On This Day: Michigan fort captured amid brutal warfare between British and Native Americans - June 2, 1763 (2024)

(edited from Wikipedia)
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Fort Michilimackinac was an 18th-century French, and later British, fort and trading post at the Straits of Mackinac; it was built on the northern tip of the lower peninsula of the present-day state of Michigan in the United States.

Built around 1715, ... the French relinquished the fort, along with their territory in Canada, to the British in 1761 following their defeat in the French and Indian War.

The Ojibwe in the region soon became dissatisfied with British policies, particularly their cancellation of the annual policy of distributing gifts to the Indians. On June 2, 1763, as part of the larger conflict known as Pontiac's War, a group of Ojibwe staged a game of baaga'adowe (a forerunner of modern lacrosse) outside the fort as a ruse to gain entrance. After entering the fort, they killed most of the British inhabitants. They held the fort for a year before the British regained control, promising to offer more and better gifts to the native inhabitants of the area.

Pontiac's War was launched in 1763 by a loose confederation of Native Americans who were dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes region following the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Warriors from numerous nations joined in an effort to drive British soldiers and settlers out of the region. The war is named after Odawa leader Pontiac, the most prominent of many indigenous leaders in the conflict.

The war began in May 1763 when Native Americans, alarmed by policies imposed by British General Jeffrey Amherst, attacked a number of British forts and settlements. Nine forts were destroyed, and hundreds of colonists were killed or captured, with many more fleeing the region. Hostilities came to an end after British Army expeditions in 1764 led to peace negotiations over the next two years. The Natives were unable to drive away the British, but the uprising prompted the British government to modify the policies that had provoked the conflict.

Warfare on the North American frontier was brutal; the killing of prisoners, the targeting of civilians, and other atrocities were widespread.

In an incident that became well-known and frequently debated, British officers at Fort Pitt attempted to infect besieging Indians with blankets that had been exposed to smallpox.

The ruthlessness of the conflict was a reflection of a growing racial divide between indigenous peoples and British colonists. The British government sought to prevent further racial violence by issuing the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which created a boundary between colonists and Natives.

Indigenous people involved in Pontiac's War lived in a vaguely defined region of New France known as the pays d'en haut ("the upper country " ), which was claimed by France until the Paris peace treaty of 1763. Natives of the pays d'en haut were from many different tribal nations. These tribes were linguistic or ethnic groupings of anarchic communities rather than centralized political powers; no individual chief spoke for an entire tribe, and no nations acted in unison. For example, Ottawas did not go to war as a tribe: Some Ottawa leaders chose to do so, while other Ottawa leaders denounced the war and stayed clear of the conflict.

The tribes of the pays d'en haut consisted of three basic groups. The first group was composed of tribes of the Great Lakes region: Ottawas, Ojibwes, and Potawatomis, who spoke Algonquian languages, and Hurons, who spoke an Iroquoian language. They had long been allied with French habitants with whom they lived, traded, and intermarried.

Great Lakes Indians were alarmed to learn they were under British sovereignty after the French loss of North America. When a British garrison took possession of Fort Detroit from the French in 1760, local Indians cautioned them that "this country was given by God to the Indians." When the first Englishman reached Fort Michilimackinac, Ojibwe chief Minavavana told him "Englishman, although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us!"

The second group was made up of tribes from eastern Illinois Country, which included Miamis, Weas, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, and Piankashaws. Like the Great Lakes tribes, these people had a long history of close relations with the French. Throughout the war, the British were unable to project military power into the Illinois Country, which was on the remote western edge of the conflict. The Illinois tribes were the last to come to terms with the British.

The third group consisted of tribes of the Ohio Country: Delawares (Lenape), Shawnees, Wyandots, and Mingos. These people had migrated to the Ohio valley earlier in the century to escape British, French, and Iroquois domination. Unlike the Great Lakes and Illinois Country tribes, Ohio tribes had no great attachment to the French regime, though they had fought as French allies in the previous war in an effort to drive away the British. They made a separate peace with the British with the understanding that the British Army would withdraw. But after the departure of the French, the British strengthened their forts rather than abandoning them, and so the Ohioans went to war in 1763 in another attempt to drive out the British.

Outside the pays d'en haut, the influential Iroquois did not, as a group, participate in Pontiac's War because of their alliance with the British, known as the Covenant Chain. However, the westernmost Iroquois nation, the Seneca tribe, had become disaffected with the alliance. As early as 1761, Senecas began to send out war messages to the Great Lakes and Ohio Country tribes, urging them to unite in an attempt to drive out the British. When the war finally came in 1763, many Senecas were quick to take action.

General Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander-in-chief in North America, was in charge of administering policy towards American Indians, which involved military matters and regulation of the fur trade. Amherst believed that, with France out of the picture, the Indians would have to accept British rule. He also believed the Indians were incapable of offering any serious resistance to the British Army. Therefore, of the 8,000 troops under his command in North America, only about 500 were stationed in the region where the war erupted. Amherst and officers such as Major Henry Gladwin, commander at Fort Detroit, made little effort to conceal their contempt for Indians; those involved in the uprising frequently complained that the British treated them no better than slaves or dogs.

Additional Indian resentment came from Amherst's decision in February 1761 to cut back on gifts given to the Indians. Gift giving had been an integral part of the relationship between the French and the tribes of the pays d'en haut. Following an Indian custom that carried important symbolic meaning, the French gave presents (such as guns, knives, tobacco, and clothing) to village chiefs, who distributed them to their people. The chiefs gained stature this way, enabling them to maintain the alliance with the French.

The Indians regarded this as "a necessary part of diplomacy which involved accepting gifts in return for others sharing their lands." Amherst considered this to be bribery that was no longer necessary, especially as he was under pressure to cut expenses after the war. Many Indians regarded this change in policy as an insult and an indication the British looked upon them as conquered people rather than as allies.

Many Indians believed the British were disarming them as a prelude to war. Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of the Indian Department, warned Amherst of the danger of cutting back on presents and gunpowder, to no avail.

Land was also an issue in the coming of Pontiac's War. While the French colonists had always been relatively few, there seemed to be no end of settlers in the British colonies.

Also contributing to the outbreak of war was a religious awakening which swept through Indian settlements in the early 1760s. The movement was fed by discontent with the British as well as food shortages and epidemic disease. The most influential individual in this phenomenon was Neolin, known as the "Delaware Prophet," who called upon Indians to shun the trade goods, alcohol, and weapons of the colonists. Melding Christian doctrines with traditional Indian beliefs, Neolin said the Master of Life was displeased with Indians for taking up the bad habits of white men, and that the British posed a threat to their very existence. "If you suffer the English among you," said Neolin, "you are dead men. Sickness, smallpox, and their poison [alcohol] will destroy you entirely." It was a powerful message for a people whose world was being changed by forces that seemed beyond their control.

Indian raids on frontier settlements escalated in the spring and summer of 1764. The hardest hit colony was Virginia, where more than 100 settlers were killed. On May 26 in Maryland, 15 colonists working in a field near Fort Cumberland were killed. On June 14, about 13 settlers near Fort Loudoun in Pennsylvania were killed and their homes burned. The most notorious raid occurred on July 26, when four Delaware warriors killed and scalped a school teacher and ten children in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Incidents such as these prompted the Pennsylvania Assembly, with the approval of Governor Penn, to reintroduce the scalp bounties offered during the French and Indian War, which paid money for every enemy Indian killed above the age of ten, including women.

General Amherst, held responsible for the uprising by the Board of Trade, was recalled to London in August 1763 and replaced by Major General Thomas Gage. In 1764, Gage sent two expeditions into the west to crush the rebellion, rescue British prisoners, and arrest the Indians responsible for the war. According to historian Fred Anderson, Gage's campaign, which had been designed by Amherst, prolonged the war for more than a year because it focused on punishing the Indians rather than ending the war. Gage's one significant departure from Amherst's plan was to allow William Johnson to conduct a peace treaty at Niagara, giving Indians an opportunity to "bury the hatchet."

Because many children taken as captives had been adopted into Native families, their forced return often resulted in emotional scenes.

The total loss of life resulting from Pontiac's War is unknown. About 400 British soldiers were killed in action and perhaps 50 were captured and tortured to death. George Croghan estimated that 2,000 settlers had been killed or captured, a figure sometimes repeated as 2,000 settlers killed. The violence compelled approximately 4,000 settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia to flee their homes. American Indian losses went mostly unrecorded, but it has been estimated at least 200 warriors were killed in battle, with additional deaths if germ warfare initiated at Fort Pitt was successful.

Pontiac's War has traditionally been portrayed as a defeat for the Indians, but scholars now usually view it as a military stalemate: while the Indians had failed to drive away the British, the British were unable to conquer the Indians. Negotiation and accommodation, rather than success on the battlefield, ultimately brought an end to the war. The Indians had won a victory of sorts by compelling the British government to abandon Amherst's policies and create a relationship with the Indians modeled on the Franco-Indian alliance.

Relations between British colonists and American Indians, which had been severely strained during the French and Indian War, reached a new low during Pontiac's War. According to Dixon (2005), "Pontiac's War was unprecedented for its awful violence, as both sides seemed intoxicated with genocidal fanaticism."

Richter (2001) characterizes the Indian attempt to drive out the British, and the effort of the Paxton Boys to eliminate Indians from their midst, as parallel examples of ethnic cleansing. People on both sides of the conflict had come to the conclusion that colonists and natives were inherently different and could not live with each other. According to Richter, the war saw the emergence of "the novel idea that all Native people were 'Indians,' that all Euro-Americans were 'Whites,' and that all on one side must unite to destroy the other."

The British government also came to the conclusion that colonists and Indians must be kept apart. On October 7, 1763, the Crown issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, an effort to reorganize British North America after the Treaty of Paris. The Proclamation, already in the works when Pontiac's War erupted, was hurriedly issued after news of the uprising reached London. Officials drew a boundary line between the British colonies and American Indian lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, creating a vast "Indian Reserve" that stretched from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River and from Florida to Quebec. By forbidding colonists from trespassing on Indian lands, the British government hoped to avoid more conflicts like Pontiac's War. "The Royal Proclamation," writes Calloway (2006), "reflected the notion that segregation not interaction should characterize Indian-white relations."

The effects of Pontiac's War were long-lasting. Because the Proclamation officially recognized that indigenous people had certain rights to the lands they occupied, it has been called a Native American "Bill of Rights," and still informs the relationship between the Canadian government and First Nations. For British colonists and land speculators, however, the Proclamation seemed to deny them the fruits of victory—western lands—that had been won in the war with France. This created resentment, undermining colonial attachment to the Empire and contributing to the coming of the American Revolution. According to Calloway, "Pontiac's Revolt was not the last American war for independence—American colonists launched a rather more successful effort a dozen years later, prompted in part by the measures the British government took to try to prevent another war like Pontiac's."

For American Indians, Pontiac's War demonstrated the possibilities of pan-tribal cooperation in resisting Anglo-American colonial expansion. Although the conflict divided tribes and villages, the war also saw the first extensive multi-tribal resistance to European colonization in North America, and the first war between Europeans and American Indians that did not end in complete defeat for the Indians. The Proclamation of 1763 ultimately did not prevent British colonists and land speculators from expanding westward, and so Indians found it necessary to form new resistance movements. Beginning with conferences hosted by Shawnees in 1767, in the following decades leaders such as Joseph Brant, Alexander McGillivray, Blue Jacket, and Tec*mseh would attempt to forge confederacies that would revive the resistance efforts of Pontiac's War.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac%27s_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Michilimackinac

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