This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.
CHRONICLES OF CANADA
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
In thirty-two volumes
THE WAR CHIEF OF THE OTTAWAS
A Chronicle of the Pontiac War
By THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS
TORONTO, 1915
There was rejoicing throughout the Thirteen Colonies, inthe month of September 1760, when news arrived of thecapitulation of Montreal. Bonfires flamed forth andprayers were offered up in the churches and meeting-housesin gratitude for deliverance from a foe that for over ahundred years had harried and had caused the Indians toharry the frontier settlements. The French armies weredefeated by land; the French fleets were beaten at sea.The troops of the enemy had been removed from NorthAmerica, and so powerless was France on the ocean that,even if success should crown her arms on the Europeancontinent, where the Seven Years' War was still raging,it would be impossible for her to transport a new forceto America. The principal French forts in America wereoccupied by British troops. Louisbourg had been razed tothe ground; the British flag waved over Quebec, Montreal,and Niagara, and was soon to be raised on all the lesserforts in the territory known as Canada. The Mississippivalley from the Illinois river southward alone remainedto France. Vincennes on the Wabash and Fort Chartres onthe Mississippi were the only posts in the hinterlandoccupied by French troops. These posts were under thegovernment of Louisiana; but even these the Americancolonies were prepared to claim, basing the right ontheir 'sea to sea' charters.
The British in America had found the strip of land betweenthe Alleghanies and the Atlantic far too narrow for arapidly increasing population, but their advance westwardhad been barred by the French. Now, praise the Lord, theFrench were out of the way, and American traders andsettlers could exploit the profitable fur-fields and therich agricultural lands of the region beyond the mountains.True, the Indians were there, but these were not regardedas formidable foes. There was no longer any occasion toconsider the Indians—so thought the colonists and theBritish officers in America. The red men had been a forceto be reckoned with only because the French had suppliedthem with the sinews of war, but they might now be treatedlike other denizens of the forest—the bears, the wolves,and the wild cats. For this mistaken policy the Britishcolonies were to pay a heavy price.
The French and the Indians, save for one exception, hadbeen on terms of amity from the beginning. The reasonfor this was that the French had treated the Indians withstudied kindness. The one exception was the IroquoisLeague or Six Nations. Champlain, in the first years ofhis residence at Quebec, had joined the Algonquins andHurons in an attack on them, which they never forgot;and, in spite of the noble efforts of French missionariesand a lavish bestowal of gifts, the Iroquois thorn remainedin the side of New France. But with the other Indiantribes the French worked hand in hand, with the Crossand the priest ever in advance of the trader's pack.French missionaries were the first white men to settlei