Encyclopedia of North American Indians -

Encyclopedia of North American Indians

Pontiac

(1720?-1769)

Ottawa war leader and chief

Robert Rogers's play Ponteach: A Tragedy made Pontiac the most famous Indian of the eighteenth century. Francis Parkman's History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac renewed and extended that fame into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These men created a powerful figure—a noble Indian who symbolized not only his race's fall but also the supposedly incompatible destinies of Indians and whites. But the real Pontiac was a more complicated and more interesting figure. If his life must be reduced to a symbol, then it can just as well be represented by nearly the opposite proposition: that an accommodation between Indians and Europeans was possible and that in change lay opportunity as well as danger.

Pontiac was an Ottawa war leader who took an indeterminate part in the increasingly anti-English councils and negotiations among the western allies of the French following the fall of Canada to the British in 1760. During these same years he came under the influence of Neolin, the Delaware prophet who preached a nativist message of Indian renewal. Neolin's doctrine, with its references to Christianity and its demand that Indians return to their old ways, was part of a growing movement of religious syncretism in the region. Pontiac adopted it, but only in part. He modified Neolin's anti-white message, stripped it of its renunciation of European technology, and turned it into a more specifically anti-English doctrine.

By 1763 Pontiac was an influential man at Detroit, and that spring he achieved much wider notoriety as the leader of an unsuccessful attempt to surprise the British garrison at that settlement. When the attempt at surprise failed, Pontiac became a leader of both Frenchmen and Indians in the siege that followed. Pontiac's goal was the return of his French "father," the governor of New France. He expected French soldiers to arrive to aid him.

The dramatic siege of Detroit became the centerpiece of what Europeans came to call "Pontiac's Rebellion." But the rebellion was hardly the work of Pontiac alone. His attack on Detroit was but part of the loosely coordinated attacks that were sweeping through the Great Lakes country and the Ohio River. British reinforcements eventually raised the siege of Detroit, and Colonel John Bradstreet, thinking Pontiac a broken man, refused his overtures for negotiations.

In some ways, however, Pontiac's greatest influence was yet to come. He retained a following in the Ottawa towns along the Maumee River, but he moved west to the Illinois country, where he apparently had relations. He became more than an Ottawa war leader; he came to be an important man in the towns of Wabash and Illinois country that refused to come to terms with the British.

Pontiac traveled widely, cementing loyalty to the common cause of continued resistance to British rule. He claimed to be acting for his French father, but he had made loyalty to Algonquian resistance of the British the defining quality of Frenchness. Any Frenchman who opposed him he regarded as English. The British who had dismissed him now came to regard him as a superhuman figure. In their view he was the key to peace. He had to be either gained to their interest or, as General Thomas Gage, the British commander, put it, "knocked in the head." Negotiating with him now seemed far less expensive than continued war.

Although a figure of importance, Pontiac was hardly the only influential leader in the Wabash and Illinois towns. Particularly after the Shawnees made peace in 1764, he came to take British peace overtures seriously and to use them to increase his influence with respect to more militant leaders. When in 1765 Kickapoos attacked a British delegation under the Indian agent George Croghan, they killed members of Croghan's Shawnee escort. War now threatened between the Shawnees and the Indians of the Illinois country. Indians in the Wabash and Illinois country willingly allowed Pontiac to negotiate for them. He deftly helped avert a war with the Shawnees and secured peace with the British. He had moved from being a war leader to being an influential mediator and chief.

Unfortunately, Pontiac came to believe that he was indeed the leader of a vast Indian confederation. From an Ottawa war leader seeking the return of his French father, he transmuted himself into a pretended Indian emperor in league with the British. It proved a fatal miscalculation. By 1766 he was acting arrogantly and imperiously, assuming powers no western Indian leader possessed. A French trader offered to bet that he would be dead in less than a year "if the English took so much notice of him." At Detroit he stabbed an Illinois leader; he lost virtually all influence among the Ottawas of Detroit and the Maumee River, where young warriors beat him. By 1768 he had become both the most famous Indian in the West and a man without a home. He retreated into exile among the Illinois, where his actions had made him enemies. There he belatedly proved the French trader right. On April 20, 1769, a nephew of Makatchinga, a Peoria chief of the Illinois confederation, murdered him in the streets of the French village of Cahokia. His death marked the limits of chieftainship.

Pontiac was, by all accounts, a man of great abilities and, to Europeans, great contradictions. He was an Algonquian war leader who embraced the ruthlessness which that role required. He could, particularly when in his drink, be a capricious and cruel man. In 1764 he ordered a Frenchman to drown Betty Fisher, a seven-year-old English captive who, sick and shivering from the cold, had sought to warm herself at Pontiac's fire. But in the fashion typical of Algonquian-speaking peoples, Pontiac metamorphosed from war leader to chief. Lieutenant Alexander Fraser, whose life Pontiac saved in the Illinois country, thought him "the most humane Indian" he ever saw.

In the end Pontiac aspired to a kind of chieftainship that was never really a possibility in Ottawa society. Ironically, it was only after the revolt that bore his name that he sought to unite the villages and towns of the old pays d'en haut, the upper country of the French, into a single confederation under his leadership. Such pretensions cost him his life.





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