The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada

By FRANCIS PARKMAN. Sixth Edition, revised, with Additions. Two Volumes. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co.

THIS was the earliest of the series of admirable books in which Mr. Parkman has recounted the story of the struggle between the French and English for supremacy on this continent. The volumes first appeared twenty years ago. Since that time American history has been enriched by nothing so much as by the author’s successive books relating to the Jesuit missions, to the enterprises of La Salle, to the Huguenots in Florida, and to the career of Champlain. In his Preface to the present edition of the “ Conspiracy of Pontiac ” Mr. Parkman expresses his hope of continuing the series up to the extinction of French power in North America, and says that the present history will then form a sequel, “and its introductory chapters will be in a certain sense a summary of what has preceded.”

Few historians have had so free, so wide, so rich a field. It contains nearly all that is picturesque and romantic in our early annals, and it is opulent in what other epochs and aspects of our national life are lamentably poor in. Mr. Parkman has been worthy his opportunity, and, as is now well known, has brought to his work, not only taste, sympathy, and skill, but the ceaseless and conscientious industry in which alone the great histories of our day are written, He has not only made thorough research into all the written and printed materials of history, he has not only profoundly studied it, but he has as far as possible lived it ; and when he tells us concerning the “Conspiracy of Pontiac,” “I chose the subject of this book as affording better opportunities than any other portion of American history for portraying forest life and the Indian character, and I have never seen reason to change this opinion,” we are to receive his confirmed judgment as that of one who has taken the testimony of savage life by actual acquaintance with it, and of the wilderness by sojourn in it. This personal contact, as we may call it, with his theme, gives Mr. Parkman’s book a high and almost unique value ; and at every step we feel that we follow a guide who is not only perfectly familiar with the way, but has no disposition to romance any of its features. Yet his very truth enchants us, and the effect of his long patience, his faithful study, his experience and observation, is to fascinate us with the picture he paints.

It is, to be sure, a tragical picture, and the fascination is rarely a pleasant one. When the English, in 1763, took possession of all the French territory west of the Mississippi, they made their dominion, as they were apt to do, positive, insolent, and aggressive, and rendered it easy for Pontiac, a great chief of the Ottawas, to unite the alarmed and offended tribe in a war against the forts and settlements. This war began with the siege of Detroit, and the destruction of all the other military posts on the Lakes, and it continued for nearly two years along the whole English frontier, from New York to the Carolina?, ending of course with the temporary reduction of the Indians and the death of Pontiac. Mr. Parkman sketches the French war which preceded this conspiracy, but mainly devotes himself to the study of the Indian insurrection in all its circumstances of treachery, outrage, and mutual atrocity. A series of events which otherwise could only become known through the partial and desultory narratives of the times, restores under his pen the whole epoch to the reader, and that wild, picturesque, perilous frontier life of a hundred years ago breathes again on his page. We share the hopes and fears of the remote beleaguered garrison of Detroit; we witness the terrible fate of the other garrisons ; we see the havoc and the misery of the settlements ; we feel the dead passions of the day against the terrible foe ; we take sides in the quarrels of Quakers and Presbyterians, and condemn or palliate the Paxton Boys in their massacres ; we behold the motives that guide the savages ; we follow them to their camps and councils; we march with Bouquet on his romantic invasion of the far-off wilderness of Ohio, and receive with him the submission of the desperate, unreconciled tribes. Yes, it is a fascinating book, rich in adventure, in chance of field and foray, and in the sombre pathos which attaches to the fate of a race so hopelessly wild that it seems scarcely to have the right of life at the cost of so much more life to a civilized people. Seems ; for who shall decide whether it would have been well to leave for their hunting-grounds the vast harvest-fields that feed our millions, and whether they had a real claim to the lands they feebly and sparsely possessed before us ? On the whole, the impression one gets from Mr. Parkman is that of great forbearances on the part of the English toward the Indians at the close of the war; in reward of which, perhaps, the English have multiplied, and the Indians have utterly perished. Happily for our repute for generosity and mercy, it was found impracticable or unnecessary to infect the hostile tribes with small-pox, as the commanderin-chief recommended, though we have always acted upon the suggestion of a subordinate officer to decimate them with rum. The idea of hunting them with dogs, which there was not time to put in effect at that time, was afterwards felicitously revived in the Florida war.

Very likely we dwell too much upon a work which has already taken a place in literature above our praise. But we cannot let this occasion of a new edition pass without expressing the satisfaction and pride with which we have read it, or commending it most heartily to all who have not read it. We are not as a people very familiar with our own history. Here is a mirror of one of its most striking phases ; the provincial politics and the frontier passions in conflict with the jealousy and hate of the forests, and all the accessory beauty and grandeur of Nature in her ever-various, ever-impressive moods.