MDDM Ch. 31 "in league with Pontiac"

[jbor]

  "Indians, in Philadelphia?" Dixon curiously.
  Mr Chantry explains. Converted by the Moravian brothers years before the
last French war, caught between the warring sides, distrusted by ev'ryone,
wishing only to live a Christian life, these Indians were peacefully settled
up near Lehigh when the Rangers there came after them, but a few Weeks
before the Conestoga murders, suspecting them of being in league with
Pontiac, whose depredations were then at their full flood. (306.5)

*

  "[Influenced by Neolin, the Enlightened, a "Delaware visionary"] in May
1763 thousands of Senecas, Ottawas, Delawares, Chippewas and others rose
against the British. ...
  'Pontiac's War' - typically, the English assumed the uprising must be the
work of one man, and named it after an Ottawa war chief who was, in fact,
only one leader among many - was fought with great ferocity by both sides.
The insurgents killed more than 2000 settlers, most of them illegal
squatters on Indian land, and too nine British-held forts. In response,
[Lord Jeffrey] Amherst resolved to 'punish the delinquents with entire
destruction', instructing that 'no prisoners' should be taken and initiating
a primitive kind of germ warfare with the order to 'send the small pox among
the disaffected tribes .... ' His attempt to enlist the Native Americans'
deadliest enemy for the British war effort worked: the commander of Fort
Pitt invited some of the besieging Delawares to a parley, and gave them
smallpox-infested blankets from the fort hospital as a token of esteem. As
the ensuing epidemic raged, it progressively undermined the Indians' ability
to fight, and the tide of war quickly turned against them. Some of the
hostile chiefs were forced to make peace in September 1764, when, in the
Treaty of Detroit, they acknowledged British sovereignty by accepting that
King George was their *father* rather than their *brother*. Two years later,
Pontiac and the other remaining insurgents surrendered at the Treaty of
Oswego.
  [William] Johnson, meanwhile, had already persuaded the five eastern
Iroquois nations that their best interests lay in a British victory, and by
the end of 1763 the Seneca had been quickly readmitted to the Covenant Chain
with little more than a stern admonition from the other League chiefs. Many
backwoods settlers were angered at this leniency towards hostile tribes,
which they compared with - as they saw it - their own shabby treatment by
the government. As the historian Bernard Knollenberg puts it, 'it was
perfectly clear that the British army had dismally failed not only to
protect the colonial frontiers but even to punish the Indians promptly.'
  Settler dissatisfaction was further fuelled by the Royal Proclamation of
1763, which attempted to fix a firm frontier along the spine of the
Appalachians between the English colonies and 'Indian Country' and
stipulated that further territory could be acquired only by the Crown and
with the full consent of the tribes concerned. The ostensible aim was to
maintain the peace, allowing Native Americans to feel secure in their
homelands and reducing the chances of illegal settlement or fraudulent land
deals sparking another conflict. Some historians, however, have seen it as
little more than a pretext for maintaining a large military presence in
North America to intimidate, and if necessary suppress, the increasingly
discontented colonists. Others share the cynical view of George Washington,
who - while planning to extend his estate beyond the border - wrote to a
friend: 'I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light (but I
say this between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds
of the Indians.'
  Whatever its ultimate motive or motives, there was an outcry in the
colonies against the Royal Proclamation. From the colonists' point of view,
it was just one more imperial shackle, an intolerable violation of their
'inherent right to circumscribe their own boundaries', and the efforts by
the royal governors to deter or remove illegal settlers provoked outrage,
offering yet more proof - if proof were needed - of the Crown's tyranny and
disregard for its own subjects. In the fervour of the American Revolution,
this first and last attempt by Britain to halt, or at least control, the
frontier was swept aside with all the other paraphernalia of royal
"despotism". The Proclamation's main lasting significance is that the
procedure it laid down for acquiring Indian land has remained an important
legal precedent in both the United States and Canada."

                        James Wilson. _The Earth Shall Weep: A History of
                        Native America_. (1998) London: Picador, pp. 127-128

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