Letters

by John Barth

  Upon Anna Cooke’s death not long after, Andrew found among his “aunt’s” papers a letter addrest to him, to be open’d & read along with her will (both documents are here in the Castines’ library). It confest the facts as aforerehearst: that she, not Joan Toast Cooke the prostitute, was his mother, Henry Burlingame III his father, Eben Cooke his uncle.

  At his then age (about 36), his parents’ names were of less interest to Grandfather than their nature: accepting as true Anna Cooke’s final version of the former, what Andrew felt the greatest urgency to decide was whether, as his Uncle Eben had maintain’d, his father had been a fail’d revolutionary in the cause of his Indian brothers & their African allies, or, as his mother affirm’d, a victorious anti-revolutionary in the cause of the British colonial government. Nota bene, nota bene, dear child! It is that same question which has vext all of his descendants vis-à-vis their progenitors, & which occasions these pre-natal epistles!

  In the absence of any documentary evidence—for which he scour’d the colonies as tenaciously as had his father before him in search of his—A.B.C. III hearken’d to the verdict of his heart: he decided that while his grandfather Chicamec, the originator of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, had been an unsuccessful idealist, his father Henry Burlingame III had been a deplorably successful hypocrite, betraying his own aboriginal blood in the venal interest of the British Crown. Anna Cooke’s insistence that her lover’s motive had been her own & their son’s welfare he dismist as romantical, given the absence of any word from Burlingame himself to this effect, or any manifest attempt on his part to communicate with her & their natural child. That my Grandfather apparently did not allow for the possibility of Burlingame’s having been discover’d & put to death before he could make any such communication, tells us something about the state of heart of this “old bachelor orphan,” as he refers to himself in his diary of the period.

  This hard judgement upon his lately-discover’d, long-dead father profoundly changed Grandfather’s life. The course of his researches up & down the country had brot him into contact with Indians of various nations as well as with officials of the several colonies & the British & French provincial authorities. His eyes were open’d to thitherto-unsuspected dimensions of a history he had largely taken for granted. It surprised him (and surprises me) that a man of early middle age, practicing law all his adult life in the seat of a colonial government, could have remain’d politically innocent for so long. But a certain naivety, together with extraordinary complication, is a family curse that dates from the mating of Cookes & Burlingames.

  They had also & no less importantly, these researches, led him here: to the newly-raised seat of the half-breed Baron Henri Castine II, son of André Castine & the Tarratine princess Madocawanda. His object was to learn what he could of that ubiquitous “Monsieur Casteene” whose name haunts the archives of the English colonies. In pursuit of it he spent a season at Castines Hundred as a guest & hunting-companion of its owner, who like all the Barons Castine (including my present host, Andrée’s brother), was an hospitable, gregarious, anti-political sportsman. And here, like Yours Truly two generations later, he lost his heart to & won the hand of the daughter of the house, whom we must call Andrée Castine I to distinguish her from your mother.

  For in other respects, grandmother & granddaughter are like as twins: the fine-edged physiognomy of the Gascoigne Castines, the dark eyes & hair & skin of Madocawanda’s people—and the audacity, political passion, & disregard for convention of “Monsieur Casteene”! She it was, Andrée I, who relieved Grandfather of both his political & his carnal innocence, which he seems to have preserved as remarkably as did his Uncle Ebenezer, the virgin poet. And she it was who insisted he 1st get her with child if he would have her to wife. So scrupulous was Grandfather on this point—and on the irregularity, of which Andrée was contemptuous, of the two-decade difference in their ages—that no less than another dozen years pass’d before (in 1746) they finally conceived my father and became man & wife, when Andrew was 50 & Andrée 30 years of age! But thro those decades they were faithful, if intermittent, lovers, as often together as apart, and not uncommonly travelling as husband & wife (or father & daughter) to appease Grandfather’s curious decorum & avoid attracting undue attention as they pursued their political objective.

  This objective, if Andrew III’s own declaration is to be believed, was not the victory of the French in America, but the defeat of the British, for which in the existing circumstances the French & Indians were the obvious instrumentality. Having decided that his father had been a British anti-insurgent, Andrew III set about in the 2nd half of his life to be an anti-British insurgent; Andrée (still in the 1st half of hers) to be an organizer of the Indian nations 1st against the British, whom she saw as the greater menace to aboriginal integrity, and ultimately against the French, who had ever been less ruthless in displacing native populations, less interested in despoiling the land, and less disdainful of intermarriage betwixt the races. To the extent that their theatres of concern can be distinguisht, Andrée’s was to resist the extension of British hegemony northward above the Great Lakes & St. Lawrence River, Andrew’s to resist its extension westward across the Appalachians toward the Mississippi. These concerns came together in the period of the French & Indian War, along the frontier betwixt Fort Niagara & Fort Detroit.

  Attend me closely now, child, if you would understand your heritage. To the simple it might appear that my grandparents’ ends would best be served by their doing all they could to ensure a French victory in North America. But so skillfully & harmoniously did the French get on with the Indians—advancing them guns & ammunition on credit against the hunting & trapping season, providing them free gunsmithing at every fort, plying them liberally with gifts of blankets, iron utensils, & brandy—the red men became insidiously dependent on the white man’s skills & manufactures, ever farther removed from their former self-reliance. They had also been decimated & re-decimated by the white man’s measles, influenza, & smallpox, against which they had no hereditary defences. And the survivors, for a hundred years already by 1750, were helpless drunkards. An immediate wholesale victory of the French over the British, my grandparents fear’d, would so extend this “benevolent” exploitation as to make impossible the forging of an independent, regenerated Indian nation: in another century, they believed, the French would be the real masters of the continent, the Indians their willing, rum-soak’d subordinates. What was needed (so they came to feel by the mid-1750’s) was a temporary British victory in America—especially under the puritanical Jeffrey Amherst, who did not believe in giving rum, or anything else, to the worthless savages. The Indian nations would then be obliged to unite for their own survival, so impossible were the Anglo-Saxons to deal with; and they would be freed of the curse of alcohol will-they nill-they. Once a genuine, sober confederacy had been forged among, say, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the principal tribes of the Upper Great Lakes, & the nations of the Ohio Valley & the Illinois, the Indians could accept from a position of strength the assistance of the defeated French in driving out the British, whilst remaining masters in their own house.

  Thus their strategy, to implement which my grandparents decided that Fort Niagara—controlling the very jugular of the Great Lakes and thus of the whole upper & central parts of the continent—must fall to the British! Lord Amherst’s campaign against the French had come, by 1759, to center on the taking of that fort: for the Indians he had only contempt, but his blockade of the St. Lawrence had had the incidental effect of cutting off the supply of cognac with which the French marinated their Indian diplomacy, and thus of driving the thirsty Senecas (in whose territory the Fort lay), and the Six Nations generally, into hopeful new alliances with the English. The force Amherst dispatcht against Niagara included, along with British regulars & colonial militiamen, some 1,900 of these Iroquois, among whom Andrew Cooke III moved easily under the nom de guerre of John Butler: it was the largest such force ever assembled on th
e side of the British. Their plan was not to take the fort by storm, but to besiege it, cut off the reinforcement of its garrison, and so force its surrender. The French relief force, sent up promptly from the Ohio Valley & Detroit to lift the siege, consisted of 1,600 Indians—Hurons, Mingoes, Shawnees—and 600 French: amongst the latter was Andrée, in the rôle of a half-breed habitant camp-follower.

  By early July the French force was assembled at Presque Isle and ready to march up the shore of Lake Erie. Andrew slipt down from the British camp, Andrée up from the French, to a week-long tryst and strategy-conference on Chautauqua Lake, betwixt the two armies. There, as they embraced among the sugar maples & black willows which line that water, they workt out their tactics, not only for the battle to come, but for the larger campaign ahead. Andrew’s candidate to lead the projected Indian confederation was a young war-chief of the Senecas named Kyashuta: the Iroquois had long been the most politically advanced of Indians; they had 200 years of confederacy already under their belts, a confederacy so effective that Benjamin Franklin had proposed it as the model for a union of the British colonies in America. They were generally fear’d for their ferocity: they had never been much committed to either the French or the English; and their combination of matriarchy & patriarchy (the Sachems were all male, but the power of their nomination was reserved exclusively to a council of women) appeal’d to my grandparents. And the Senecas (in whose country they were trysting) were the fiercest, least “Eastern,” & most independent of the Iroquois.

  Andrée for her part was much taken with a young Ottawa named Ponteach, or Pondiac, or Pontiac. The confederacy, she argued, must be center’d well west of the Alleghenies if it was to hold out against disease & alcohol. The Iroquois League could serve as an example & a 1st line of defence, but they were too hated by the Great Lakes tribes, on which they had prey’d for decades, to be able to unite them: their very name was a Huron hate-word meaning “vipers who strike without warning.” Pontiac had in his favor that he was, after the manner of other great leaders in history, not quite native to the tribe he had begun to lead (his mother was an Ojibwa). More important, in addition to his courage, eloquence, energy, good humor & political judgement, he had what amounted to a Vision (transmitted to him by Andrée herself from a prophet of the Delawares): a return to aboriginal ways & implements, a sacrifice of comfort & efficiency in the interest of repurification & the achievement of sufficient moral strength to repel the white invaders. This Delaware Prophet—also known as “The Impostor”—was an authentic mystic & certifiable madman, very potent nonetheless among the Ohio Valley tribes. Pontiac was neither mystical nor mad, and even more potent was his canny modification of the vision, retail’d in parable form: the Prophet himself loses his way in the forest, encounters a beautiful maiden (Andrée, in the rôle of Socrates’s Diotima), & is by her instructed to give up his firearms & firewater for the manlier hunting-bow, tomahawk, & scalping knife. His reward is regeneration in the arms of the maiden herself.

  Your great-grandfather (like your father) was a tactful husband: he kiss’d Andrée—by then his wife of a dozen years & mother of his son, my father—and agreed that this Pontiac must be their man. She in turn agreed that he must not rise to power prematurely: a decisive, even shocking defeat at Fort Niagara would weaken the leadership of his older rivals, impress the beaten tribes with the necessity of confederation, and oblige their retreat westward toward Fort Detroit, a better center for their regrouping. And it would be well if this defeat were at the hands more of Sir William Johnson’s Iroquois than of the British regulars and colonials: the Hurons & Shawnees would be thereby more effectually stung; the Iroquois would be encouraged in their largest joint military operation & properly set up, not for warmer relations with the British, but for militant disaffection when—as would inevitably be the case under Amherst’s administration—they were denied the massacre, plunder, rape, torture, & rum they regarded as the victor’s due.

  With this accord the couple parted, planning to reunite at Castines Hundred in the fall. Two days later, within a few hours after dinner on 20 July, surely by “John Butler’s” arrangement, both of the British officers in command at the siege of Fort Niagara were kill’d, the one by a “French” sniper, the other by “accidental” explosion of a siege-gun, and leadership of the besieging army (which rightfully pass’d to Colonel Haldemand in Oswego) was effectively usurpt next day by Sir William Johnson & his Iroquois. On the morning of the 24th, against Captain Pouchot’s urgent warnings, Captain de Lignery “inexplicably” led the French relief column straight up the portage road on the east bank of the Niagara into Johnson’s ambush at the shrine of La Belle Famille, two miles below their destination. 500 French & Indians died before Pouchot surrender’d the fort at 5 P.M. The Iroquois night of plunder, promist them by Johnson, was so thoro that it took a thousand troops two months to clean up & repair the damage. Even so, Andrew managed to persuade the Senecas (some of whom had fought with the French inside the fort) that their brothers the Mohawks, Johnson’s own adopted tribe, had got the best of the pillaging. At this point the real Captain John Butler came on the scene, and Grandfather rejoin’d his family at Castines Hundred.

  The next two years they spent establishing new identities for themselves & cultivating young Pontiac, whose influence was growing rapidly amongst the Ottawas & their neighbours. Grandfather took the role of an habitant trader from Lake St. Clair named Antoine Cuillerier. Andrée, in order to free herself for a certain necessary flirtation in Detroit, pretended to be, not his wife, but his daughter Angélique. And my father Henry Burlingame IV—by then a stout lad of fourteen—happily play’d the rôle of his mother’s young brother, Alexis: his 1st involvement in the family enterprise, to which he took like a duck to water.

  As they had expected, the fall of Fort Niagara inclined many Indian leaders, if not to the surly but victorious British, at least away from the French, toward neutrality. When New France surrender’d at Montreal in September 1760, and Lord Amherst claim’d for Britain a territory twelve times its size, my family began their counter-campaign. The British refusal to provide ammunition on credit for the hunting season, they explain’d to Pontiac, was the 1st step of a plan to exterminate the Indians altogether; only solidarity among the nations could withstand them. Pontiac agreed, but set forth his doubts: just as using the white man’s rifles & drinking his spirits had made the Indians less than Indians, so he fear’d that real political alliances & concerted military campaigns in the white man’s fashion, while they might be the only alternative to extinction, would if successful transform the Indians into red Englishmen. Very well to preach the taking up of firearms to fight firearms, to the end of returning to the noble bow & arrow: he could not seriously believe that, once taken up wholesale, they would ever be laid down, any more than he himself would ever again in his life be able to remain sober in the presence of alcohol.

  Thus he brooded, here in this hall, a little drunk already on Baron Castine’s good Armagnac, on the night before setting out with the “Cuilleriers” for Detroit. And till the hour he lost consciousness (Andrée reported next morning to Andrew) he could not decide whether to lead his people away, westward, across the Mississippi, or to begin at Detroit the campaign of resistance about which he had such divided feelings. “Angélique” had recognized in these vague insights a rudimentary tragical vision and, much moved, had taken the rôle of another sort of angel: that of the Delaware Prophet’s vision. The red men, she had told Pontiac, were doom’d in any case to become other than they were. If, in order to preserve artificially their ancient ways, they retreated forever from the whites who multiplied and spread like a chancre on the earth, they would lose by the very strangeness of the land they retreated to; they would be themselves a kind of invader from the east—and their loss would be without effect upon the whites, who would press on in any case. If on the other hand they banded together, stood fast, and fought to the end, they would at worst die a little sooner, at best just possi
bly contain the white invasion for a few generations: if not east of the Alleghenies, at least east of the Mississippi. And if such resistance meant inescapably some “whitening” of the red men, as Pontiac wisely foresaw, this was a knife that cut both ways: their host, for example (Baron Henri Castine II), was not Madocawando of the Tarratines, but neither was he the old Baron of St. Castine in Gascony. More than once, Pontiac & his brothers had eaten brave captives to acquire their virtues; did he imagine that the whites could swallow whole nations of Indians without becoming in the process somewhat redden’d forever?

  What ensued is more remarkable than clear. The ménage went west: the “Cuilleriers” to establish themselves at Detroit & befriend the just-arrived British garrison of that fort; Pontiac to preach the Delaware Prophet’s amended vision & to pass war-belts among the Shawnees, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Delawares, & disaffected Senecas. Andrew particularly befriended the young aide of Amherst’s who had brot the English garrison from Fort Pitt: Captain Robert Rogers, a New Hampshireman with whom one could discuss Shakespeare. “Angélique,” finding unapproachable the British commandant Major Gladwin, made a conquest of his close friend the fur trader James Sterling, and so kept Pontiac inform’d of the situation in the fort.

  By 1763 the plan was ready: Pontiac’s people would take Fort Detroit early in May, and its fall would serve as both signal & encouragement for each tribe along the Allegheny & Ohio rivers to rise against the fort nearest it. From there the programme would be improvised: if all went well, the rest of the Iroquois might join the Senecas, take Fort Niagara, and sweep east across the Finger Lakes to the Hudson & south into Pennsylvania toward the Chesapeake, allying what was left of the once-fierce Susquehannas as they went. The Hurons would move with the displaced Algonkins up the west bank of the St. Lawrence, the Miamis & Shawnees & Illinois down the Mississippi Valley, whilst Pontiac & his Ottawas, in the heart of their beloved Lakes, laid down their rifles at last & took up their bows for peaceful hunting…