American Biography
Economic Change
Revolutionary Period
Pontiac
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The American Revolution was fought in many areas. Historians often focus on the fighting which broke out in New England in 1775 and continued along the eastern coast for the next six years. However, battles had been taking places along the western edge of the colonies since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.
Native Americans played a major role in this early fighting. Angry about British control of their lands, many Native Americans attacked British forts along the frontier to regain their land and freedom from the British military.
One Native American who helped inspire these attacks was Pontiac, a leader of the Ottawa. Pontiac’s attack on Fort Detroit led other Native Americans to start similar uprisings throughout the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley region. Although the British eventually defeated him, Pontiac’s rebellion was one of the first fights for independence in the era of Revolution.
Joseph Brant, a Mohawk, had a different strategy for dealing with the British. Pontiac argued for Native rights and preached Native independence from any European power. Brant, however, actively tried to make an alliance with the British military against anti-British settlers. His leadership and skills as a military commander led him to become an officer in the British military during the Revolutionary War.
Brant used his fame and experience as a middleman between Native Americans and Europeans to become a negotiator between the Six Nations and the American government. After the Revolution, Brant tried to use his connections with the British and his own popularity within the Native community to resist American movement into Native territory.
This map shows the Ohio River Valley region, the area in which much of the fighting during the French and Indian War took place.
Missionaries were often the first settlers to move into Native American territory. This image, drawn centuries after the arrival of missionaries into the frontier, shows a Moravian preacher, David Zeisberger, preaching Christianity to Native Americans. Zeisberger, standing, appears dominant in the image, with members of the tribe seated in darkness around him.
In 1768, British military officers and Iroquois leaders signed a treaty at Fort Stanwix , New York . The treaty was supposed to end fighting between the two sides, but it failed. The British saw the treaty as a guarantee that violence would stop in the frontier. The Native Americans thought the treaty would end British expansion into their lands. Neither occurred, and the hostilities continued.
Very few documents were created by Native Americans themselves in the 1700s. This is an early Native American map of the Ohio country.