A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Indian suspicions of the English.

‘When the Indian nations saw the French power, as it were, annihilated in North America, they began to imagine that they ought to have made greater and earlier efforts in their favour. The Indians had not been for a long time so jealous of them as they were of us. The French seemed more intent on trade than settlement. Finding themselves infinitely weaker than the English, they supplied, as well as they could, the place of strength by policy, and paid a much more flattering and systematic attention to the Indians than we had ever done. Our superiority in this war rendered our regard to this people still less, which had always been too little.’[3] The Indians were frightened too, says the same writer, by the English possession of the chains of forts: ‘they beheld in every little garrison the germ of a future colony.’ Ripe for revolt, and never yet subdued, as their countrymen further east had been, they found a strong man of their own race to lead them, and tried conclusions with the dominant white race in North America.

Rogers’ mission to Detroit.

In the autumn of 1760, after the capitulation of Montreal, General Amherst sent Major Robert Rogers, the New Hampshire Ranger, to receive the submission of the French forts on the further lakes. On the 13th of September Rogers embarked at Montreal with two hundred of his men: he made his way up the St. Lawrence, and coasted the northern shore of Lake Ontario, noting, as he went, that Toronto, where the French had held Fort Rouillé, was ‘a most convenient place for a factory, and that from thence we may very easily settle the north side of Lake Erie’.[4] He crossed the upper end of Lake Ontario to Fort Niagara, already in British possession; and, having taken up supplies, carried his whale boats round the falls and launched them on Lake Erie. Along the southern side of that lake he went forward to Presque Isle, where Bouquet was in command of the English garrison; and, leaving his men, he went himself down by Fort le Bœuf, the French Creek river, and Venango to Fort Pitt, or Pittsburg, as Fort Duquesne had been renamed by John Forbes in honour of Chatham. His instructions were to carry dispatches to General Monckton at Pittsburg, and to take orders from him for a further advance. Returning to Presque Isle at the end of October, he went westward along Lake Erie, making for Detroit. No English force had yet been in evidence so far to the West. On the 7th of November he encamped on the southern shore of Lake Erie, at a point near the site of the present city of Cleveland, and there he was met by a party of Ottawa Indians ‘just arrived from Detroit’.[5]

His meeting with Pontiac.

They came, as Rogers tells us in another book,[6] on an embassy from Pontiac, and were immediately followed by that chief himself. Pontiac’s personality seems to have impressed the white backwoodsman, though he had seen and known all sorts and conditions of North American Indians. ‘I had several conferences with him,’ he writes, ‘in which he discovered great strength of judgement and a thirst after knowledge.’ Pontiac took up the position of being ‘King and Lord of the country’, and challenged Rogers and his men as intruders into his land; but he intimated that he would be prepared to live peaceably with the English, as a subordinate not a conquered potentate; and the result of the meeting was that the Rangers were supplied with fresh provisions and were escorted in safety on their way, instead of being obstructed and attacked, as had been contemplated, at the entrance of the Detroit river. On the 12th of November Rogers set out again; on the 19th he sent on an officer in advance with a letter to Belêtre, the French commander at Detroit, informing him of the capitulation of Montreal and calling Surrender of Detroit to the English. upon him to deliver up the fort. On the 29th of November the English force landed half a mile below the fort, and on the same day the French garrison laid down their arms. Seven hundred Indians were present; and, when they saw the French colours hauled down and the English flag take their place, unstable as water and ever siding at the moment with the stronger party, they shouted that ‘they would always for the future fight for a nation thus favoured by Him that made the world’.[7]

Detroit.

There were at the time, Rogers tells us,[8] about 2,500 French Canadians settled in the neighbourhood of Detroit. The dwelling-houses, near 300 in number, extended on both sides of the river for about eight miles. The land was good for grazing and for agriculture, and there was a ‘very large and lucrative’ trade with the Indians.

Having sent the French garrison down to Philadelphia, and established an English garrison in its place, Rogers sent a small party to take over Fort Miami on the Maumee river, and set out himself with another detachment for Michillimackinac. But it was now the middle of December; Return of Rogers. floating ice made navigation of Lake Huron dangerous; after a vain attempt to reach Michillimackinac he returned to Detroit on the 21st of December; and, marching overland to the Ohio and to Philadelphia, he Michillimackinac occupied by the English. finally reached New York on the 14th of February, 1761. In the autumn of that year a detachment of Royal Americans took possession of Michillimackinac.