Rebellion of Pontiac and its legacy

The total number of fatalities during Pontiac's rebellion is unknown. Around 400 British soldiers were killed in combat and about 50 were captured and tortured to death. George Croghan estimated that some 2,000 settlers were killed or captured. The violence drove more than 4,000 English to flee their homes in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Data on the losses of American Indians are even less known, although it is estimated that during different clashes killed 200 warriors, to which we should add all the deaths caused by smallpox if one accepts that the stratagem of infected blankets was successful.

Map of the division between the Indian reserve and colonial Territories, as designed in the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

Pontiac's Guerra has been traditionally seen as a defeat of the Indians, but it is more accurate to say that it was a military tie: while the Indians failed in their attempt to expel the British, they were unable to conquer the lands of the natives. The end of the war came through negotiations and not by victories in battle fields. The Indians, in fact, had an important victory to get the British Government to abandon the policies of repression of Amherst, and instead seek an alliance with the natives in the style that they already had with France.

Like this wampum belts were used by native Americans to send information between different villages. In the months prior to the Pontiac Rebellion circulated many of those instigating the uprising against Britain.

Relations between the settlers and the Indians, who had been severely damaged during the French and Indian war, returned to decline during Pontiac's rebellion. The war highlighted by violence on both sides, apparently moved by a genocidal fanaticism. The people of both sides reached the conclusion that both settlers and natives were totally different by nature and could never live with each other. According to historian Daniel Richter, during the war the idea that all natives were Indians, all white Europeans and that each mission was to destroy the other.

Indian massacre of Lancaster in 1763. On December 27 of that year, the Paxton Boys murdered 14 native protected in that city.

The English Government also came to the conclusion that the settlers and Indians should remain separate. On October 7, 1763, the Crown drafted the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which wanted to reorganize the American territories after the Treaty of Paris. The rebellion occurred when the Decree was still in the process of preparation, which had to be approved quickly as soon as the news of the uprising reached London. Officials drew a boundary line between the British colonies and the lands of the natives to the West the Appalachian mountains, creating a vast India reserve that ranged from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River and from Florida to Newfoundland. To prohibit settlers to enter Indian lands, the British Government hoped to avoid new events as Pontiac's rebellion. From this moment, segregation characterized relations between Europeans and natives in North America.

Portrait of Jeffrey Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of British troops in the American colonies.

The effects of Pontiac's Guerra is noted for a long time. Since the Decree recognized some rights to indigenous peoples over lands which they occupied became known as the Charter right of Indians (Indian Bill of Rights in English). English settlers and land speculators, however, the Decree seemed refusal to occupy the lands they had conquered the French. The resentment which this created undermined among the settlers towards the Empire, determined the uprising that led to the American Revolution.

Portrait of Pontiac, John Mix Stanley as imagined in the 19th century.

For American Indians, Pontiac's Guerra demonstrated the importance of the union of all the tribes to resist the advance of colonial. Although the conflict divided tribes and villages, first multitribal resistance against Europeans was created during this war and was the first who was not a complete defeat of the natives. However, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 did not that Britons try to expand westward, so that indigenous peoples were forced to form new resistance movements. The first began in 1767 after a meeting organized by the shawnee and the following decades there were various leaders such as Joseph Brant, Alexander McGllivray, Blue Jacket and Tecumesh, for example, that attempted to create new confederations to revive the resistance movements.

The Ohio territory covered the current state of Ohio and part of the Pennsylvania, Virginia West and Indiana.

Source: Rebelión de Pontiac y su Legado