Landing of Wolfe.
[1760-1763]
Quebec in 1730--From an old Print.
Vaudreuil, the French commander at Montreal, sought to dislodge the
English ere the ice left the river in the spring of 1760, and succeeded
in driving them within their works. Each side then waited and hoped for
help from beyond sea so soon as navigation opened. It came the earlier
to the English, who were gladdened on May 11th by the approach of a
British frigate, the forerunner of a fleet. They now chased Vaudreuil
back into Montreal, where they were met by Haviland from Crown Point and
by Amherst from Oswego. France's days of power in America were ended.
Her fleet of twenty-two sail intended for succor met total destruction
in the Bay des Chaleurs and by the Peace of Paris, 1763, she surrendered
to her victorious antagonist every foot of her American territory east
of the Mississippi, save the city of New Orleans.
The Indians were thus left to finish this war alone. Pontiac, the brave
and cunning chief of the Ottawas, aghast at the rising might of the
English, and the certain fate of his race without the French for
helpers, organized a conspiracy including nearly every tribe this side
the Mississippi except the Six Nations, to put to the sword all the
English garrisons in the West. Fatal success waited upon the plan. It
was in 1763 Forts Sandusky, St. Joseph (southeast of Lake Michigan),
Miami (Fort Wayne), Presque Isle (Erie, Pa.), Le Boeuf, Venango, and
Pittsburgh were attacked and all but the last destroyed, soldiers and
settlers murdered with indescribable barbarities. Pittsburgh held out
till re-enforced, at dreadful cost in blood, by Colonel Bouquet and his
Highlanders, who marched from Philadelphia.
Bouquet's Redoubt at Pittsburgh.
The hottest and longest conflict was at Detroit, Major Gladwyn
commanding, where Pontiac himself led the onset, heading perhaps a
thousand men. The siege was maintained with fearful venom from May 11th
till into October. The English tried a number of sallies, brave, fatal,
vain, and were so hard pressed by their bloodthirsty foe that only
timely and repeated re-enforcements saved them. At last the savages,
becoming, as always, disunited and straitened for supplies, sullenly
made peace; and at the call of the rich and now free Northwest, caravans
of English immigrants thronged thither to lay under happiest auspices
the foundations of new States.
END OF VOLUME l.