Letters

The jury preferr’d his original version & found against my father, who promptly escaped custody & disappear’d — as Alexis Cuillerier. One “Antoine Cuillerier,” then in his 70’s, lived a few more years in the role of habitant in the Fort Detroit area, and there died. Of Andrew Cooke III we know no more. Pontiac himself, two years after his trial, was clubb’d & stabb’d (so reports one Pierre Menard, habitant) in the village of Cahokia by a young Illinois warrior bribed “by the English” to the deed. The assassin’s tribe was almost exterminated in the reprisal by the nations Pontiac had endeavour’d in vain to bring together: that was a kind of fighting they understood.

Oh child, how I am heavied by this chronicle — whose next installment must bring my father to rebirth, myself to birth (you too, perhaps!), & be altogether livelier going.

Pontiac, Pontiac! Andrew, Andrew! How near you came to succeeding!

And Henry, Henrietta! We will come nearer yet, you &

Your loving father,

A.B.C. IV

O: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of H. C. Burlingame IV: the First American Revolution.

At Castines Hundred

Niagara, Upper Canada

Thursday, 9 April 1812

My Darling Henry or Henrietta,

On this date 100 years since, there was bloodily put down in New York a brave rebellion of black slaves, instigated three days before — so my father chose to believe — by his grandfather & namesake, Henry Burlingame III, after the failure of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy. Six of the rebels committed suicide, 21 were executed. One “Saturnian revolution” later, he maintain’d, in 1741, my own grandfather & namesake, Andrew Cooke III, successfully spiked a 2nd such revolution in the same place, with even bloodier result: 13 hang’d, 13 burnt, 71 transported.

I did not believe him.

Neither did I believe, when I came of age, what he had told me in my boyhood of his mother, Andrée Castine: that she betray’d Pontiac to Major Gladwin & thus undermined, with my grandfather’s aid, the great “Indian Conspiracy” of 1763-64.

Henry Cooke Burlingame IV, at least in the brief period of his official life (1746–1785), lack’d Pontiac’s tragical vision. The most I will concede to his slanderous opinion of my grandparents is the possibility of their having realized, around 1760, that their grand strategy had misfired: that the French might never regain control of the Canadas, much less link them with Louisiana & push east across the Appalachians to the Atlantic; that “successful” Indian resistance would lead only to their extermination by the British. In short, that the sad sole future of the red man lay in accommodation & negotiated concession, to the end of at least fractional survival & the gradual “reddening” of the whites. Pontiac’s one victory, on this view, was Major Rogers’s verse tragedy Ponteach: as Lord Amherst infected the Indians with smallpox, Pontiac infected white Americans with Myth, at least as contagious & insusceptible to cure.

More simply, we have the testimony of Andrée’s diary that she & Andrew believed it necessary for the Indians (who, as we have seen, would not take the calculated loss of storming operations) at least to master the art of protracted siege — which interfered only with their seasonal rhythms, not with their famous individualism — if they were to conduct successful large-scale campaigns against white fortifications & artillery. Sieges were a repeatable discipline; Pontiac’s tactic (to enter the fort as if for a conference & then fall on the unsuspecting officers) was a one-time-only Indian trick which would make legitimate conferences difficult to arrange in the future. Its “betrayal” (she does not directly either admit or deny betraying it herself) did not undermine the general plan; it only made necessary a change of tactics.

“She made that diary note a full year later,” my father observed. “She was covering their tracks. She knew how I loved old Pontiac.”

It is true that such entries, especially belated ones, can be disingenuous. But my father, like the rest of us, chose by heart as much as by head which ones to put his faith in.