Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/342

322 of the native chiefs who have most resolutely resisted successive European encroachments on their domain: namely this, that while especially well informed and familiar with the resources and appliances, and supposed advantages of a state of civilization, they have most passionately repelled and scorned it, and stubbornly avowed a preference for their own wild state of Nature, — the forest and lake and river, with their free range, — and the simple nakedness of its indolence and activity.

We must allow Pontiac, by anticipation, this mention here, because he represented France, among the savages, as its avenger. When he first encountered small detachments of the English forces penetrating the lake and wilderness highways to establish themselves in the strongholds to be yielded up by the French, he seemed for a brief interval disposed to reconcile himself to the change of intruders, and to receive the new comers with a real or a feigned tolerance. But his stern purpose, if not before conceived, was soon wrought into a bold and far-reaching design, with a plan which, as a whole, and in the disposal of its parts and details, exhibits his own great qualities. His plan was to engage all the Indian tribes in defying the hated intruders and keeping the heritage of their fathers inviolate for their posterity. So far as he could impart to or rouse in other native chieftains his own sad prescience of their doom, or stir in them the fires of their own passions, he could engage them in that plan. He roamed amid the villages of many scattered tribes, and to others he sent messengers bearing the war-belt and the battle-cry. He held councils, the solemn, meditative silence of which he broke by impassioned appeals, sharpened with bitter taunts and darkened by sombre prophecies, in all the fervent picture-eloquence of the forests, to inflame the rage of his wild hearers and to turn them on the war-path. He found inflammable spirits. Jealousy and hate, and what tried to be scorn, had already