The way had been opened earlier in the year by Croghan, one of Sir William Johnson’s officers, who in the summer months went westward down the Ohio to remind the tribes of the pledges given to Bouquet, and to quicken their fulfilment. He reached the confluence of the Wabash river, and a few miles lower down was attacked by a band of savages, who afterwards veered round to peace and conducted him, half guest, half prisoner, to Vincennes and Ouatanon, the posts on the Wabash. Near Ouatanon he met Pontiac, was followed by him to Detroit, where it was arranged that a final meeting to conclude a final peace should be held at Oswego in the coming year. The meeting took place in July, 1766, under the unrivalled guidance of Sir William Johnson, and with it came the end of the Indian war.
End of the Indian war and death of Pontiac.
The one hope for the confederate Indians had been help from the French. Slowly and reluctantly they had been driven to the conclusion that such help would not be forthcoming, and that for France the sun had set in the far west of North America. Pontiac himself gave in his submission to the English; he took their King for his father, and, when he was killed in an Indian brawl on the Mississippi in 1769, the red men’s vision of independence or of sovereignty in their native backwoods faded away. The two leading white races in North America, French and English, had fought it out; there followed the Indian rising against the victors; and soon was to come the almost equally inevitable struggle between the British colonists, set free from dread of Frenchman or of Indian, and the dominating motherland of their race.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Annual Register for 1763, p. 19, identified the St. John river with the Saguenay, and the mistake was long perpetuated.
[2] All the quotations made in the preceding pages are taken from the Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada 1759-1791, selected and edited by Messrs. Shortt and Doughty, 1907.
[3] Annual Register for 1763, p. 22.
[4] Journals of Major Robert Rogers, London, 1765, p. 207.
[5] Journals of Major Robert Rogers, London, 1765, p. 214.
[6] A Concise Account of North America, by Major Robert Rogers, London, 1765, pp. 240-4.