Welcome to this week’s History Thread!
Today’s picture: On May 7, 1763, Pontiac of the Ottawa tribe took a party of warriors to Ft. Detroit, initiating one of North America’s bloodiest Indian conflicts – Pontiac’s War. The war arose from the aftermath of the French and Indian War, particularly the heavyhanded governance of Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who restricted trade with the Natives and began stationing troops in their territory with obvious contempt for them. Despite the Proclamation of 1763, which nominally restricted white settlement west of the Alleghenies, Amherst’s style clashed with the previously amiable relationships between Natives and the French who’d previously occupied the region, breeding resentment. This, along with a religious movement led by the Delaware Prophet, led a loose alliance of tribes to coalesce around Pontiac in order to resist the British.
The war began with Pontiac’s failed attack on Ft. Detroit and soon spread as far east as Pennsylvania and Virginia, from attacks on military installation to raids on settlements. There were many atrocities committed by Pontiac’s men against white settlers, though there was no consistency in their actions; tribes who had better relations with whites tended to take captives or disperse the enemy rather than kill them. In the nature of frontier warfare, the British responded with even greater, often indiscriminate ferocity: a group of vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys rampaged throughout eastern Pennsylvania, murdering dozens of peaceful Indians and even threatening to march on Philadelphia to massacre Indians who’d taken refuge there. And at Ft. Pitt, General Amherst at least considered gifting smallpox blankets to Indians menacing the fort, though there’s conflicting evidence whether it was ever carried out.
Eventually, after a decisive defeat at the Battle of Bushy Run and several punitive expeditions by General Thomas Gage, Pontiac’s confederation collapsed. Nonetheless, modern historians often view it as, if not a victory for Pontiac, at least a stalemate, as it delayed British expansion into the Midwest and established a friendlier, more diplomatic Anglo-Indian relationship which lasted through the War of 1812. Nonetheless, the raids antagonized colonists in the states and territories affected by the war, and their distrust of British ability to protect them from Indians played a contributing factor in the tensions leading to the American Revolution a decade later.