Ponteach, or the Savages of America

by Tiffany Potter

  While such inaccuracies preclude Ponteach from being read as a conventionally historical depiction of Pontiac’s Rebellion, the play offers a different kind of insight into Anglo-Indian relationships, allowing a more individuated and human understanding of the types of perceptions and interactions that contributed to what was in many ways the last great stand of the North American Indigenous nations against the westward expansion of colonial settlements. The play at no point asserts absolute historical accuracy, and these sorts of departures from documentable history tend to serve either artistic purposes (as in the presumed audience appeal of a love plot in Chekitan) or political ones (as in the fictionalization of real men to make more explicit what Rogers perceives to be their errors).

  HISTORICAL CONTEXT

  Running from the spring of 1763 until the final formal treaty was signed at Fort Ontario on 25 July 1766, the conflict most commonly known as Pontiac’s Rebellion covered a geography from Pennsylvania to Illinois and included more than a dozen different tribes from the Illinois, Ohio, and Great Lakes regions, as well as the Senecas, the Keepers of the Western Gate of the Iroquois Five Nations (though the remaining groups of the Five Nations, including the Mohawks, maintained the Covenant Chain, which affirmed their allegiance to the British). Eighteenth-century estimates suggested that some 2,000 settlers and soldiers had been killed or captured by the end of 1763, though modern historians of the conflict are sceptical: as Gregory Evans Dowd points out, the most-cited source for this number is Deputy Indian Superintendent George Croghan, but Croghan was in London when he made the estimate, and the ‘public and personal papers that he would have had at his disposal do not bring the number anywhere near that high’ (142). Howard Peckham documents a plausible calculation of deaths, with some 450 soldiers killed in the conflict (239), and William R. Nester provides a similarly reasonable calculation of approximately 200 Native warriors killed (279). Regardless of the final numbers of dead on both sides, the conflict was long, wide-ranging, and bloody, fostering tremendous suffering in both settler and Indigenous communities.

  As in any war, the origins of Pontiac’s Rebellion are complex and at times contradictory. The long-standing conflict between Britain and France had most recently been activated in the Seven Years’ War, which was fought on European, North American, African, and Asian soil. With reference to the specific events of North America, the conflict is most often called the French and Indian War. Hostilities in the French and Indian War ended for the most part with the September 1760 signing of the Capitulation of Montreal, though it was the February 1763 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Seven Years’ War and all of its subsidiaries, calling for a ‘Christian, universal, and perpetual peace, as well by sea as by land, and a sincere and constant friendship shall be re established between their Britannick, Most Christian, Catholick, and Most Faithful Majesties, and between their heirs and successors, kingdoms, dominions, provinces, countries, subjects, and vassals, of what quality or condition soever they be, without exception of places or of persons.’ Under the Treaty of Paris, nearly all of the territory previously controlled by the French was ceded to Britain, giving Britain control of all but a very small part of the American territory east of the Mississippi. As George Croghan reported to Sir William Johnson at the time, however, various Indigenous leaders asserted that ‘the French had no right to give up their Country to the English’ (quoted in Dowd 112). This sentiment alone might or might not have led to armed conflict, but, as Rogers’ play points out, the relationship between the Indians and the British was very different from that fostered by the French in previous generations.

  The relatively small numbers of French settlers had developed interdependent and widely amicable, if not necessarily egalitarian, alliances and trading and domestic relationships with many of the Great Lakes Nations, including intermarriage. After 1763, British policy instead generally addressed French and Indians as equally conquered peoples. Instead of leaving existing French forts as the generally small trading outposts they had been, the British rebuilt many of them (including the mammoth Fort Pitt), convincing the Indians that the British intended to take over their territory exclusively and permanently. Though the western expansionism implied by such fortifications is one obvious motivation for Pontiac’s Rebellion, population pressures were much less important to Pontiac’s Ottawas and the other Great Lakes Nations (Hurons, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis) than to the Shawnees, Delawares, Mingos, and Wyandots of the Ohio region, which faced constant pressure from the Thirteen Colonies. Still, though the Great Lakes and Illinois Nations had yet to face substantial pressures of colonial expansion, the experiences of the Ohio Nations made clear that the British plan was distinct from that of the French. Differences in administrative attitudes and policies soon became another common complaint and source of racial tension.

  Among the British leaders of the North American colonies after 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst is perhaps the most emblematic face of the new modes of governance. Amherst was the governor general of British North America from 1760 to 1763, and he made no secret of his distaste for the Indigenous inhabitants of his newly claimed territory, and this was made most explicitly manifest in his decision to cut back on the long-standing tradition of gift-giving. In most of the Indigenous cultures of America, the giving or exchange of gifts functioned as a gesture of respect and communalism. The French had incorporated this tradition into their trading relationships, and regularly made gifts of European goods such as hunting weapons, gunpowder, blankets, clothing, and alcohol (as well as tobacco) to local sachems, who then distributed the goods in their communities as evidence of their status and their ability to negotiate benefits from the French. Though Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson and many of Amherst’s officers in the field pointed out the enormous cultural significance of gifts among the North American nations, and advised against the policy change,7 Amherst read the tradition as mere bribery at best and extortion at worst. He reasoned that ‘we must deal more sparingly for the future, for the now tranquil state of the country and the good regulations you have put the trade under, I can see very little reason for bribing the Indians or buying their good behavior, since they have no enemy to molest them, but, on the contrary, every encouragement & protection they can desire for their trade’ (quoted in Nester 51). To add potential injury to insult, Amherst also reduced the amount of gunpowder that could be traded. This had a doubled negative effect: at the most practical level, scarcity of powder made hunting and thus the sustenance of communities more difficult; this in turn contributed to a larger sense that the Indians were being weakened and disarmed in order to render them vulnerable to future attack.

  Though the conflict is named after Ottawa sachem Pontiac, it was the Senecas who sent the first round of war belts, calling the Great Lakes Nations and others to uprising in 1761. Seneca support for war and later for Pontiac was not unanimous, however. Because the Senecas were a part of the Iroquois Five Nations, the sending of war belts constituted a break in the Covenant Chain, the long-standing agreement between the Iroquois confederacy and the British. For this and other reasons, this first round of discontent could not bring the different nations to unified action, but by 1763 two things had changed: the consequences of the handover of territory from the French to the British became undeniable, and a religiously based movement towards Indian nationalism gained great momentum.

  In the early 1760s, word spread quickly among Great Lakes Nations of the dream vision of Neolin, known as the Delaware Prophet (of the Wolf Clan of the Delaware Nation). Rogers’ play touches relatively briefly on the specific rhetoric of Neolin, but his historical importance, especially to Pontiac’s role in the conflict, is great. The earliest recorded account of the Delaware Prophet comes in 1761 from a Pennsylvania fur trader named James Kenny, not long after the first of the visions, which Neolin asserted had begun in 1760. The version of Neolin’s vision most closely associated with Pontiac, though, is the contemporary document, the Journal of
Pontiac’s Conspiracy, a French-language account of the Siege of Detroit written in the form of a journal. The Journal is generally attributed to Robert Navarre, a notary and interpreter at Detroit, who had access to both the garrison and Pontiac’s camp during the conflict.8 Navarre’s account of Neolin’s vision is reprinted in Appendix B of this volume.

  Neolin claimed a dream in which the Master of Life demanded several changes to traditional practices of worship and domestic life. The account of Neolin’s dream begins with the dreamer’s quest to meet the Master of Life. After eight days of travel, the dreamer is directed to the Master of Life by a woman and then a man dressed in white. The Master of Life tells him, ‘Because I love you, ye must do what I say and love, and not do what I hate.’ In Pontiac’s telling, the Master of Life rejects drinking ‘to the point of madness,’ infighting, polygyny, and adultery, and medicine dances seeking the Manitou, whom he calls ‘an evil spirit who prompts you to nothing but wrong, and who listens to you out of ignorance of me.’ He admonishes the dreamer for dependence on English weapons and trade goods: ‘if ye were not evil, as ye are, ye could surely do without them. Ye could live as ye did live before knowing them … I do not forbid you to permit among you the children of your Father;9 I love them. They know me and pray to me, and I supply their wants and all they give to you. But as to those who come to trouble your lands, – drive them out, make war upon them. I do not love them at all; … Send them back to the lands which I have created for them and let them stay there’ (Navarre 28–30).

  The Delaware Prophet conveyed his vision of the Master of Life to several groups across a surprisingly wide geography, but Pontiac was his most influential follower. Navarre’s account reports that the ‘adventure was soon noised about among the people of the whole village who came to hear the message of the Master of Life, and then went to carry it to the neighbouring villages. The members of these villages came to see the pretended traveller, and the news was spread from village to village and finally reached Pontiac’ (32). Richard Middleton documents some of Pontiac’s subsequent role in spreading Neolin’s vision: ‘according to Menominee tradition, he visited the Milwaukee some time in the fall of 1762 or the early spring of 1763 for a grand council, where he introduced the Wisconsin peoples to Neolin’s vision’ (66). Such introductions culminated in his repetition of the story at the critical war council of Hurons, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis near Detroit on 27 April 1763, where, Navarre records ‘they listened to him as to an oracle, and told him that he had only to speak and they were all ready to do what he demanded of them’ (32).

  The war council depicted in Act III scene iii of Ponteach may allude to this specific gathering, where a character named ‘The Wolf’ echoes Neolin’s criticism of the abandoning of old ways in favour of European ones:

  Our great Forefathers, ere these Strangers came,

  Liv’d by Chace, with Nature’s Gifts content,

  …

  …if some daring Foe

  Provok’d their Wrath, they bent the hostile Bow,

  Nor waited his Approach, but rush’d with Speed,

  Fearless of Hunger, Thirst, Fatigue, or Death.

  But we their soften’d Sons, a puny Race,

  Are weak in Youth, fear Dangers where they’re not

  …

  And would you stop it, you must resolve to conquer,

  Destroy their Forts and Bulwarks, burn their Towns

  And keep them at a greater Distance from us.

  Given Pontiac’s importance in spreading Neolin’s word – and the huge persuasive effect that Pontiac’s telling of Neolin’s story is purported to have had in the 27 April war council – it might seem odd that this speech comes directly from a character named ‘The Wolf’ rather than from Ponteach himself in the play. With the play’s intended English audience, however, to have Pontiac speak of a Prophet’s dream vision might risk making Ponteach seem religiously misguided and thus less heroic. Instead, Pontiac has his own dream of the elk, which is never called anything but a ‘Dream’ by anyone but the untrustworthy Catholic priest, who at one point calls it a ‘Vision’ (III ii).10 Ponteach, then, rewrites Pontiac’s apparently genuine belief in Neolin’s vision as an ‘article of faith’ (Navarre 32) as the more conventional dramatic device of the misinterpreted dream, alluding to the importance of Neolin, perhaps, but declining to locate Rogers’ hero as a follower of a human man who could be misperceived a charlatan.

  Largely based on historian Francis Parkman’s 1851 volume The Conspiracy of Pontiac, there has long been a sense that Pontiac was a singular leader in the war that bears his name. In fact, though Pontiac certainly led the attacks on Fort Detroit, and certainly did meet with war sachems from other tribes several times in the early 1760s, the evidence does not support a single individual leading the rebellion or creating a coordinated multi-centred plan of attack on British forts. Instead, the attack on and siege of Fort Detroit seems to have inspired other tribes and alliances to act. The timeline is perhaps the most concise way to make this clear. On 7 May 1763, Pontiac made his first attempt on Fort Detroit, as he attended a scheduled council. With him, he brought some 300 men carrying hidden weapons, but an informant had given away his plan, and the attempt was aborted. On 9 May, Pontiac and his allied warriors laid siege to the fort, indicating their seriousness by killing as many British settlers outside the fort as could be found, including women and children. While the Siege of Detroit went on, messengers were sent out to spread word of the action, fostering several smaller – ultimately more successful – rebellions: on 16 May, Wyandots took Fort Sandusky (which had only been built in 1761, under great protest from the Wyandots), killing several British traders and all of the soldiers except the commander. On 25 May, Potawatomis took Michigan’s Fort St Joseph, and two days later Miamis took Fort Miami in Indiana, led by Cold Foot, who had attended Pontiac’s war councils. Another fort in what is now Indiana, Fort Ouiatenon, was taken on the first of June by the tribes of the Illinois country, an unusual case, in that there were no deaths, and Nester and others argue that the local tribes took the fort not out of animosity towards the British, but because they feared retaliation from the Ottawas if they failed to do so (91). The next day, Michigan’s Fort Michilimackinac was taken by a group of Ojibwa and Sauk warriors. This is the famous trick attack where warriors staged a game of lacrosse, drawing an audience of the fort’s soldiers. A ball was apparently accidentally knocked through the open gates, and the warriors rushed after it, grabbed weapons that had been hidden under the blankets of Indian women spectators and traders, and attacked the soldiers, killing approximately half and later torturing some survivors to death. Pennsylvania’s Fort Venango and Fort Le Boeuf were taken on 16 and 18 June respectively by Senecas, and Fort Presque Isle was attacked on 19 June, falling to a band of Ojibwas, Ottawas, Senecas, and Wyandots two days later. A second siege was begun when Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania was attacked by Delawares and others on 22 June. Fort Pitt was large and extremely well fortified, with walls twenty feet high and sixty feet thick at their base, protected by sixteen cannons, and so could not be taken in a single attack; it was held under active siege until 1 August, when nearly all of the warriors suddenly disappeared from the perimeter of Fort Pitt to meet the forces of Colonel Henry Bouquet at Bushy Run. It was a costly battle for both sides, but Bouquet’s troops officially relieved Fort Pitt on 20 August.