The duty continues its journey back to the sources of French America, focusing on the exploration of Quebec newspapers and archives. To broaden our horizons, we will travel from the northern reaches of the Hudson to the sunny dreams of Florida, while tracing the thread of a shared story. Today, Pontiac and French Illinois.
On April 20, 1769, the most famous Aboriginal chief of his time, Pontiac, was not yet outrageously reduced to the image of a simple brand of automobiles. The Outaouais chef enters the counter of Baynton, Wharton & Morgan, in Cahokia, in the country of Illinois. He just emerges when he is fatally stabbed in the back. The man, who six years earlier had made British America tremble, collapses full length, in the middle of one of the muddy streets of this village populated by French Canadians.
Pontiac’s uprising had broken out in the spring of 1763 in the Great Lakes basin, barely two years after the British conquest of Canada. The new masters of the country have axed the French diplomacy of the annual presents offered to the indigenous nations. Access to guns and gunpowder is also restricted, by order of General Jeffery Amherst.
This austerity policy is tearing up the relationships established up to now. In addition to the Outaouais of its own nation, Pontiac rallies the Delawares, the Hurons of Detroit, the Miamis, the Ojibwés, the Poutéouatamis and the Shawnees, whom English speakers call Shawnees. The movement is carried by the mystical current of the prophet Neolin, who preaches a return to pre-Columbian traditions. More realistic, Pontiac is betting on a tactical alliance with France, which he hopes will “wake up”.
Michilimackinac
From the British point of view, the impromptu uprising of Pontiac constitutes a “conspiracy”. Quebec historian Denys Delâge, professor emeritus at Laval University, sees it as nothing less than a “war of independence”.
Within weeks, the allied warriors captured nine fortified trading posts located around the Great Lakes. The largest of them, that of Michilimackinac, was conquered by trickery in the wake of a friendly game of lacrosse between the Ojidos and the Sauks. The soldiers of the garrison suspect nothing when the match ball lands in the compound. This is the signal for the two teams, who rush into it, catching the guns hidden under the covers of a group of indigenous women.
The Anglo-American merchant Alexander Henry witnesses the ensuing massacre in the streets of the town of 200 inhabitants. “I saw several of my compatriots fall, fighting for their lives between the knees of an Indian and having their scalps scalped long before they gave up the ghost,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I was equally horrified and scared, witnessing suffering that I knew I could experience myself. »
Tomahawk moves are not random. “At the worst of the carnage, I had clearly observed that several Canadians living in the fort were calmly watching what was happening and taking care not to intervene. This is what leads the Anglo-American to rush into the house of his neighbor, Charles Langlade, who is watching the scene from his window with his family. Henry begs him to get him out of this mess. “What do you want me to do about it?” retorts the Canadian, shrugging his shoulders.
The unfortunate man is saved in extremis by the native slave of the Langlade family, who leads him quietly to the attic. After many ups and downs, Henry slips away, blending into the native universe. “It was not without regret that I gave up my long hair, which I thought was flattering and natural,” he wrote after his head was shaved. The adventurer will end his life comfortably in Montreal, even becoming the dean of the Beaver Club, this meeting of the most prosperous fur traders in the metropolis, whose celebrations of the 200and anniversary in 1985 will be the subject of a famous cinematographic pamphlet by Pierre Falardeau.
Detroit
Michilimackinac fell on June 2, 1763. Pontiac was then 500 kilometers away, at the foot of the palisade of Detroit, the capital of the Great Lakes. Quite obliquely, the war of skirmishes, this little war practiced by the Aboriginals, does not allow the entry of such fortifications where there are 400 soldiers, cannons and mortars with grenades. Pontiac consulted the Canadians on the outskirts of the fort in order to construct a siege trench. Of good advice, the former subjects of Louis XV, however, hide in a benevolent and apparent neutrality.
Pontiac, for his part, deliberately maintains the mirage of a reconquest of the country by France. “It is not for revenge only that I make war on the English, it is for you my brothers, as for us”, he told the Canadians during one of his speeches reported by the anonymous author of Journal or dictation of a conspiracy. “I am French and I want to die French,” adds the Outaouais chief, who has carefully kept the white uniform given to him by General Montcalm. The confirmation of the signing of the Paris peace treaty is all the more discouraging for Pontiac.
The 1763 uprising was already running out of steam when General Amherst suggested to Colonel Henry Bouquet that he exterminate the Aboriginals of the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley through blankets infected with smallpox. This proposal for bacteriological warfare before its time, the application and effects of which are difficult to measure, will earn the British general the withdrawal of his name from the toponymy of Montreal in 2019.
Pontiac retreated to the southwest of Lake Erie with his warriors after the blockade of Detroit was lifted. The traveler Charles-André Barthe passed just a few kilometers from his camp in November 1765. The rumor of France’s return to America, fueled by the Outaouais chief, crept into the subconscious of this native Montrealer. “I dreamed that an Englishman told me that Canada, Acadia and La Pointe belonged to the King of France”, writes Barthe in his Naille Day in December 1765. His brother, Pierre-Amable, openly sided with Pontiac.
At the end of the beautiful days of 1766, the last warriors lay down their arms. The mirage of indigenous political autonomy is dissipating, despite the establishment of a territory that is in principle reserved for them, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. “The Royal Proclamation [britannique de 1763] directly prolongs the conquest of New France,” writes historian Alain Beaulieu. “Generally presented as a measure of protection against the Aboriginals, it in fact formalizes their dispossession. »
Cahokia
The British occupation of the Great Lakes basin extended to the Illinois country, where there was a string of Canadian villages surrounded by Aboriginal communities. We are at the heart of the Middle Ground, this space of reasonable accommodation conceptualized by the American historian Richard White.
Cahokia is one of those Canadian villages located on the east bank of the Mississippi. Cattle and pigs are raised there. Wheat is grown there, always with the help of slave labor which forms a third of the population. It was in the middle of this hamlet with sparse houses that Pontiac was shot in 1769 by a member of the Peorias nation who had come to avenge one of his uncles, humiliated by the former Outaouais leader.
In 1774, five years after Pontiac’s assassination, this village of Cahokia came under Quebec’s jurisdiction, along with all of the Great Lakes. As the American Revolution approached, London hoped to win Canadians over to the British cause. This “Quebecois” Cahokia was however conquered in 1778 by a small army of insurgents from Virginia.
Around 1820, one can still come across unilingual French-speaking Canadians there wearing the low ponytail, which had gone out of fashion everywhere else, at least among men. Visitors who stop there throughout the 19thand century are struck by the joie de vivre of these dance lovers who appear lost in the midst of American modernity. In 1935, the folklorist Joseph Médard Carrière took note of the presence of the last speakers from this Métis life. The Middle Ground of Pontiac has lived.