Pontiac's Rebellion 1763: Detroit's Foiled Ambush and a Stickball Ruse

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After the Seven Years' War ended French power in the Great Lakes and Ohio country, General Jeffery Amherst treated the region's nations as conquered subjects, ending the customary gift giving and restricting gunpowder and ammunition just as crop failures and disease struck in 1761 and 1762. Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, preached that the Master of Life demanded a rejection of European goods and alcohol. In late April 1763 the Odawa leader Pontiac gathered Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Wyandot leaders at a council on the Ecorse River, and on May 7 he entered Fort Detroit with about 300 warriors carrying concealed weapons, only to find the garrison armed and waiting. He gave no signal, walked out, and laid siege with more than 900 warriors.

Pontiac's wampum belts carried his call to distant nations, his forces routed a British sortie at the Battle of Bloody Run in July, and eight British forts fell within weeks. At Fort Pitt, William Trent and Captain Simeon Ecuyer handed native envoys two blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox hospital, while Amherst separately urged spreading the disease. The Paxton Boys massacred peaceful Susquehannock people, and Benjamin Franklin faced down their march on Philadelphia. As winter came and the French failed to return, Pontiac urged diplomacy while the Shawnee leader Charlot Kaské pressed on. Amherst was recalled, and the 1766 treaty at Fort Ontario cost Pontiac no land, prisoners or hostages.

• At Fort Michilimackinac on June 4, Ojibwe players knocked a stickball ball through the open gate and seized weapons women had smuggled in.
• Historian Francis Parkman framed the war as Pontiac's Conspiracy, but modern historians see a decentralized uprising Pontiac inspired.
• Pontiac flew a French flag in his camp, still hoping the French king would send help.
• John Bradstreet cut Pontiac's wampum peace belt to pieces with his sword in front of indigenous delegates.
• The Royal Proclamation of 1763 barred settlement west of the Appalachians, angering colonists such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.