In all Indian annals no name is more
illustrious than Pontiac's; no figure more forcefully displays
the good and bad qualities of his race. Principal chief of the
Ottawa tribe, he was also by 1763 the head of a powerful
confederation of Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomi, and a leader
known and respected among Algonquin peoples from the sources of
the Ohio to the Mississippi. While capable of acts of
magnanimity, he had an ambition of Napoleonic proportions, and to
attain his ends he was prepared to use any means. More clearly
than most of his forest contemporaries, he perceived that in the
life of the Indian people a crisis had come. He saw that, unless
the tide of English invasion was rolled back at once, all would
be lost. The colonial farmers would push in after the soldiers;
the forests would be cut away; the hunting-grounds would be
destroyed; the native population would be driven away or
enslaved. In the silence of his wigwam he thought out a plan of
action, and by the closing weeks of 1762 he was ready. Never was
plot more shrewdly devised and more artfully carried out.
Pages:
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32