and even eaten. The frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania were laid
waste by hordes of savages, who burned the homes of the settlers,
murdered a large number, and carried off many prisoners, men, women,
and children, to their savage fastnesses in the western wilderness.
The war never ended until Virginia and Pennsylvania--where the Quaker
element still prevailed--were aroused from their apathy and gave the
requisite aid to an expedition under the command of an able officer,
Colonel Bouquet, who had been one of Brigadier Forbes's officers during
the campaign of 1759 in the Ohio valley. He rescued Fort Pitt, after
administering to the Indians a severe defeat at Bushy Run. A year
later he succeeded in taking a large force into the very heart of a
country where the Indians thought themselves safe from any attack of
their white enemy. His unexpected appearance on the banks of the
Muskingkum awed the Delawares, Shawanoes, and Mingoes, who gladly
agreed to terms of peace, especially as they knew that Colonel
Bradstreet was in their rear on the banks of Lake Erie. The prisoners,
whom the Indians had taken during their raids on the frontier
settlements of Virginia and {274} Pennsylvania, were restored to their
friends and relatives who had, in the majority of cases, never hoped to
see them again. The annals of those days tell us strange stories of
the infatuation which some young women felt for the savage warriors
whom they had wedded in Indian fashion. Some children had forgotten
their mothers, and Parkman relates in his graphic narrative of those
memorable times that one girl only recalled her childhood when she
heard her distracted mother sing a song with which she had often lulled
her daughter to sleep in happier days.
Peace again reigned in the West. Detroit, after repulsing Pontiac so
successfully, was at last relieved, and the red cross of England
floated above the forts of Chartres and Vincennes, which were given up
by the French.
By the end of the autumn of 1765 France possessed only a few acres of
rock, constantly enveloped in fog, on the southern coast of
Newfoundland, of all the great dominion she once claimed in North
America. Pontiac now disappears from history, and is believed to have
been killed by an Indian warrior of the Illinois nation, after a
drunken bout at the village of Cahokia--an ignominious ending to the
career of a great chief whose name was for so many months a menace to
English authority in that wilderness region, which was declared in
later years by an imperial statute, the Quebec Act, to be a part of
Canada's illimitable domain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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