Fancy the surprise of the Indians, then, when little parties of redcoat soldiers came into the West, and, with quiet insolence, took possession of the French forts and of the Indian’s land! And the French moved neither hand nor foot to oppose them, though through so many years they had boasted their prowess, and though ten Wyandots could have done so successfully. Detroit was surrendered to a mere corporal’s guard, and the lesser forts to a sentry’s watch each. It remained for the newcomers to inform the Indians of the events which led to the changing of the flags on these inland fortresses—to tell them that the French armies had been utterly overwhelmed, and the French capital captured, and French rule in America at an end.
But these explanations, given glibly, no doubt, by arrogant English officers, were repeated over and over by the Indians, and slowly, before a hundred, yea, a thousand dim fires in the forests. We can believe it was not all plain to them, this sudden conquest of a country where hardly a battle had been fought for eight years, and that battle the greatest victory ever achieved by the red man. Perhaps messengers were sent back to the forts to gain, casually, additional information concerning this marvelous conquest by proxy. French traders, as ignorant, or feigning to be, as the Indians, were implored to explain the sudden forgetfulness of the French “Father” of the Indians.
It was inexplicable. The news spread rapidly: “The French have surrendered our land to the English.” Fierce Shawanese around their fires at Chillicothe on the Scioto heard the news, and sullenly passed it on westward to the Miamis, and eastward to the angered Delawares on the Muskingum, who had now forgotten Frederick Post. The Senecas on the upper Allegheny heard the news. The Ottawas and Wyandots on both sides of the Detroit River heard it—and before the fires of each of these fierce French-loving Indian nations there was much silence while chieftains pondered, and the few words uttered were stern and cruel.
Cruel words grew to angry threats. By what right, the chieftains asked, could the French surrender the Black Forest to the English? When did the French come to own the land, after all? They were the guests, the friends of the Indian—not his conquerors. The French built forts, it is true, but they were for the Indian as well as for the French, and were forts in name only, and the more of them the merrier! But now a conqueror had come, telling the Indian the land was no longer his, but belonged to the British king.
Threats soon grew into visible form. Where it started is not surely known—some say from the Senecas on the upper Allegheny—but soon a fearful Bloody Belt went on a journey with its terrible summons to war. It passed to the Delawares and to the Shawanese and Miamis and Wyandots, and where it went the death halloo sounded through the forests. The call was to the Indians of the Black Forest to rise and cast out the English from the land. If the French could not have it, certainly no one else should. The dogs of war were loosened. The young warriors of the Allegheny and Muskingum and Scioto and Miami and Detroit danced wildly before the fires, and the old men sang their half-forgotten war chants.
The terrible war which in 1763 burst over the West has never been paralleled by savages the world over in point of swift success. This may be attributed to the fact that a leader was found in Pontiac, a chieftain in the Ottawa nation, who for daring and intelligence was never matched by a man of his race. He had the courage of sweeping and patriotic convictions. He saw in the English occupation of the land the doom of the red man. Indeed he must have seen it before, but if so he had not had an opportunity to put his convictions to a public test. The Indian was becoming a changed man. The implements and utensils of the white man were adopted by the red. The independent forest arts of their fathers were beginning to be forgotten. Kettles and blankets and powder and lead were taking the place of the wooden bowls and fur robes and swift flint heads. In another generation the art of making a living for himself in the forest would be forgotten by the Indian, and he would henceforth be absolutely dependent upon the foreigner. All this Pontiac saw. He felt commissioned to lead a return to nature. The arts of the white man must be discarded and the Indians must come back to their primitive mode of living in dependence upon their own skill and ingenuity.
And so Pontiac waged a religious war. At a great convention of the savages he told them that a Delaware Indian had, while lost in the forests, been guided into a path which led to the home of the Great Spirit, and, on coming there, had been upbraided by the Master of Life himself for the degenerate state to which his race was falling. The forest arts of their fathers must be encouraged and relied upon. The utensils of the white man must be banished from the wigwams. Bows and arrows and tomahawks and stone hatchets should not be discarded. Otherwise the Great Spirit would take away their land from them and give it to others. And so, much of the fury which accompanied the war was a sort of religious frenzy. “The Master of Life himself has stirred us up,” said the warriors.
Pontiac’s plot—undoubtedly the most comprehensive military campaign ever conceived in redman’s brain—was discovered by the British at Fort Miami, on the Maumee River, in March 1763, four years after the fall of Quebec. There the Bloody Belt was found and secured before it could be forwarded to the Wabash with its murderous message. By threats and warnings the untutored English officers thought to quell the disturbance. Amherst, his Majesty’s commanding general in America, haughtily condemned the signs of revolution as “unwarranted.” Moreover he gave his officers in the West authority to declare to the Indian chieftains that if they should conspire they would in his eyes, make “a contemptible figure!” Time passed and the garrisons breathed easily as quiet reigned.
It was but the lull before the storm. On the seventh of May, Pontiac, who led his Ottawas at Braddock’s defeat, appeared before Detroit, the metropolis of the northwest, with three hundred warriors. The watchfulness of the brave Major Gladwin, a well-trained pupil in that school on Braddock’s Road, and the failure of Pontiac to capture the fort by strategy, though his warriors were admitted within its walls and had shortened guns concealed beneath their blankets, was the dramatic beginning of a reign of terror and a war of devastation all the way from Sault St. Marie to even beyond the crest of the Alleghenies. Pontiac immediately invested Detroit and throughout the Black Forest his faithful allies did their Ottawa chieftain’s will. On the sixteenth of May, Fort Sandusky was surrounded by Indians seemingly friendly. The British commander permitted seven to enter. As they sat smoking, by the turn of a head the signal was given and the commander was a prisoner. As he was hurried out of the fort he saw, here one dead soldier, there another—victims of the massacre. Nine days later a band of Indians appeared before the fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph. “We are come to see our relatives,” they said, “and wish the garrison good morning.” Within two minutes after their entrance the commanding officer and three men were prisoners and eleven others were murdered. Two days later the commander of Fort Miami, on the Maumee River, came, at an Indian girl’s pitiful plea, to the Indian village to bleed a sick child. He was shot in his tracks. Four days later the commander of Fort Ouatianon, on the Wabash, was inveigled into an Indian cabin and captured, the fort surrendering forthwith. Two days later Indians gathered at Fort Michilimackinac to engage in a game of lacrosse. At the height of the contest the ball was thrown near a gate of the fort. In the twinkling of an eye the commanding officer who stood watching the game was seized, and the Indians, snatching tomahawks from under the blankets of squaws who were standing in proper position, entered the fort and killed fifteen soldiers outright and took the remainder of the garrison prisoners.
Sixteen days later Fort Le Bœuf, on French Creek, where Washington delivered his message to the haughty St. Pierre a decade before, was attacked by an overwhelming army of savages. Keeping the enemy off until midnight, the garrison made good its escape, unknown to the exultant besiegers who had already fired one corner bastion, and fled down the river to Fort Pitt. On their way they passed the smouldering ruins of Fort Venango. Two days later Fort Presque Isle was attacked. In two days the commander, senseless with terror, struck his flag. The same day Fort Ligonier on Forbes’s Road was invested by a besieging army.