The War for the Great Lakes: Pontiac's Confederacy, 1763-1766

The plan depended on an open gate. In May 1763 an Odawa speaker named Pontiac gathered more than three hundred Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Huron-Wendat warriors across the river from Fort Detroit. They would ask to come inside for a council, as they always had, and take the fort from within. But someone had warned the commandant, Major Henry Gladwin, and on the morning of May 9 the gates stayed shut.

What brought them to that riverbank was a peace they had no part in making. When New France surrendered in 1760, the Great Lakes nations found their French father replaced by a British one who would not send gifts to their councils. To the people of the upper country a gift was the signature on an alliance, and General Jeffrey Amherst saw no reason to pay for a peace he had already won. Then word came down the rivers from a Delaware prophet named Neolin: the Master of Life had given this land to the people made for it.

Within weeks, British posts across the upper country had fallen and Fort Pitt was under siege too. Detroit held out for nearly six months. Elsewhere the war ran on to Colonel Henry Bouquet's hard-won victory at Bushy Run and the Paxton men who murdered the Conestoga people of Lancaster County, while in London the Proclamation of 1763 tried to fix a boundary along the mountains. It ended in peace councils, one of them at the forks of the Ohio.

Pontiac never took Detroit. But an empire that had just won Canada learned that it would have to bargain for the Great Lakes, council by council and gift by gift.