Ojibwe tribesmen playing a rowdy ball and stick game similar to lacrosse
suddenly rushed the open gates of Fort Micjilimackinac massacring the
small garrison and English inhabitants. It was the westernmost attack in
a continent spanning uprising against English rule led Pontiac in 1763.
It must have been an exciting game. Certainly, June 2, 1763 was a perfect day for it. Spring
had finally come to Fort Michilimackinac,
the ice was clearing from Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. The sun was shining. The men of the fort, and some of their women,
too, spilled out of the palisaded walls to watch the excitement. Others
went about their business
inside. The semi-permanent Ojibwe trading village outside the walls was overflowing with visitors for the contest of baaga’adowe, a stick and ball goal game—a forerunner
of lacrosse—with scores of young men, stripped to the waist, dashing
back and forth across a broad field
flaying with their clubs. It must have been quite a spectacle, and a welcome relief from the boredom of having been cooped
up in the Fort for the long northern
winter.
Then, on some sort of signal, the players
turned from their game and rushed
the wide open gate of the fort, their game clubs now turned to deadly weapons.
The warriors clubbed all of the Englishmen
they could find but unless they resisted
or there was a mistake left the French unmolested. The English not killed outright were rounded
up. Their prolonged executions were more
gruesome than those felled in the initial rush. One or two Englishmen hid or managed to escape and attempt the long, treacherous trip to the safety
of far off Fort Detroit. The handful of English women were taken captive.
Michilimackinac was not a military outpost. It was a key
trading post for the fur trade.
But it was situated in
one of the most strategically important
locations in North America, the southern shore of the Straits of Mackinac connecting Lake
Huron and Lake Michigan, at the northern
tip of the lower peninsula of
the present-day Michigan. Thus is stood athwart the trading highway that stretched from the mouth of the St. Lawrence,
through the Great Lakes and by connection via portage to the drainage of
the Mississippi River.
Jesuit missionary and explorer Pere Jaques Marquette founded St.
Ignance Mission in 1671 near the site where the French built For de
Baude.
The French from Quebec had established a presence in the area back
in 1671 when the Jesuit explorer Père
Jacques Marquette founded St.
Ignance Mission. Then French
authorities built Fort de Buade in
1683 and a mission at Sault Ste. Marie in
1688. But these distant outposts were imperiled
when some of the tribes murdered their
Jesuit missionaries in isolated
villages and rebelled against French
trading practices. Fearing a general war and the permanent rupture of valuable trade relations with the
tribes, the Sieur de Cadillac moved the French garrison to Fort
Detroit and closed the mission.
But the area was too vital to be permanently abandoned. The
French returned in 1717 and built the first
palisades for Fort Michilimackinac.
Over the next decades the
Fort grew into a complex of buildings,
a real village, as the log walls were
expanded. There was a small military
garrison, but the fort was filled mostly with French traders, priests, and
numerous Métis—French and native “half breeds” who made up the indispensable core of the voyagers
who made the vast fur trade possible.
Since the French lost the prolonged dust-up known to Americans as the French and Indian Wars, they had to surrender Michilimackinac, along with half a continent in 1716.
The English recognized the post as a key trading post and as a possible check to any possible attempt
by France to reclaim the fur trade
by encroachment from their settlements in Louisiana Although they did
dispatch a small garrison, the post remained what it always had been—a trading
post. The English allowed the French and
Métis inhabitants to stay and to practice
their religion. They had to. In order to take over the fur trade they needed
them. But a layer of new English traders were brought in to run things.
And the English had a different
way of doing business.
The French both well understood the local culture, which valued gift giving, and had developed
long standing relationships—often blood
relationships—with the tribes. So
naturally, the Ojibwe were resentful
of the displacement of their longtime
friends. But they were far more
resentful of English trade policies. The newcomers with their mercantile tradition were loath
to make gifts or payments
without explicit direct return. So they greatly
reduced the annual gifts presented to tribal
leaders. Then they re-set the value set on a variety of furs and pelts essentially reducing payments across the board.
In addition, goods in the post
stores were priced higher and
some were subject to the new duties
imposed by Parliament to pay for
the cost of the wars—the same duties
Colonists on the Atlantic seaboard would soon become restless
about.
Moreover, the English just seemed more contemptuous of the tribes
and their people. As they were less interested than the French in saving the souls of the “savages”, they
were less likely to treat them with
respect. To be frank, a deep racism had already infected the English to a degree
different, and worse, than the
French.
So it should not have been
surprising that resent building among the tribes was bound to boil over. Yet it
was. So clueless were the English to all of the signals around them, so confident in their superiority to rule.
No reliable portrait of Pontiac exists. This fanciful 19th Century
engraving un-historically depicts him in council before a village of
tepees, a plains tribe lodging found nowhere among the tribes the great
leader united against the British.
Dissatisfaction was not just limited
to the Ojibwe. It was shared by many tribes spanning the Ohio valley, Great Lakes, and the newly
acquired Illinois Country. Representatives of many tribes had been called together for a Great Council on April 28 of 1763 where
the Ottawa leader Pontiac purportedly called for a
confederation of the tribes to unite in a concerted effort to drive
the English out.
Runners
went out across the wilderness. Quickly remarkably
coordinated attacks were launched
against English outposts across the wide
area. On May 7 Pontiac led an
attack on the keystone fort in the West—Detroit,
which settled into a long siege. Meanwhile attacks were carried out on other
posts and five more were captured—Fort Sandusky on Lake Erie, Fort St. Joseph on the river of the same name near Lake Michigan, Fort Ouiatenon in the
Illinois Country (modern Indiana), Fort Miami near modern Ft. Wayne, and then Michilimackinac.
Despite the wide spread warfare, the
garrison there was completely unaware
of the other attacks.
Ojibwe elders and warriors gather in the shadow of the Fort to plan the
attack. Although eastern posts and been attacked almost a month earlier
and Fort Detroit was under siege, Michilmackinace had not gotten
word of the wide-spread uprising.
In all of these attacks, except the
one on Fort Ouiatenon, the garrisons and civilians were massacred. But at the Illinois
outpost the Weas, Kickapoos, and Mascoutens not only spared the
garrison, but apologized to the
English commander for the attack. They
did not want to do it, they said, but they had promised the other tribes that they would support the
uprising. The fact that the Illinois
tribes were at best reluctant
participants helped unravel the
whole rebellion.
Despite the success of early attacks
and the defeat of an English relief
force in the field at the Battle of
Bloody Run on July 31and a second
wave of attacks that captured forts in the Ohio region, forcing the English
back to Fort Pitt where they were
besieged, Pontiac was not able to take
Fort Detroit. By late August his
warriors, used to warfare by raid
and unaccustomed to a prolonged
siege campaign began melting away. He pinned
his hopes on the arrival for support from the Illinois Country, but
eventually came to the conclusion
that it would never arrive. By October he had to lift the siege.
Meanwhile after serious fighting and raids
deep into Pennsylvania and Virginia, the siege of Fort Pitt had
been relieved by reinforcements and
the English systematically introduced
small pox to the eastern tribes by way of infected blankets causing what would
eventually be a devastating epidemic
killing as many as 400,000 natives
during and in the years following the rebellion.
Lord Jeffrey Amherst donned romantic armor for this heroic portrait. He
out waited Pontiac at the Siege of Detroit and managed to retake most
of the lost western forts the next year before making a peace largely
favorable to the native tribes.
The following year the English commander, Lord Jeffrey Amherst was able to mass reinforcements and take back most of the lost forts, including
Michilimackinac with relatively little
fighting. The Ojibwe and their
French and Métis friends could find no
market for their furs with the English still controlling the east and St.
Lawrence, meaning none of the trade goods on which the local economy had become
dependent on were available. They were willing to treat with the English.
For their part the English seem to
have learned a lesson. Instead of punitive expeditions aimed at annihilating the tribes, Amherst
promised a return of annual gifts
and more favorable trade policies. A local
peace was made. This pattern was
repeated over the wide contested areas.
Pontiac was never able to rally
the tribes for a second season
of coordinated warfare. Although some
fighting—including brutal raiding and counter raiding between the tribes and
frontier settlers and their militias along
the eastern frontier—continued, local peace took hold many places and Pontiac
himself signed a treaty at Fort Ontario in July of 1766. It was hardly
a surrender—no lands were ceded, no
prisoners returned, and no hostages were
taken, but it did end the conflict
with a broad acknowledgement of English
sovereignty.
News
from England of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which drew a boundary line between the British colonies along the
seaboard, and Native American lands west of the creating a vast Indian
Reserve that stretched west to the Mississippi and from Florida to Quebec, undoubtedly appeased the tribes.
But it also infuriated the
American Colonies, particularly Pennsylvania and Virginia which had claims to land beyond the mountains and settlers
clamoring for new land.
The English rapprochement with the tribes was so successful that when the American
Revolution broke out, most sided
with the Red Coats and were recognized as irregular native troops in bloody
frontier warfare. The Americans, for
their part, had been so hostile and
punitive that few tribes allied
with them.
The masonry fort on Mackinac Island replaced the last incarnation of the wooden palisade fort on the mainland.
Back at Michilimackinac, the English
came to the conclusion that the old
fort was indefensible, especially
after George Rogers Clark successfully
captured their western outposts at Kaskaskia,
Cahokia, and Vincennes during the Revolution. In 1781 they began the
construction of a new, modern limestone
fortification on nearby Mackinac
Island. Once the walls were up, the buildings of Ft.
Michilimackinac were dismantled one
by one and rebuilt on the island. When
the transfer was complete, the palisades of the old fort were burned.
The English were supposed to surrender the fort to the newly independent United States by the Treaty
of Paris in 1783. But the English
were loath to surrender such an
important strategic .location and a still quite profitable trading post. The Americans were not able to take possession until 1798,
In the war of 1812 the English were
able to retake the fort without firing a shot from the small
American garrison there. An American
attempt to retake the fort in 1814 failed
and it remained in enemy hands
for the duration of the war. It was returned to American hands in 1815.
The modern re-creation of Fort Michilimackinac is considered one of the
most accurate replicas in North America except for having just one wall
instead of a double palisade.
Today a recreation of Ft.
Michilimackinac stands in Colonial Michilimackinac
State Park in Mackinaw City. It is considered one of the most accurate of such recreations, although
it features only one palisade, not the double
palisades of the old French fort.
Across the water Fort Mackinac is
well preserved as part of Mackinac
Island State Park and is the site of regular
historic reenactments. Both are major tourist attractions.
