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The Old Northwest : A chronicle of the Ohio Valley and beyond By: Frederic Austin Ogg (1878-1951) |
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A CHRONICLE OF THE OHIO VALLEY AND BEYOND
By Frederic Austin Ogg New Haven: Yale University Press Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press 1919
CONTENTS I. PONTIAC'S CONSPIRACY
II. "A LAIR OF WILD BEASTS"
III. THE REVOLUTION BEGINS
IV. THE CONQUEST COMPLETED
V. WAYNE, THE SCOURGE OF THE INDIANS
VI. THE GREAT MIGRATION
VII. PIONEER DAYS AND WAYS
VIII. TECUMSEH
IX. THE WAR OF 1812 AND THE NEW WEST
X. SECTIONAL CROSS CURRENTS
XI. THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE OLD NORTHWEST Chapter I. Pontiac's Conspiracy The fall of Montreal, on September 8, 1760, while the plains about the
city were still dotted with the white tents of the victorious English
and colonial troops, was indeed an event of the deepest consequence to
America and to the world. By the articles of capitulation which were
signed by the Marquis de Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, Canada and
all its dependencies westward to the Mississippi passed to the British
Crown. Virtually ended was the long struggle for the dominion of the
New World. Open now for English occupation and settlement was that
vast country lying south of the Great Lakes between the Ohio and the
Mississippi which we know as the Old Northwest today the seat of five
great commonwealths of the United States. With an ingenuity born of necessity, the French pathfinders and
colonizers of the Old Northwest had chosen for their settlements sites
which would serve at once the purposes of the priest, the trader, and
the soldier; and with scarcely an exception these sites are as important
today as when they were first selected. Four regions, chiefly, were
still occupied by the French at the time of the capitulation of
Montreal. The most important, as well as the most distant, of these
regions was on the east bank of the Mississippi, opposite and below
the present city of St. Louis, where a cluster of missions, forts, and
trading posts held the center of the tenuous line extending from Canada
to Louisiana. A second was the Illinois country, centering about the
citadel of St. Louis which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of
"Starved Rock," near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A third was
the valley of the Wabash, where in the early years of the eighteenth
century Vincennes had become the seat of a colony commanding both the
Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was the western end of Lake
Erie, where Detroit, founded by the doughty Cadillac in 1701, had
assumed such strength that for fifty years it had discouraged the
ambitions of the English to make the Northwest theirs. Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to whom Vaudreuil surrendered in 1760, forthwith
dispatched to the western country a military force to take possession
of the posts still remaining in the hands of the French. The mission
was entrusted to a stalwart New Hampshire Scotch Irishman, Major Robert
Rogers, who as leader of a band of intrepid "rangers" had made himself
the hero of the northern frontier. Two hundred men were chosen for
the undertaking, and on the 13th of September the party, in fifteen
whaleboats, started up the St. Lawrence for Detroit. At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present city
of Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian chiefs and
warriors who, in the name of their great ruler Pontiac, demanded to
know the object of their journeying. Parleys followed, in which Pontiac
himself took part, and it was explained that the French had surrendered
Canada to the English and that the English merely proposed to assume
control of the western posts, with a view to friendly relations between
the red men and the white men. The rivers, it was promised, would flow
with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming in
endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the savages, and,
after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the chieftain and his
followers withdrew... Continue reading book >>
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