The English tried neither to save their souls nor to win their hearts;
they both hated and despised the savages, and ruthlessly destroyed them.
Now, when the smoldering strife between the French and English in
the West burst into an open flame of war between the two nations, the
Western tribes took the side of those whom reason and instinct taught
them to know as their best friends.
But ten years after Céloron visited Ohio, Wolfe captured Quebec, and
France gave up to England not only the whole of Canada, but the whole of
the vast region between the lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and kept for
herself only the Province of Louisiana. The Indians were left to
their fate, and they made what terms they could with the English. They
promised peace, but they broke their promises, and constantly harassed
the outlying English settlements. At one time they joined together under
the great chief Pontiac, and tried to win back the West for themselves.
The French forts had been ceded to Great Britain and garrisoned with
British troops, and the allied Indians now took all of these but Detroit
and Fort Pitt. In the end they failed, and then they made peace again,
but still they kept up their forays along the English borders. They
stole horses and cattle, they burned houses and barns, they killed men,
women, and children, or carried them off into captivity. In the Ohio
country alone their captives counted hundreds, though the right number
could never be known, for they could easily be kept out of the way when
the tribes were summoned to give them up.
It was the same story in the West that it had been in the East, and the
North, and the South, wherever the savages fell upon the lonely farms or
the scattered hamlets of the frontiers, and it was not ended until our
own day, when the Indians were at last shut up in reservations.
[Illustration: Indians carry off the women 036R]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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