Pontiac’s War

The war began in May 1763 when Native Americans were offended by the policies of British General Jeffery Amherst. Native Americans attacked a number of British forts and settlements. Eight forts were destroyed and hundreds of colonists were killed or captured, with many more fleeing the region. Hostilities came to an end after British Army expeditions in 1764 led to peace negotiations over the next two years.

About Pontiac’s War in brief

The war began in May 1763 when Native Americans were offended by the policies of British General Jeffery Amherst. Native Americans attacked a number of British forts and settlements. Eight forts were destroyed and hundreds of colonists were killed or captured, with many more fleeing the region. Hostilities came to an end after British Army expeditions in 1764 led to peace negotiations over the next two years. The war is named after Odawa leader Pontiac, the most prominent of many Indian leaders in the conflict. It became widely known as \”Pontiac’s Conspiracy\” after the 1851 publication of Francis Parkman’s The Conspiracy of Pontiac. In the 20th century, some historians argued that Parkman exaggerated the extent of Pontiak’s influence in the war and that it was misleading to name the war after him. The tribes involved in Pontiac’s Rebellion lived in a vaguely defined region of New France known as the pays d’en haut, which was claimed by France until the peace treaty of 1763. A tribe was a linguistic or familial group rather than a political group; no tribe spoke for no chief, and no tribe acted in unison. For example, Ottawas did not go to war as a tribe; some leaders chose to do so, while others denounced the conflict and stayed to learn the language of the pays’en. The first group was composed of the Great Lakes region: Odawa, Ojibwas, Potawatomis, and Potawatomi, who spoke an Iroquoian language. They had long been allied with French habitants with whom they lived, traded, and intermarried.

The British Crown began to implement changes in order to administer its vastly expanded American territory. The French had long cultivated alliances among certain of the Indian tribes, but the British post-war approach was essentially to treat the Native Americans as a conquered people. In 1758, the British colonists made peace with the Shawnee and Lenape Native Americans in 1758 with the Treaty of Easton, where the British promised not to settle beyond the ridge of the Allegheny Mountains, a demarcation which the king confirmed in the Royal Proclamation of 1762. British troops proceeded to occupy the various forts in the Ohio Country and Great lakes region previously garrisoned by the French. The Native Americans who had been French allies found themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the British occupation and their new policies. They were alarmed that the British were moving into their territory and were alarmed to learn that Native Americans spoke an Algonian language, which they traded with the French for years before the French lost New France to Great Britain. The conflict ended in 1763 after British troops captured Montreal, the last important French settlement in the region, and retreated to the Midwest. It was the first of a series of wars between Britain and France in which Britain fought the French and Indian Wars in America in which France lost NewFrance to Britain. The war became known as Pontiac’s War, but historians generally continue to refer to it by the familiar names.

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