Title: The French King Wakes up in Detroit: "Pontiac's War" in Rumor and History
Abstract: After the fall of New France, the rumor circulated among Indians, habitants, and Anglo-Americans that France would imminently return to America. This article examines the role of the rumor in War, suggesting that it had little to do with French control over Indians as previous historians have intimated. Considering the rumor's form as well as its substance, the article argues that it represented an Indian attempt to influence France. To support that argument, the article traces the rumor's history through the American Revolution to the Louisiana Purchase. In the Great Lakes region after the withdrawal of France, the belief that the French king would return his armies to North America found remarkably wide acceptance. Held by individuals among both the French and the Indian communities, this belief influenced many of the warriors in the western theater of the war (1763-65) that bears name.1 Encountered and seized upon by British traders and officers, it was carried into the upper echelons of both the British Indian department and the British North American military establishment, where it was transmuted into an understanding that the war was the result of a French conspiracy. Placed in the letters and journals of prolific British agents, the belief journeyed out of the eighteenth century and into the histories of Francis Parkman and Howard Peckham, as well as those of prominent scholars of our own day.2 These historians, like the British officers and traders from whom they drew most of their evidence, have seen French intrigue behind Indian action. While neither scholar has ignored Indian motives-most importantly the Indians' dread of the territorial expansion of the British, a people who had not proven themselves willing to abide by Indian protoEthnohistory 37:3 (Summer I990). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I80i/9o/$I.5.. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 04:40:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Pontiac's War in Rumor and History col or to take into consideration Indian needs-they have nonetheless placed French influence in the foreground, leaving Indian objectives in the shadow of the imperial struggles.3 Cutting implicitly against the grain of Parkman's and Peckham's interpretations stands much of the work, one might even say the program, of ethnohistorians who have sought to discover Native American influences in history. Cutting explicitly against the charge that the Indians fought in response to manipulative French intrigue are the dissertation of Michael McConnell, a short, assertive, biographical entry by Louis Chevrette, and the third volume of Francis Jennings's Covenant-Chain trilogy, Empire of Fortune. McConnell argues not only that the French habitants were divided over the hostilities, but that those Canadians who supported Indians in the war did so not as instigators but as people who, like the Indians, were suddenly faced with a radically different world under British occupation. Chevrette baldly states that the French officers in the Illinois country had no part in the Indians' war. Jennings locates early stirrings in the central council of the Six Nations at Onondaga.4 Still, after crediting Indians with agency, after comprehending Indian defensive motives and grasping the Indian quest for autonomy, we are nonetheless left with all that talk, in the record, of the French, much of it from the lips of Indian speakers. We are still left with those rumors that the French king had awakened and was sending his troops to rescue New France. We are still left with Native American claims that a French revival of power was in the making. This is a history of the idea of the French return, an idea that has been widely noted but never convincingly interpreted. Reinterpreting a very narrow body of evidence, most of which has been previously worked over in a very different manner, this article will suggest that the idea had little to do with French manipulation of Indians. Through an examination not only of the content of recorded Indian speech but also of its context and style, it will argue that the idea of the French return reflected an Indian attempt to manipulate France, to bring back, through war and ceremony, the French counterweight to Anglo-American expansion. The notion of the French return spread far beyond the Indian villages of the trans-Allegheny West. It enlivened the hopes of habitants, but not all habitants; it stirred deep fears among Britons, particularly British traders; and it worked its way into scholarship, providing evidence for the major historical interpretation of the war, which we will now examine in detail. According to much of the scholarship on War, the French achieved a revival of power following the fall of New France through their continued influence over the Indians. Francis Parkman, in his multivolume z55 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 04:40:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Publication Year: 1990
Publication Date: 1990-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 12
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