Chapter 10

1763.

DETROIT.

To the credulity of mankind each great calamity has its dire prognostics.  Signs and portents in the heavens, the vision of an Indian bow, and the figure of a scalp imprinted on the disk of the moon, warned the New England Puritans of impending war.  The apparitions passed away, and Philip of Mount Hope burst from the forest with his Narragansett warriors.  In October, 1762, thick clouds of inky blackness gathered above the fort and settlement of Detroit.  The river darkened beneath the awful shadows, and the forest was wrapped in double gloom.  Drops of rain began to fall, of strong, sulphurous odor, and so deeply colored that the people, it is said, collected them and used them for writing.  A literary and philosophical journal of the time seeks to explain this strange phenomenon on some principle of physical science; but the simple Canadians held a different faith.  Throughout the winter, the shower of black rain was the foremost topic of their fireside talk; and forebodings of impending evil disturbed the breast of many a timorous matron.

La Motte-Cadillac was the founder of Detroit.  In the year 1701, he planted the little military colony, which time has transformed into a thriving American city.  At an earlier date, some feeble efforts had been made to secure the possession of this important pass; and when La Hontan visited the lakes, a small post, called Fort St.  Joseph, was standing near the present site of Fort Gratiot.  The wandering Jesuits, too, made frequent sojourns upon the borders of the Detroit, and baptized the savage children whom they found there.
Fort St.  Joseph was abandoned in the year 1688.  The establishment of Cadillac was destined to a better fate, and soon rose to distinguished importance among the western outposts of Canada.  Indeed, the site was formed by nature for prosperity;  and a bad government and a thriftless people could not prevent the increase of the colony.  At the close of the French war, as Major Rogers tells us, the place contained twenty-five hundred inhabitants.  The centre of the settlement was the fortified town, currently called the Fort, to distinguish it from the straggling dwellings along the river banks.  It stood on the western margin of the river, covering a small part of the ground now occupied by the city of Detroit, and contained about a hundred houses, compactly pressed together, and surrounded by a palisade.  Both above and below the fort, the banks of the stream were lined on both sides with small Canadian dwellings, extending at various intervals for nearly eight miles.  Each had its garden and its orchard, and each was enclosed by a fence of rounded pickets.  To the soldier or the trader, fresh from the harsh scenery and ambushed perils of the surrounding wilds, the secluded settlement was welcome as an oasis in the desert.

The Canadian is usually a happy man.  Life sits lightly upon him; he laughs at its hardships, and soon forgets its sorrows.  A lover of roving and adventure, of the frolic and the dance, he is little troubled with thoughts of the past or the future, and little plagued with avarice or ambition.  At Detroit, all his propensities found ample scope.  Aloof from the world, the simple colonists shared none of its pleasures and excitements, and were free from many of its cares.  Nor were luxuries wanting which civilization might have envied them.  The forests teemed with game, the marshes with wild fowl, and the rivers with fish.  The apples and pears of the old Canadian orchards are even to this day held in esteem.  The poorer inhabitants made wine from the fruit of the wild grape, which grew profusely in the woods, while the wealthier class procured a better quality from Montreal, in exchange for the canoe loads of furs which they sent down with every year.  Here, as elsewhere in Canada, the long winter was a season of social enjoyment; and when, in summer and autumn, the traders and voyageurs, the coureurs de bois, and half-breeds, gathered from the distant forests of the north-west, the whole settlement was alive with dancing and feasting, drinking, gaming, and carousing.

 FORT AND SETTLEMENTS OF DETROIT, A.  D.  1763
Larger.  

Within the limits of the settlement were three large Indian villages.  On the western shore, a little below the fort, were the lodges of the Pottawattamies; nearly opposite, on the eastern side, was the village of the Wyandots; and on the same side, five miles higher up, Pontiac’s band of Ottawas had fixed their abode.  The settlers had always maintained the best terms with their savage neighbors.  In truth, there was much congeniality between the red man and the Canadian.  Their harmony was seldom broken; and among the woods and wilds of the northern lakes roamed many a lawless half-breed, the mongrel offspring of the colonists of Detroit and the Indian squaws.

We have already seen how, in an evil hour for the Canadians, a party of British troops took possession of Detroit, towards the close of the year 1760.  The British garrison, consisting partly of regulars and partly of provincial rangers, was now quartered in a well-built range of barracks within the town or fort.  The latter, as already mentioned, contained about a hundred small houses.  Its form was nearly square, and the palisade which surrounded it was about twenty-five feet high.  At each corner was a wooden bastion, and a blockhouse was erected over each gateway.  The houses were small, chiefly built of wood, and roofed with bark or a thatch of straw.  The streets also were extremely narrow, though a wide passage way, known as the chemin du ronde, surrounded the town, between the houses and the palisade.  Besides the barracks, the only public buildings were a council-house and a rude little church.

The garrison consisted of a hundred and twenty soldiers, with about forty fur-traders and engagés; but the latter, as well as the Canadian inhabitants of the place, could little be trusted, in the event of an Indian outbreak.  Two small, armed schooners, the Beaver and the Gladwyn, lay anchored in the stream, and several light pieces of artillery were mounted on the bastions.

Such was Detroit,—a place whose defences could have opposed no resistance to a civilized enemy; and yet, far removed as it was from the hope of speedy succor, it could only rely, in the terrible struggles that awaited it, upon its own slight strength and feeble resources.

Standing on the water bastion of Detroit, a pleasant landscape spread before the eye.  The river, about half a mile wide, almost washed the foot of the stockade; and either bank was lined with the white Canadian cottages.  The joyous sparkling of the bright blue water; the green luxuriance of the woods; the white dwellings, looking out from the foliage; and, in the distance, the Indian wigwams curling their smoke against the sky,—all were mingled in one broad scene of wild and rural beauty.

Pontiac, the Satan of this forest paradise, was accustomed to spend the early part of the summer upon a small island at the opening of the Lake St.  Clair, hidden from view by the high woods that covered the intervening Isle au Cochon.  “The king and lord of all this country,” as Rogers calls him, lived in no royal state.  His cabin was a small, oven-shaped structure of bark and rushes.  Here he dwelt, with his squaws and children; and here, doubtless, he might often have been seen, lounging, half-naked, on a rush mat, or a bear-skin, like any ordinary warrior.  We may fancy the current of his thoughts, the turmoil of his uncurbed passions, as he revolved the treacheries which, to his savage mind, seemed fair and honorable.  At one moment, his fierce heart would burn with the anticipation of vengeance on the detested English; at another, he would meditate how he best might turn the approaching tumults to the furtherance of his own ambitious schemes.  Yet we may believe that Pontiac was not a stranger to the high emotion of the patriot hero, the champion not merely of his nation’s rights, but of the very existence of his race.  He did not dream how desperate a game he was about to play.  He hourly flattered himself with the futile hope of aid from France, and thought in his ignorance that the British colonies must give way before the rush of his savage warriors; when, in truth, all the combined tribes of the forest might have chafed in vain rage against the rock-like strength of the Anglo-Saxon.

Looking across an intervening arm of the river, Pontiac could see on its eastern bank the numerous lodges of his Ottawa tribesmen, half hidden among the ragged growth of trees and bushes.  On the afternoon of the fifth of May, a Canadian woman, the wife of St.  Aubin, one of the principal settlers, crossed over from the western side, and visited the Ottawa village, to obtain from the Indians a supply of maple sugar and venison.  She was surprised at finding several of the warriors engaged in filing off the muzzles of their guns, so as to reduce them, stock and all, to the length of about a yard.  Returning home in the evening, she mentioned what she had seen to several of her neighbors.  Upon this, one of them, the blacksmith of the village, remarked that many of the Indians had lately visited his shop, and attempted to borrow files and saws for a purpose which they would not explain.  These circumstances excited the suspicion of the experienced Canadians.  

Doubtless there were many in the settlement who might, had they chosen, have revealed the plot; but it is no less certain that the more numerous and respectable class in the little community had too deep an interest in the preservation of peace, to countenance the designs of Pontiac.  M.  Gouin, an old and wealthy settler, went to the commandant, and conjured him to stand upon his guard; but Gladwyn, a man of fearless temper, gave no heed to the friendly advice.

In the Pottawattamie village, if there be truth in tradition, lived an Ojibwa girl, who could boast a larger share of beauty than is common in the wigwam.  She had attracted the eye of Gladwyn.  He had formed a connection with her, and she had become much attached to him.  On the afternoon of the sixth, Catharine—for so the officers called her—came to the fort, and repaired to Gladwyn’s quarters, bringing with her a pair of elk-skin moccasons, ornamented with porcupine work, which he had requested her to make.  There was something unusual in her look and manner.  Her face was sad and downcast.  She said little, and soon left the room; but the sentinel at the door saw her still lingering at the street corner, though the hour for closing the gates was nearly come.  At length she attracted the notice of Gladwyn himself; and calling her to him, he pressed her to declare what was weighing upon her mind.  Still she remained for a long time silent, and it was only after much urgency and many promises not to betray her, that she revealed her momentous secret.

To-morrow, she said, Pontiac will come to the fort with sixty of his chiefs.  Each will be armed with a gun, cut short, and hidden under his blanket.  Pontiac will demand to hold a council; and after he has delivered his speech, he will offer a peace-belt of wampum, holding it in a reversed position.  This will be the signal of attack.  The chiefs will spring up and fire upon the officers, and the Indians in the street will fall upon the garrison.  Every Englishman will be killed, but not the scalp of a single Frenchman will be touched.

Such is the story told in 1768 to the traveller Carver at Detroit, and preserved in local tradition, but not sustained by contemporary letters or diaries.  What is certain is, that Gladwyn received secret information, on the night of the sixth of May, that an attempt would be made on the morrow to capture the fort by treachery.  He called some of his officers, and told them what he had heard.  The defences of the place were feeble and extensive, and the garrison by far too weak to repel a general assault.  The force of the Indians at this time is variously estimated at from six hundred to two thousand; and the commandant greatly feared that some wild impulse might precipitate their plan, and that they would storm the fort before the morning.  Every preparation was made to meet the sudden emergency.  Half the garrison were ordered under arms, and all the officers prepared to spend the night upon the ramparts.

The day closed, and the hues of sunset faded.  Only a dusky redness lingered in the west, and the darkening earth seemed her dull self again.  Then night descended, heavy and black, on the fierce Indians and the sleepless English.  From sunset till dawn, an anxious watch was kept from the slender palisades of Detroit.  The soldiers were still ignorant of the danger; and the sentinels did not know why their numbers were doubled, or why, with such unwonted vigilance, their officers repeatedly visited their posts.  Again and again Gladwyn mounted his wooden ramparts, and looked forth into the gloom.  There seemed nothing but repose and peace in the soft, moist air of the warm spring evening, with the piping of frogs along the river bank, just roused from their torpor by the genial influence of May.  But, at intervals, as the night wind swept across the bastion, it bore sounds of fearful portent to the ear, the sullen booming of the Indian drum and the wild chorus of quavering yells, as the warriors, around their distant camp-fires, danced the war-dance, in preparation for the morrow’s work.