Masters of Empire by Michael McDonnell

Author:Michael McDonnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374714185
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

European Treaties and Claims over the Great Lakes, 1763, 1783, and 1794 (Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, edited by Helen Hornbeck Tanner. Copyright © 1987. University of Oklahoma Press. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved)

Indian attacks rolled across the pays d’en haut like shock waves pulsing outward from the epicenter at Detroit. At Michilimackinac, on June 2, Anishinaabe Ojibwe famously surprised the fort while pretending to play a game of lacrosse. They killed or captured the entire garrison within minutes. By June 21, a nervous James Gorrell abandoned his isolated post at Green Bay and barely managed to escape with his life. By that time, Delaware and Mingo warriors had shed the first blood in the upper Ohio country when they overran Colonel William Clapham’s settlement twenty-five miles up the Monongahela River from Fort Pitt. Seneca war parties—sometimes accompanied by Odawa, Ojibwe, and Huron warriors—attacked English posts and settlements in the Ohio Valley in mid-June. All of the new forts leading from the south shore of Lake Erie to the Forks of the Ohio were next to go. Fort Venango fell on June 16, its garrison killed. Fort LeBoeuf was taken on the eighteenth, and Fort Presque’îsle on the twenty-first.34

Almost simultaneously, Delaware and Shawnee warriors cut off the newly named Fort Pitt from the east by destroying settlements along Forbes Road and attacking Forts Ligonier and Bedford in quick succession. By the end of June, Fort Pitt itself was under attack and every British post west of Detroit had fallen to the Indians. Both Detroit and Fort Pitt were still in British hands but were cut off from supply bases on the Great Lakes and in Canada. In addition, Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo war parties began raiding Pennsylvania settlements again as far east as Carlisle and down to the Virginia backcountry as far south as North Carolina. Colonel Henry Bouquet, a British officer who had helped take Fort Duquesne in 1758, reported a “general Panick” among English settlers near Carlisle. Rumors swirled that Indian attacks were just the start of something larger. Slaveholders along the eastern seaboard heard that Indians attacking the frontiers were “saving and caressing all the Negroes they take” and feared this might “be productive of an insurrection.” The Second Anglo-Indian War rocked the British Empire.35

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Most historians see 1763 as the end of the Seven Years’ War. Others see it as the start of events that would lead to the American Revolution. It was both, and they were connected by another event—a revolution in Indian country, a turning point in British imperial relations with indigenous peoples. Its effects would transform the world in which we live today. But what it was not was an Indian “rebellion,” “uprising,’” or “conspiracy.” Nor was it “Pontiac’s War.” It was a second Indian war against Britain. While the first was primarily an attempt to rebalance power between the English and the French, this second conflict aimed to rebalance power between Native Americans and the English. In effect, it

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