The Old Northwest | Page 8

Erie, whence he still hurled his ineffectual threats at the "dogs in
red." His power, however, was broken. The most he could do was to
gather four hundred warriors on the Maumee and Illinois and present
himself at Fort Chartres with a demand for weapons and ammunition
with which to keep up the war. The French commander, who was now
daily awaiting orders to turn the fortress over to the English, refused;
and a deputation dispatched to New Orleans in quest of the desired
equipment received no reply save that New Orleans itself, with all the
country west of the river, had been ceded to Spain. The futility of
further resistance on the part of Pontiac was apparent. In 1765 the
disappointed chieftain gave pledges of friendship; and in the following
year he and other leaders made a formal submission to Sir William
Johnson at Oswego, and Pontiac renounced forever the bold design to
make himself at a stroke lord of the West and deliverer of his country
from English domination.
For three years the movements of this disappointed Indian leader are
uncertain. Most of the time, apparently, he dwelt in the Maumee
country, leading the existence of an ordinary warrior. Then, in the
spring of 1769, he appeared at the settlements on the middle
Mississippi. At the newly founded French town of St. Louis, on the
Spanish side of the river, he visited an old friend, the commandant
Saint Ange de Bellerive. Thence he crossed to Cahokia, where Indian
and creole alike welcomed him and made him the central figure in a
series of boisterous festivities.
An English trader in the village, observing jealously the honors that
were paid the visitor, resolved that an old score should forthwith be
evened up. A Kaskaskian redskin was bribed, with a barrel of liquor
and with promises of further reward, to put the fallen leader out of the
way; and the bargain was hardly sealed before the deed was done.
Stealing upon his victim as he walked in the neighboring forest, the
assassin buried a tomahawk in his brain, and "thus basely," in the
words of Parkman, "perished the champion of a ruined race." Claimed
by Saint-Ange, the body was borne across the river and buried with
military honors near the new Fort St. Louis. The site of Pontiac's grave
was soon forgotten, and today the people of a great city trample over
and about it without heed.

Chapter II
. "A Lair Of Wild Beasts"
Benjamin Franklin, who was in London in 1760 as agent of the
Pennsylvania Assembly, gave the British ministers some wholesome
advice on the terms of the peace that should be made with France. The
St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes regions, he said, must be retained by
England at all costs. Moreover, the Mississippi Valley must be taken, in
order to provide for the growing populations of the seaboard colonies
suitable lands in the interior, and so keep them engaged in agriculture.
Otherwise these populations would turn to manufacturing, and the
industries of the mother country would suffer.
The treaty of peace, three years later, brought the settlement which
Franklin suggested. The vast American back country, with its inviting
rivers and lakes, its shaded hills, and its sunny prairies, became English
territory. The English people had, however, only the vaguest notion of
the extent, appearance, and resources of their new possession. Even the
officials who drew the treaty were as ignorant of the country as of
middle Africa. Prior to the outbreak of the war no widely known
English writer had tried to describe it; and the absorbing French books
of Lahontan, Hennepin, and Charlevoix had reached but a small circle.
The prolonged conflict in America naturally stimulated interest in the
new country. The place-names of the upper Ohio became household
words, and enterprising publishers put out not only translations of the
French writers but compilations by Englishmen designed, in true
journalistic fashion, to meet the demands of the hour for information.
These publications displayed amazing misconceptions of the lands
described. They neither estimated aright the number and strength of the
French settlements nor dispelled the idea that the western country was
of little value. Even the most brilliant Englishman of the day, Dr.
Samuel Johnson, an ardent defender of the treaty of 1763, wrote that
the large tracts of America added by the war to the British dominions

were "only the barren parts of the continent, the refuse of the earlier
adventurers, which the French, who came last, had taken only as better
than nothing." As late indeed as 1789, William Knox, long
Under-Secretary for the Colonies, declared that Americans could not
settle the western territory "for ages," and that the region must be given
up to barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as