Letters

by John Barth

  Henry, Henrietta: it might have workt, you know! Even nipt in the bud it came near to working! At this point Andrew & Andrée fall silent; I have only their son’s account, my father’s, for what happen’d, and (as shall be seen in another letter) it must be read with large allowance for his peculiar bias. And there is, of course, the historical record, already embellisht by romantical tradition. Pontiac’s conspiracy was betray’d, possibly by “Angélique Cuillerier” via her “lover” James Sterling; Major Gladwin forestall’d Pontiac’s surprise attack from within the fort by not admitting him, on the appointed day, to the conference he had requested; the “storm” turn’d into a desultory siege. Even so, the Potawatomis quickly took Fort St. Joseph to the west; the Senecas, Shawnees, Delawares, & Miamis, in less than one week, captured all three forts between Niagara & Fort Pitt: Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango. As of the summer solstice, Lord Amherst still had only the dimmest idea of the scale of the uprising; ignorant of Indians in general & of the western nations in particular, he could not imagine that the troublesome Senecas were not at the bottom of it; that the Allegheny-Ohio rumblings were but an echo of Pontiac’s main thrust at Detroit; that what was threatening to delay his long-awaited relief from the American command & his return to England was not another drunken redskin riot, but a full-scale Indian War for Independence! All that remain’d, all that remain’d was to take Detroit by storm before the garrison was reinforced, then to move quickly & concertedly against Forts Pitt & Niagara. There the line might be held.

  For—unknown to most white & all red Americans, unknown perhaps even to Jeffrey Amherst & George Washington (but not to canny Ben Franklin & the “Cuilleriers”)—Pontiac had a powerful, unsuspected ally: George III of England, whom my father call’d “wiser in his madness than most kings sane.” Even before the British conquest of Canada, the King & his ministers had foreseen, in unlimited westward colonization of America, two distinct threats to the mother country. In the short run, given the expense & difficulty of transporting goods over the mountains, manufacturing towns were bound to be establisht in the Ohio Valley & along the Great Lakes, in competition with British industry. In the long run, & in consequence, such unimaginably expanded colonies—20, 30 times larger than Britain, and anon more populous, richer, even more powerful—would not be content to remain colonies forever. Even before Pontiac, the newly-crown’d King had consider’d declaring the crest of the Appalachians to be the western limit of white settlement. A determined Indian stand from, say, Frontenac at the head of the St. Lawrence down to Fort Pitt at the head of the Ohio, even if it lasted only a few months, would be sufficient occasion for George to make such a proclamation as if in the interests of the colonials themselves.

  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 t
ragedy 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”:

  The Play is ended; now succeeds the Farce.

  And when characters thot dead vengefully reappear, his other son “Chekitan” (Pontiac had no such sons; he was more father to my father than to his own offspring, of whom we know nothing) wonders in best Elizabethan fashion:

  May we believe, or is this all a Dream?

  Are we awake?…

  Or is it Juggling, Fascination all?

  Deadly juggling it was. In the aftermath of the war, “Alexis Cuillerier” was arrested in Detroit and charged with the 1764 murder of one Betty Fisher, the seven-year-old daughter of the 1st white family kill’d in the rising. “Angélique” did not appear at the trial—in fact, after 1763 Andrée Castine Cooke vanishes from the family records as if flown bodily to heaven—but “Antoine Cuillerier” did, and by some means prevail’d upon Pontiac to testify in my father’s defence. The Chief 1st declared that the Fisher child, afflicted with the fluxes after her capture, had so anger’d him by accidentally soiling his clothes that he had thrown her into the Maumee & order’d young Cuillerier to wade in & drown her. Not exactly an exoneration! After further conference with my grandfather, who reminded him that the Oswego treaty made him immune from prosecution on any charges dating from the war, Pontiac changed his testimony: He himself, he now declared, had done both the throwing & the drowning, driven by his general hatred of white females after his betrayal by one of their number in May 1763. And the river had been the Detroit, not his beloved Maumee, which he would never have so defiled.

  The jury preferr’d his original version & found against my father, who promptly escaped custody & disappear’d—as Alexis Cuillerier. One “Antoine Cuillerier,” then in his 70’s, lived a few more years in the role of habitant in the Fort Detroit area, and there died. Of Andrew Cooke III we know no more. Pontiac himself, two years after his trial, was clubb’d & stabb’d (so reports one Pierre Menard, habitant) in the village of Cahokia by a young Illinois warrior bribed “by the English” to the deed. The assassin’s tribe was almost exterminated in the reprisal by the nations Pontiac had endeavour’d in vain to bring together: that was a kind of fighting they understood.

  Oh child, how I am heavied by this chronicle—whose next installment must bring my father to rebirth, myself to birth (you too, perhaps!), & be altogether livelier going.

  Pontiac, Pontiac! Andrew, Andrew! How near you came to succeeding!

  And Henry, Henrietta! We will come nearer yet, you &

  Your loving father,

  A.B.C. IV

  O: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of H. C. Burlingame IV: the First American Revolution.

  At Castines Hundred

  Niagara, Upper Canada

  Thursday, 9 April 1812

  My Darling Henry or Henrietta,

  On this date 100 years since, there was bloodily put down in New York a brave rebellion of black slaves, instigated three days before—so my father chose to believe—by his grandfather & namesake, Henry Burlingame III, after the failure of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy. Six of the rebels committed suicide, 21 were executed. One “Saturnian revolution” later, he maintain’d, in 1741, my own grandfather & namesake, Andrew Cooke III, successfully spiked a 2nd such revolution in the same place, with even bloodier result: 13 hang’d, 13 burnt, 71 transported.

  I did not believe him.

  Neither did I believe, when I came of age, what he had told me in my boyhood of his mother, Andrée Castine: that she betray’d Pontiac to Major Gladwin & thus undermined, with my grandfather’s aid, the great “Indian Conspiracy” of 1763-64.

  Henry Cooke Burlingame IV, at least in the brief period of his official life (1746-1785), lack’d Pontiac’s tragical vision. The most I will concede to his slanderous opinion of my grandparents is the possibility of their having realized, around 1760, that their grand strategy had misfired: that the French might never regain control of the Canadas, much less link them with Louisiana & push east across the Appalachians to the Atlantic; that “successful” Indian resistance would lead only to their extermination by the British. In short, that the sad sole future of the red man lay in accommodation & negotiated concession, to the end of at least fractional survival & the gradual “reddening” of the whites. Pontiac’s one victory, on this view, was Major Rogers’s verse tragedy Ponteach: as Lord Amherst infected the Indians with smallpox, Pontiac infected white Americans with Myth, at least as contagious & insusceptible to cure.

  More simply, we have the testimony of Andrée’s diary that she & Andrew believed it necessary for the Indians (who, as we have seen, would not take the calculated loss of storming operations) at least to master the art of protracted siege—which interfered only with their seasonal rhythms, not with their famous individualism—if they were to conduct successful large-scale campaigns against white fortifications & artillery. Sieges were a repeatable discipline; Pontiac’s tactic (to enter the fort as if for a conference & then fall on the unsuspecting officers) was a one-time-only Indian trick which would make legitimate conferences difficult to arrange in the future. Its “betrayal” (she does not directly either admit or deny betraying it herself) did not undermine the general plan; it only made necessary a change of tactics.

  “She made that diary note a full year later,” my father observed. “She was covering their tracks. She knew how I loved old Pontiac.”

  It is true that such entries, especially belated ones, can be disingenuous. But my father, like the rest of us, chose by heart as much as by head which ones to put his faith in.

  No Cooke or Burlingame has ever disprized book learning; the Burlingames, however, are the scholars. “Alexis Cuillerier,” 21 years old, b
roke jail in Detroit in 1767 and disappear’d before he could be convicted, on Pontiac’s original testimony, of drowning the child Betty Fisher. In the autumn of that same year, Henry Burlingame IV matriculated at the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Upon his graduation, he went up to Yale College in New Haven, staying on as a tutor in history after taking a Master of Arts degree there in 1772. His life in this interval, in great contrast to his adventuresome youth, was austere, even monastic. By Mother’s report, he was still much shock’d by what he took to be his parents’ successful duplicity: he even imagined that they had bribed Pontiac with rum to give his damaging testimony, and subsequently arranged his assassination, to the end of further “covering their tracks”! (Was it in some rage against his mother that “Alexis” drown’d the poor beshitten Fisher girl? But we have only Pontiac’s word that he did, together with the rumors that had led to his arrest.) This shock, no doubt, accounts for his reclusion. And there was another factor, as we shall see.

  H. C. Burlingame IV thus became the 1st of our line not merely to doubt his father (we have all, in our divers ways, done that) but to despise him. I was the 2nd; and am perhaps the 1st to pass beyond that misgrounded, spirit-wasting passion, to spare you which is the end & object of these letters.