Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/341

Rh then first to have fully realized their impending doom, and to have summoned all their resources of barbarous rage, ferocity, cunning, and prowess, with something of real skill and concentration in their wilderness tactics, to avert that doom. Intelligent, fervid, pathetic pleading and remonstrance were not wanting from them; but hate and exasperation infuriated them.

Then came upon the scene that ablest and most daring and resolute savage chieftain known in our history. There have been three conspicuous men of the native race, — the towering chieftains of the forest, signal types of all the characteristics of the savage, ennobled, so to speak, by their lofty patriotism, — who have appeared on the scene of action at the three most critical eras for the white man on this continent. If the material and stock of such men are not exhausted, there is no longer for them a sphere, a range, an occasion or opportunity in place or time here. The white man is the master of this continent. An Indian conspiracy would prove abortive in the paucity or discordancy of its materials. What the great sachem Metacomet, or King Philip, was in the first rooting of the New England colonies, which he throttled almost to the death throe; what Tecumseh was in the internal shocks attending our last war with Great Britain, — Pontiac, a far greater man than either of them, in council and on the field, was in the strain and stress of the occasion offered to him after the cession of Canada. Pontiac conceived, and to a large extent effected, the compacted organization of many of the most powerful of the Western tribes, in a conspiracy for crushing the English as they were about to take possession of unbounded territory here in the name and right of the British crown. Pontiac, the chief of the Ottawas, and the recognized dictator of many affiliated tribes, as well as an able reconciler of hostile tribes, was a master of men. Then in the vigor of his life, he exhibited signally that marked characteristic of all the ablest, bravest, and most dangerous