JULY 24:

1534 Penouille Point Quebec Jacques Cartier 1491-1557 lands at rocky Penouille Point on the Gaspé coast; erects 10 metre high cross, bearing fleur-de-lys and motto 'Vive le Roy de France'; takes possession of the mainland of Canada in the name of François I; Donnacona, the Iroquois chief at Stadacona (Quebec) will later protest against Cartier's declaration.

Dan George (Teswahno) 1899-1981 actor, first nations leader, born Geswanouth Slahoot in North Vancouver, BC; died Sept. 23, 1981, in Vancouver. George served as Chief of the Salish Band in Burrard Inlet from 1951 to 1963, 1961 started his acting career playing Old Antoine on CBC's Cariboo Country, then in George Ryga's Ecstacy of Rita Joe (1967); 1970 won an Academy Award nomination for his role as Old Lodge Poles, opposite Dustin Hoffman, in Arthur Penn's Little Big Man; 1978 played Old Sioux in the TV miniseries Centennial (picture shows him with another Canadian-born actor, Glen Ford); 1976 played a comic role opposite Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, and in Harry and Tonto (1974).  He has written several books including My Heart Soars (1974), My Spirit Soars (1982), and You Call Me Chief: Impressions of the Life of Chief Dan George (1981).

Jackson Beardy 1944-1984 Cree artist, born at Island Lake, Manitoba; died after years of battling illness Dec 8, 1984. Beardy was a member of the Native Group of Seven with Norval Morrisseau and others.

1991 Lac Ste Anne Alberta Douglas Crosby asks forgiveness for abuse suffered by native children in 60 Oblate schools since 1880s; President of Oblate Conference of Canada.

1766 Oswego New York Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas, makes peace with Sir William Johnson at Fort Ontario; the Treaty of Oswego peace agreement marks the end of the uprising started in 1763.

1759 Youngstown, New York: Lieutenant Colonel Massey arrives outside French Fort Niagara with extra troops; the incoming French reinforcements will be stopped by a volley of musket fire, and attacked by Johnson's Indian allies; Pierre Pouchot will surrender the French garrison the following day.

1701 Detroit, Michigan Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac 1658-1730 arrives by canoe with 50 settlers, 50 soldiers, and two priests, to found the trading post of Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit (meaning the narrows between the lakes); the settlement will become a major commercial crossroad, and helps halt the advance of the English into the western Great Lakes region; despite his birth in a noble family at Gascony, France, Cadillac was almost penniless (he also possessed a very long nose that supposedly inspired Edmond Rostand's play, Cyrano de Bergerac); yet he had inspired King Louis XIV with his wit, courage, honesty, and swordsmanship, and was sent to New France to work under Governor Frontenac as investigator for the king, reporting on corruption in the colony; 1689 he returned to France to report to the king, then returned to New France in 1690; from 1694-99 he commanded the post at Mackinac at the head of Lake Michigan before building Detroit; from 1713-17 he will serve in Louisiana before retiring with his wife and 13 children to a small chateau near his birthplace. 

July 24, 1766:  Pontiac surrenders.
 

BACKGROUND:
 

Ottawa Chief Pontiac, 1720 - 1769

Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas, born on Ottawa river about 1720, died in Cahokia, Ill., in 1769. He was the son of an Ojibway woman, and, as the Ottawas were in alliance with the Ojibways and Potawattamies, he became the principal chief of the three tribes.

In 1746, with his warriors, he defended the French at Detroit against an attack by some of the northern tribes, and in 1755 he is believed to have led the Ottawas at Braddock's defeat. After the surrender of Quebec, Major Robert Rogers, of New Hampshire, was sent to take possession of the western forts, under the treaty of Paris, but in November, 1760, while encamped at the place where the city of Cleveland now stands, he was visited by Pontiac, who objected to his further invasion of the territory. Finding, however, that the French had been driven from Canada, he acquiesced in the surrender of Detroit, and persuaded 400 Detroit Indians, who were lying in ambush, to relinquish their design of cutting off the English. While this action was doubtless in good faith, still he hated the English and soon began to plan their extermination.

In 1762 he sent messengers with a red-stained tomahawk and a wampum war belt, who visited every tribe between the Ottawa and the lower Mississippi, all of whom joined in the conspiracy The end of May was determined upon as the time when each tribe was to dispose of the garrison of the nearest fort, and then all were to attack the settlements. A great council was held near Detroit on 27 April, 1763, when Pontiac delivered an oration, in which the wrongs and indignities that the Indians had suffered at the hands of the English were recounted, and their own extermination was prophesied. He also told them of a tradition, which he could hardly have invented, that a Delaware Indian had been admitted into the presence of the Great Spirit, who told him his race must return to the customs and weapons of their ancestors, throw away the implements they had acquired from the white man, abstain from whiskey, and take up the hatchet against the English, "these dogs dressed in red, who have come to rob you of your hunting grounds and drive away the game."

The taking of Detroit was to be his special task, and the 7th of May was appointed for the attack, but the plot was disclosed to the commander of the post by an Indian girl, and in consequence Pontiac found the garrison prepared. Foiled in his original intention, on 12 May he surrounded Detroit with his Indians; but he was unable to keep a close siege, and the garrison received food from the Canadian settlers. The latter likewise supplied the Indians, in return for which they received promissory notes drawn on birch bark and signed with the figure of an otter, all of which it is said were subsequently redeemed. Supplies and reinforcements were sent to Detroit by way of Lake Erie, in schooners, but these were captured by the Indians, who compelled the prisoners to row them to Detroit in hope of taking the garrison by stratagem, but the Indians, concealed in the bottom of the boat, were discovered before a landing could be effected. Subsequently another schooner, filled with supplies and ammunition, succeeded in reaching the fort, and this vessel the Indians repeatedly tried to destroy by means of fire rafts.

The English now believed themselves sufficiently strong to make an attack upon the Indian camp, and 250 men, on the night of 31 July, set out for that purpose; but Pontiac had been advised of this intention by the Canadians, and, waiting until the English had advanced sufficiently, opened fire on them from all sides. In this fight, which is known as that of Bloody Bridge, 59 of the English were killed or wounded. A desultory warfare continued until 12 October when the siege was raised and Pontiac retired into the country that borders Maumee river, where he vainly endeavored to organize another movement. Although Pontiac failed in the most important action of the conspiracy, still Fort Sandusky, Fort St. Joseph, Fort Miami, Fort Ouatanon, Mackinaw, Presque Isle, Fort Le Boeuf, and Fort Venango were taken and their garrisons were massacred, while unsuccessful attacks were made elsewhere.

The English soon sent troops against the Indians and succeeded in pacifying most of the tribes so that, during the summer of 1766, a meeting of Indian chiefs, including Pontiac, was held in Oswego, where a treaty was concluded with Sir William Johnson. Although Pontiac's conspiracy failed in its grand object, still it had resulted in the capture and destruction of eight out of the twelve fortified posts that were attacked, generally by the massacre of their garrisons, it had destroyed several costly English expeditions, and had carried terror and desolation into some of the most fertile valleys on the frontiers of civilization. In 1769 a Kaskaskia Indian, being bribed with a barrel of liquor and promise of additional reward, followed Pontiac into the forest and there murdered him.
 

From: http://www.chiefpontiac.org/

*****

In King Phillip's War and the Seven Years' War, the indians were for the first time sucked into the white man's quarrels in a big way - with, as usual, disastrous consequences.

King Phillip's War ended with Phillip's head on a pike in Plymouth and the power of his people finished for ever. The Seven Years' War brought defeat to the French and the loss of their vast domain east of the Mississippi. This was a staggerig blow to the indians, most of whom had fought on the losing side.  Who was there now to block the steady push of the settlers into their hunting grounds?  Who was to save them from the insatiable land hunger of the English?  Bitter, defeated, resentful,they knew in their hearts what the answer was:  it was nobody.

There was one indian, however, ho was willing to try.  He was Pontiac, a war chief of the Ottawa.  Pontiac, to be sure, did not know that the struggle between the French and British was already over.  And when he began to organize the tribes in the Ohio country for an attack on the British forts in that area, the French did not bother to tell  him that the war was already lost.

Pontiac's uprising was at first successful.  A whole string of wilderness forts fell to his warriors, but at Detroit the great chief was thwarted by the indian mistress of an officer who, turning informer, warned the British of the impending attack.  Six months later Pontiac was still pinned down before the fort, while at Fort Pitt, a small but stubborn force defied the Delaware, Mingo and Shawnee.

It was now that the indians first came into solid contact with a new breed of foe - the Scottish-Irish frontiersman.  While the British troops and Pontiac's forces were waging more or less organized warfare in the Great Lakes region, it was the riflemen of the backwoods who dealt with the border raiders.

These Ulster Presbyterians, of whom about 40,000 had settled on the frontier, played rough.  They matched the indians in fighting skill, unrestrained cruelty and implacable hatred.  Their atrocities horrified professional soldiers like Sir Jeffrey Amherst.  Hungry for land, they were perfectly willing to annihilate the indians in order to get it.  As a beginning, they shot and hatcheted all the peaceful indians they could find in the neighborhood - women and children, as well as men.  Then they marched a thousand strong on Philadelphia, with the idea of massacring a band of Christian Delaware.  But the Quakers spirited away the indians and bought off the backwoodsmen with a promise of scalp bounties.

Pontiac's War ended in defeat and disillusionment for the great chief and his warriors.  All its blood-letting and suffering had proved nothing but man's shocking capacity for cruelty.  It had served only to intensify the frontier's deadly hatreds - and to push the indians still deeper into their dark swamp of desperation and despair.
 

>From "In the Country of the Walking Dead, by Walter O'Meara (Award Books)