Amherst planned to punish the western Indians as he had once punished the Cherokee nation. He had asked New York to raise 1,400 troops and New Jersey 600, while requesting 1,000 from Pennsylvania and 500 from Virginia: in all 3,500 provincials to be divided between two regular colonels and used to support the small number of available redcoats in a matched set of expeditions. In the north, Colonel John Bradstreet was to lead a bateau-borne force from Fort Niagara across Lake Erie to Detroit, chastising whatever Indians remained in arms and sending detachments to reopen posts as far west as Michilimackinac and Green Bay. In the Ohio Country, Colonel Henry Bouquet had orders to march westward from Fort Pitt to the valleys of the Muskingum and the Scioto, subduing the Delaware, Mingo, and Shawnee villages there—the hard core of Indian resistance in the west. Bradstreet and Bouquet were to devastate all resisting settlements, liberate white captives, subject rebellious chiefs to British authority, and dispatch representatives from the defeated tribes to New York, where Sir William Johnson would dictate terms of peace. While all this was taking place, regulars from West Florida were to ascend the Mississippi and occupy Fort de Chartres and the trading posts in the Illinois Country, depriving the western Indians of French aid and encouragement. Gage altered the plan by adding 300 Canadian bateaumen and 1,600 New England provincials but otherwise did not tamper with Amherst’s outline.2
Little worked out as intended. In the first place, Major Arthur Loftus and his detachment from the 22nd Regiment never left West Florida. Hostile Tunicas, not allied to the Illinois tribes but nonetheless unwilling to see the British replace the French upriver, blocked their advance on the lower Mississippi and sent them packing back to Mobile. Second, the colonies proved slow or unwilling to contribute provincials to the expeditions. Arguing that the Currency Act made it impossible to finance the necessary expenditures, the House of Burgesses refused to authorize a new Virginia Regiment. New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts all declined to raise men on the grounds that the Indians’ peace overtures rendered all expeditions unnecessary. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut came up with fewer than half the number asked. After a long dispute over the terms on which the expedition would be financed, Pennsylvania finally met its thousand-man quota, but the troops were slow to muster and quick to desert. Fewer than seven hundred Pennsylvanians, together with a couple hundred mounted Virginia volunteers (whom Bouquet enlisted on his own initiative and whom the Burgesses refused to pay), actually made it to Fort Pitt. They arrived only in mid-September, preventing Bouquet from opening his campaign until October 3. On that day he had just fifteen hundred men under his command—three-quarters of the number he had expected. 3
The northern expedition fell even further shy of its planned strength. Gage had promised Bradstreet more than 4,000 regulars and provincials. By the time Bradstreet left Niagara in August, he had 1,400 men: 300 redcoats drafted from the 17th Regiment, still weak from the Havana campaign; 300 New Yorkers; 250 Connecticut provincials; 240 Jersey Blues; and 300 Canadian bateaumen. Bradstreet, however, started his campaign with one inestimable advantage over Bouquet. About five hundred Indian warriors, representing most of the nations that had been in arms against the British the previous year, accompanied him as auxiliaries.4
That Bradstreet’s expedition included so many Indians resulted from the only significant departure Gage had been willing to make from Amherst’s plans: he had allowed Sir William Johnson to convene a peace congress on July 11 at Fort Niagara. Amherst had instructed Johnson to agree to peace only “when the Indians, who have Committed the Hostilities, are Sufficiently Punished.” Johnson barely waited for the Weasel to clear Paulus Hook before he began pressing the new commander in chief to let him dispatch emissaries announcing Britain’s willingness to treat for peace. Gage hesitated, then assented. By spring, Johnson’s messengers had fanned out across the pays d’en haut, spreading the word that the superintendent would kindle a council fire at Niagara. If the Indians who attended agreed to bury the hatchet, the British would “fill their canoes with presents; with blankets, kettles, guns, gunpowder and shot, and large barrels of rum, such as the stoutest [man] will not be able to lift.”5
The response was enormous beyond expectation. Warriors from nineteen nations attended, numbering more than two thousand: in Johnson’s estimation “the largest Number of Indians perhaps ever Assembled on any occasion,” and a concourse equal to the great gathering at Fort Carillon in 1757. The Indians included representatives from every hostile tribe except the Potawatomies, Delawares, and Shawnees. A few notable warriors, including Pontiac, absented themselves, but this seemed only to suggest the extent to which their nations had repudiated them. The chiefs were eager to resume trade and welcomed the terms that Johnson proposed: returning white captives, severing relations with Indians who remained hostile, compensating traders whose stocks had been lost during the rebellion, guaranteeing the safety of the traders who would soon be coming among them, and submitting whatever disputes might arise to Johnson or to the commandant of Detroit for settlement. To prove that Amherst’s policies were indeed dead, Johnson distributed a phenomenal quantity of presents—worth about £38,000 sterling—and, significantly, ended the prohibition on alcohol sales.6
When Bradstreet left on August 7 in the wake of the great peace congress, he believed that his task would consist not of carrying fire and sword from Niagara to Michilimackinac but rather of accepting the submission of a few remaining hostile bands. At least he hoped so. His force consisted of untrained provincials and sickly regulars, and his own health was hardly robust: an obscure debilitating ailment had felled him in May, and even in late July he could not walk unaided. When ten Indian chiefs approached his camp near Presque Isle on August 12 under a flag of truce, therefore, Bradstreet’s spirits soared. Representing themselves as ambassadors from the Wyandots of Sandusky, Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos, and Munsees—the “Five Nations of Indians inhabiting the Plains in Scioto”—they asked for peace. Bradstreet replied with terms like those Johnson had offered at Niagara. The Indians were to cease all hostile activity immediately; to deliver all white prisoners to him in twenty-five days’ time, at Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie; to send all Indians who subsequently killed or plundered whites to Fort Pitt for trial; and to leave hostages with his force pending fulfillment of the terms, while taking an officer and an Indian interpreter of his army along with them as they carried the peace terms back to their villages. In return the colonel promised to inform his superiors of the agreement and prevent Bouquet’s expedition from devastating the villages in the Ohio Country. 7
Sending Gage word of his negotiations, Bradstreet proceeded on what looked, with every passing day, more like a triumphal progress than a military expedition. As Indian bands met him and offered their submission he told them to meet him at Detroit in early September for a grand treaty conference. Confident that he was witnessing the last collapse of the rebellion, on August 26 he detached Captain Thomas Morris of the 17th Regiment and sent him up the Maumee River with a small escort and orders to proceed to the Illinois Country and assume command there. If he encountered Pontiac along the way, Morris was to tell him to meet Bradstreet at Sandusky, where the colonel would await the delivery of the Delaware, Shawnee, and other prisoners. Bradstreet assumed he was on the threshold of pacifying the entire American interior.8
When, in the last days of August, Bradstreet accomplished the formal relief of Major Gladwin’s weary garrison and sent detachments on to reoccupy Michilimackinac and Fort Edward Augustus, he believed he had completed the mission that Gage had assigned. When he turned to the diplomatic task of confirming the peace with the assembled Indian representatives on September 5, however, he responded less to his orders than to the volatile combination of grandiosity and greed that had always defined his personality. The consequences would prove damaging to peace and deadly to Bradstreet’s blossoming ambition to make himself overlord of the Great Lakes.
Long before leaving Fort Niagara, the colonel had s
een his expedition as an opportunity to serve himself as well as his king, and therefore he had stowed a considerable quantity of trade goods belonging to himself and some business partners among the barrels of army stores destined for Detroit. But while in July he probably aspired only to make a tidy fortune in the revived Indian trade, the disintegration of Indian resistance reawakened an older dream. Since 1755, when Bradstreet had first seen Oswego and understood the pays d’en haut as a potential empire with himself at its center, he had promoted schemes to establish a “dominion of the lakes”—quietly at first, publicly after his triumph at Fort Frontenac in 1758. He had been frustrated then, but now it seemed that the dream lay within his grasp. To seize it he inserted an unprecedented article in the treaty he presented to the assembled chiefs of the Ottawas, Chippewas, Hurons, Miamis, Potawatomis, and Mississaugas. Calling the Indians not only the “Children” of George III, but his “Subjects,” the treaty proclaimed His Majesty’s “Sovereignty Over all and every part of this Coun[try, in as] full and as ample a manner as in any part of his Dominions whatever.” The chiefs made their marks, but it is impossible to believe that they fully understood that Bradstreet intended to subordinate them to a degree that no Indian people had ever willingly accepted.9
The colonel’s design at Detroit became unmistakable only later, when he reported to Whitehall on the peace conference and explained that by the terms of the treaty “His Majesty may in Justice and the ordinary Exertion of his Prerogative make what Grants of those Lands he pleases, & erect such Governments as in His Royal Wisdom he sees meet.” That he had both grants and the erection of a government in mind subsequently became clear when he and “Sixty Officers Serving in the upper Lakes this Campaign” petitioned for a hundred thousand acres at Detroit, on which they promised to settle 639 families. This settlement, Bradstreet explained, would become the heart of an inland Crown colony that he himself was the man best suited to govern: a place to which the French from the Illinois Country could be relocated and kept under the vigilant eye of a regiment officered by Bradstreet’s fellow applicants, and where the Indians of the Great Lakes might be taught the arts of husbandry that would give them a “Secure Subsistence.” Detroit’s geographical advantages, Bradstreet argued, conferred present strategic value and foretold future greatness. It was far enough west to dominate the fur trade of the interior, bypassing the scheming, unreliable Six Nations and insuring that the Indians of the lakes and the upper midwest would not take their peltry to the Spanish and French traders beyond the Mississippi. Once “properly settled,” Detroit would be a “strong barrier” against future insurrections and a source of foodstuffs to ease the chronic “want of provisions” among the Indians. It would become the keystone of a stable American interior, a jewel in Britain’s imperial crown.10
The vision that shimmered before his eyes blinded Bradstreet to the more immediate consequences of his actions at the conference—and nearly destroyed him. Mistaking momentary advantage for control, he behaved more like a conqueror than the mediating “father” whom the Indians had come to Detroit to find. While there is every reason to think that they did not understand the clause in the treaty that conferred on them the new status of subjects, they could not have mistaken the import of Bradstreet’s response to the peace belt that Pontiac sent to Detroit in lieu of his own attendance. Professing outrage that the Ottawa had not come to make his submission in person, the colonel seized a hatchet, chopped the belt into pieces, and ordered the wampum cast into the river. Bradstreet intended to destroy Pontiac’s dignity. By failing to understand that what he did was “roughly equivalent to a European ambassador’s urinating on a proposed treaty,” however, he chopped his own credibility to bits, restoring stature to an Indian leader whose own people had largely repudiated him.11
The man who unwittingly drowned the hope of peace in the Detroit River along with the shards of Pontiac’s wampum began to see his dream fall apart soon after the conference ended. On September 12 the first of several letters arrived from Gage, informing him that he had exceeded his authority in concluding a peace treaty at Presque Isle and that he was now to abandon his agreement, move overland against the Shawnee and Delaware villages on the Scioto, and “use every means . . . to destroy them.” Bradstreet, Gage had written, was to accept no offers of peace until the offending Indians had delivered up “Ten of the Chief promoters of the War, to be put to Death.” Only then could he agree to a truce and send their delegates “in a proper manner to Sir William Johnson to sue for peace.”12
Disconcerted as much by the unexpected rebuke as by the impossible orders, Bradstreet responded with a self-justifying letter (the first of a long series), then hastened to Sandusky Bay, where he expected the captives whom the Shawnee, Delaware, and other ambassadors had promised to deliver. The colonel was no stranger to tight spots or, for that matter, to his superiors’ distrust. Always before, he had produced the successes that silenced his critics, transforming official censures into (at least grudging) approval. All he needed to improve Gage’s temper was to return with the prisoners.
But no prisoners came to Sandusky. More letters did instead, and between them and the increasingly obvious fact that the Shawnees and Delawares would never bring in the captives, Bradstreet could see the looming outlines of disaster. The worst news came from Captain Morris, who never made it to Illinois. Before his party had paddled twenty miles up the Maumee River they met Pontiac. Although he had not yet abandoned his faith in the return of the French king, he listened to Morris’s addresses and agreed to send a peace belt up to Bradstreet at Detroit. He also promised Morris safe passage to the Illinois Country, sending an escort with wampum to ease his way. But farther upriver Morris found that Pontiac’s good offices mattered little. A band of Miami warriors that had lately accepted a war belt from the Ohio Indians seized him and tied him to a stake. They were at the point of torturing him to death when their chief, a kinsman of Pontiac’s, dissuaded them and took Morris into his lodge. At the earliest opportunity the shaken captain fled overland to Detroit. There, describing his adventures to Bradstreet, Morris argued that while Pontiac might be useful, it seemed clear that the Indians’ peace overtures at Presque Isle had been a ruse. “A mine is Laid, & the Match Lighted to blow us up. The Senecas, Shawnese, & Delawares, have sent their war belts to all the Nations; who only wait the signal for a General Attack.”13
Bradstreet heard other fuses sizzle and hiss in the letters that arrived at Sandusky. From Gage and Bouquet, he learned that the Ohio Indians had not stopped attacking the Pennsylvania backcountry after the Presque Isle treaty; if anything, the pace of the raids had picked up. Gage, with increasing asperity, was ordering him to move his men up the Sandusky River, to cross to the Scioto Valley, and then descend on the Shawnee villages from the north, while Bouquet marched west from Pittsburgh against the Delawares. But this was not possible. The commander in chief, as heedless of western distances as of the water levels in the late-summer rivers, probably did not understand that he was in effect requiring Bradstreet’s men to march two hundred miles overland, through a roadless forest, without even pack animals to haul supplies. The colonel, trapped between the knowledge of what happened to officers who disobeyed direct orders and the certainty that Gage had ordered a suicide mission, sat tight at Sandusky. He spent the remainder of the campaign ineffectually imploring his Indian allies to attack the Delawares and Shawnees and writing long defensive letters to Gage. Meanwhile his men gobbled up supplies and sickened with fevers, while the provincials among them anticipated the campaign’s end with the usual loss of subordination. On October 18, dismayed and disillusioned, Bradstreet finally ordered a return to Niagara—and found disaster stretched across his path. On the first night out, a sudden storm destroyed half the expedition’s boats. Bradstreet abandoned his artillery, sent a hundred or so Iroquois warriors back on foot, packed the remaining troops into what bateaux could still float, and limped onward. But the weather worsened and progress slowed to a crawl.
Food ran short, and boat after leaky boat had to be abandoned; finally, he set hundreds of men ashore to march home “without a morsel of Provisions.” It was November 3 before the surviving bateaux and their battered oarsmen reached Little Niagara. Those who had been forced to return on foot—the ones who did not starve to death or die of exposure—straggled in for weeks thereafter. When the Six Nations warriors whom Bradstreet had initially abandoned returned, they attacked the guards on the Niagara portage, nearly severing communications with Detroit once again.14
By the time Bradstreet’s expedition crawled home, Colonel Henry Bouquet was concluding an altogether more successful campaign in the Ohio Country. After agonizing delays in assembling men, packhorses, supplies, cattle, and drovers, Bouquet finally marched from Fort Pitt on October 3, following the Ohio to the mouth of Big Beaver Creek and then striking cross-country for the Muskingum. Unlike the previous year, when he had blundered into a deadly trap at Bushy Run, Bouquet moved his force with great attention to security, making no mistakes. Mapping the country and clearing roadways as they went, Bouquet’s men marched about eighty miles before word arrived that “the head men of the Delawares and Shawanese were coming as soon as possible to treat of peace.”15
Bouquet ordered trenches dug and stockades thrown up near the Muskingum and awaited the arrival of the chiefs. From October 17 through October 20 he treated with them, offering essentially the same terms Bradstreet had offered and allowing them twelve days to bring in their white captives as a sign of goodwill. That interval gave him enough time to relocate his camp to a strong point in the very heart of the Delaware towns: “so that from this place the army had it in their power to awe all the enemy’s settlements and destroy their towns, if they should not punctually fulfil the engagements they had entered into.” There, a mile above the forks of the Muskingum, Bouquet’s troops built a fortified camp like “a little town in which the greatest order and regularity were observed,” stoutly defended by entrenchments and “four redoubts” with cannon. By November 9, the Mingos and Delawares had brought in over two hundred whites, while the Shawnees, whose main settlement lay on the Scioto eighty miles further west, promised to deliver their prisoners to Fort Pitt the following spring. After informing the chiefs that they would need to travel to Johnson Hall and confirm the peace by official treaty, Bouquet withdrew. By November 28, without firing a shot in anger, his little army was back at Fort Pitt, and peace in the Ohio Valley seemed secure.16
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