mascoutens to avenge the killing of their chiefs. Unsettled, the warriors decided to spare the lives of their captives long enough to carry them up the Wabash to Vincennes and Ouiatenon, where they could consult with French traders and seek the counsel of their own leaders.
As they traveled, Croghan gradually recovered his strength, and as soon as he was able to talk, he too began playing on his captors’ fears. So, for that matter, did the people in the villages they passed along the way, none of whom wanted a war with the Shawnees, especially when Croghan made it clear that they would come with British backing and illimitable supplies of arms and ammunition. By the time the party reached Ouiatenon, 250 miles upriver from the site of the attack, the warriors themselves were convinced that they had made a terrible mistake, and they did not demur when the civil chiefs of the village set Croghan and the other captives free. On July 1, the leaders of the five Wabash peoples (the Kickapoos, Mascoutens, Miamis, Piankashaws, and Weas) asked the Irishman to mediate a settlement that would avoid further bloodshed. Croghan, happily noting that “a thick Scull is of Service on some Occasions,” agreed to write the necessary letters and sponsor the necessary talks.23
When news of the attack reached Kaskaskia, Charlot Kaské immediately sent word to have Croghan burned, but Pontiac—recognizing a chance to act as a mediator and recover lost influence—gathered up a delegation of Mingos, Delawares, and Shawnees, and set out for Ouiatenon. There, in July, the five nations of the Wabash renounced Charlot Kaské’s leadership and asked Pontiac to represent them in meetings with Croghan. Irishman and Ottawa had no trouble in recognizing their opportunity and quickly made the most of it. In councils held at Ouiatenon in July and at Detroit in August, Pontiac and the chiefs of the Wabash Indians made their peace with the British. Pontiac’s sole condition, which he knew would be necessary if the Illinois nations were to tolerate British garrisons on their lands, was that the British promise to occupy the Illinois posts as the French had, as tenants abjuring all claims to the surrounding territory, and even to the ground on which the forts stood. Croghan—disingenuously, since he had no intention of giving up his own scheme to colonize Illinois—raised no objections. Pontiac still had to travel to New York and formalize the treaty with Sir William Johnson. Croghan knew that the northern superintendent could disallow the article then, once the redcoats were in place, without risk.
As soon as the preliminaries had been completed, Croghan notified Gage that troops could safely be sent to take post in the Illinois Country. The first unit, a hundred Highlanders of the 42nd Regiment from Fort Pitt under Captain Thomas Stirling, reached Fort de Chartres on October 9, 1765. With no small relief Saint-Ange handed over the crumbling post and withdrew his troops to a more promising site across the river, the new village of St. Louis. Most of the habitants and traders went along, preferring life as Spanish subjects to military rule by the British. Charlot Kaské gathered his followers to waylay Stirling’s detachment on the lower Ohio, in one last attempt to stop the invaders. But soon it became clear that the French traders would offer no more aid, while the Wabash tribes would take no action that might invite Shawnee and British retaliation. Thus Charlot Kaské followed the French across the river in the fall of 1765, the last leader of the great rebellion that the British always misunderstood as Pontiac’s: a rebel unable to accept, as Pontiac finally did, a British father in
the stead of Onontio, who would never wake again. 24
CHAPTER 65
The Lessons of Pontiac’s War
1764-1769
SO WHAT HAD IT proven, this seemingly endless protraction of the war? What did it portend? As usual, Indians and Britons and Anglo-Americans all found different lessons to learn, lessons that were by no means complementary or even mutually compatible. Pontiac himself drew a fatal conclusion. He thought that the war had earned him his enemy’s respect, and that Gage’s promise of support would establish him as a chief over all the peoples of the old pays d’en haut. He was right about the high opinion Gage and Johnson had of him, but wrong about its rewards. Seduced by the illusion that British support would enable him to lead many nations, he became only the focus of other leaders’ resentments. When the British did not follow through with the stream of gifts that were necessary to affirm his status, by which he might maintain others as his supporters, the Ottawas themselves rejected his pretensions to chieftainship. By the spring of 1768 the young men of his own village were making such sport of him that to save himself from their casual beatings he withdrew to live among his wife’s relatives in the Illinois Country. There, more isolated than ever, he lost even the ability to defend himself. On April 20, 1769, a Peoria warrior clubbed him senseless, then stabbed him to death in front of Baynton, Wharton and Morgan’s trading post at Cahokia, on the Mississippi shore opposite St. Louis. No one—not even his own sons—felt obliged to avenge Pontiac’s murder.1
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