Letters

In the spring, “Alexis Cuillerier” show’d Pontiac a letter he claim’d to have taken from a French courier betwixt Detroit & Illinois: in the name of Louis XV, and despite the Peace of Paris, it warn’d the English to leave Detroit before they were destroy’d by the French army he was sending from Louisiana. It was my father’s 1st forged letter. I am loath to believe that Pontiac gave credence to its ancient fiction, or was meant to, tho he tried in turn to make use of it to rouse the Illinois & others to resume the war. But Colonel Bouquet’s counter-expedition that year, from Fort Pitt to Ohio, was Senecan in its ferocity: the English now scalpt, raped, tortured, took few prisoners, disemboweled the pregnant — even lifted two scalps from each woman, and impaled the nether one on their saddle horns, an atrocity that had not hitherto occurr’d to the Iroquois. The Delawares made peace; the Mingoes, the Shawnees, the Miamis, the Potawatomis, on what terms they could. On 25 July, 1766, the 7th anniversary of Sir William Johnson’s capture of Fort Niagara, Pontiac sign’d a treaty with that worthy at Oswego, officially ending his great Conspiracy, and retired to his ancestral home on the Maumee River, above Detroit, laden with gifts & very drunk.

That same year, my grandfather’s literate friend Captain Robert Rogers (now Major Rogers) publisht the 1st American play ever to deal with the Indians: a blank-verse tragedy in the Shakespearian manner called Ponteach: or, The Savages of America. I cannot prove that Andrew Cooke III wrote that play, but there are almost as many family touches in it as in Sot-Weed Redivivus. The unscrupulous trader M’Dole in Act I not only boasts to his associate:

Our fundamental Maxim then is this,

That it’s no Crime to cheat and gull an Indian…

but acknowledges candidly:

…the great Engine I employ is Rum,

More powerful made by certain strengthening Drugs.

“Ponteach” declares to the English governor in Act I:

[The French] we thot bad enough, but think you worse.

And in Act II:

The French familiariz’d themselves with us,

Studied our Tongue and Manners, wore our Dress,

Married our Daughters, and our Sons their Maids…

Chief Bear laments of the English invaders:

Their Cities, Towns, and Villages arise,

Forests are spoil’d, the Haunts of Game destroy’d,

And all the Sea Coasts made one general Waste.

Chief Wolf asserts:

We’re poisoned with the Infection of our Foes…

A wily French priest repeats in Act III a perversion of the gospel of the “Delaware Prophet”:

[The English] once betray’d and kill’d [God’s] Son,

Who came to save you Indians from Damnation—

He was an Indian, therefore they destroy’d him;

He rose again and took his flight to Heaven.

But when his foes are slain he’ll quick return,

And be your kind Protector, Friend, and King.

Be therefore brave and fight his Battles for Him…

Kill all you captivate, both old and young,

Mothers and children, let them feel your Tortures;

He that shall kill a Briton, merits Heaven.

And should you chance to fall, you’ll be convey’d

By flying Angels to your King that’s there.

Alas, we know the Angel who had flown! In Act V, Rogers sounds a pair of Shakespearian notes that (so testified my father) Andrew Cooke had taught him to admire: the Indians having been betray’d by British & French alike and the uprising collapsed, “Ponteach’s” son “Philip” remarks on the “game of governments”:

The Play is ended; now succeeds the Farce.

And when characters thot dead vengefully reappear, his other son “Chekitan” (Pontiac had no such sons; he was more father to my father than to his own offspring, of whom we know nothing) wonders in best Elizabethan fashion:

May we believe, or is this all a Dream?

Are we awake?…

Or is it Juggling, Fascination all?

Deadly juggling it was. In the aftermath of the war, “Alexis Cuillerier” was arrested in Detroit and charged with the 1764 murder of one Betty Fisher, the seven-year-old daughter of the 1st white family kill’d in the rising. “Angélique” did not appear at the trial — in fact, after 1763 Andrée Castine Cooke vanishes from the family records as if flown bodily to heaven — but “Antoine Cuillerier” did, and by some means prevail’d upon Pontiac to testify in my father’s defence. The Chief 1st declared that the Fisher child, afflicted with the fluxes after her capture, had so anger’d him by accidentally soiling his clothes that he had thrown her into the Maumee & order’d young Cuillerier to wade in & drown her. Not exactly an exoneration! After further conference with my grandfather, who reminded him that the Oswego treaty made him immune from prosecution on any charges dating from the war, Pontiac changed his testimony: He himself, he now declared, had done both the throwing & the drowning, driven by his general hatred of white females after his betrayal by one of their number in May 1763. And the river had been the Detroit, not his beloved Maumee, which he would never have so defiled.