Then arose the first Fort Pitt in December, 1758, the command of which was given to that gallant Virginian, Col. Hugh Mercer. This fort was about four hundred yards from Fort Duquesne, that is to say, the site of that fortification or its remains.

The next year there was built by the orders of the British ministry by Gen. John Stanwix who came here, the second, or permanent Fort Pitt, which lasted until 1791. It was a really formidable work for a wilderness fort. Bouquet, who was at the taking of Fort Duquesne, or what remained of it, November 25, 1758, was here again with his succoring force fresh from his great victory over Guyasutha at Bushy Run, August 5, 1763. The next year, before his departure on the expedition to the Muskingum country, he had erected outside the main walls of Fort Pitt the pentagon shaped little blockhouse that has remained to us. It was intended as an outpost for riflemen to prevent surprise by any enemies entering within the outer fortifications by reason of low water in the rivers and the draining of the ditches. The original rifle holes may be seen in the building. Fort Pitt was five-sided, necessitating the block house likewise. In the wall of the block house Bouquet placed the stone tablet that is now seen there, reading: "A. D. 1764, Coll. Bouquet." The abbreviation is with two ls, an old time form, and after the A and D are stars. After the date and the abbreviation, "Coll." is a sign that resembles the letter S on its side.

This tablet fully establishes the date of erection and the builder. We now come to the query: "How can a small brick block house, 16 feet front, figure as a formidable earthwork that was blown up six years. previous to the erection of the block house?" Similarly: "How can Fort Pitt, the second fortress, be confounded with the French Fort Duquesne which passed out of existence at least ten months before any work was done on Pitt?"

In fact these forts had nothing in common save that they were built for a similar purpose: each was intended to further and perpetuate the sovereignty of the nation whose flag it flied. The close proximity of their sites has confused many, especially those who "did not stop to think."

CHAPTER XXIII.

When Pontiac Struck.

When the great Pontiac struck he struck suddenly and hard-in more than one place, too. Three only of the English forts held out against the hordes of Pontiac's Algonquin allies, who had in a moment changed from friends to foes to the English, and become besiegers. Niagara, too strong, was in little danger. Detroit was saved as by a miracle; Fort Pitt withstood a long siege and was relieved by the gallant Bouquet and his once sturdy Highlanders, physically ill-fitted for the task, and the few Colonial troops he could secure. Forbes came to Fort Duquesne and obtained a bloodless victory. Bouquet fought his way through, and at the rivulet known as Bushy Run gave to the world for all time an example of intrepidity, unsurpassed in the annals of border warfare in America. True, it has been equalled. With Bouquet there could be no thought of failure-no halting, no halfway measures. It was go through, and he went. Fort Pitt was saved.

The conspiracy of Pontiac has been written of time and again. All historians attest the marvelous mentality of the great Ottawa who organized the widespread revolt against the English, and failed after much bloodshed, and early successes that were futile, and valueless to him.

Parkman, in his inimitable manner, has told the story of the conspiracy of Pontiac-and all the story. The relative danger of Detroit and Pittsburgh will be apparent. The chief conspirator himself deigned to take Fort Detroit. His Mingo subordinate, Guyasutha, essayed to capture Pitt. Both were humiliated and defeated. All of the harrowing tales of the fall of the little forts cannot be given. Some of them must appear in the narration of events at Pittsburgh during the days of terror there in the summer of 1763. In this narration one should go back to the days of French dominancy and recite again the long story of how, from year to year, the discontent of the Pennsylvania Algonquins grew apace, and it needed only the machinations of a master mind who came with flaming torch to spread a devastating fire. The memories of the Long Walk, the taking of the Juniata Valley hunting grounds and a long series of wrongs were burning memories, whose light never darkened. Revenge had been partly obtained under the French regime, but although the French Indian allies had carried the tomahawk and the torch to the Delaware, they had not, could not, come back to their old homes along and east of the Susquehanna. Though Post had withheld the aid of the Delawares and Shawnese from the French at a critical period, he had no inkling of a general Algonquian uprising. Though he was then living at one of the Tuscarawas towns in 1763, one hundred miles west of Fort -Pitt, it does not appear that he knew that a great blow would soon be struck. We may believe the conspirator nations took good care that the converted Delawares on the Tuscarawas did not receive any information for fear some Christian would consider it a duty to apprise the English

commander at Fort Pitt of the trend of events, and look upon the overhanging cloud of devastation-as in exact manner Gladwyn was informed at Detroit in the very moment of Pontiac's success, with the fatal hatchet about to fall with crushing force on Gladwyn and his garrison. [Note the more common spelling "Gladwyn," instead of "Gladwin," ante]. The change of sovereignty, too, had its mighty influences. From Onontio to King George of Great Britain was a great leap. We read of these facts with keen appreciation of their truth:

To the Indian tribes, natural owners of the country, the change was nothing but a disaster. They had held, in a certain sense, the balance of power between the rival colonies of France and England. Both had bid for their friendship, and both competed for the trade with them. The French had been the more successful. Their influence was predominant among all the interior tribes, while many of the border Indians, old allies of the English, had of late abandoned them in favor of their rivals. While the French had usually gained the good will, often the ardent attachment, of the tribes with whom they came in contact, the English, for the most part, had inspired only jealousy and dislike. This dislike was soon changed to the most intense hatred. Lawless traders and equally lawless spectators preyed on the Indians; swarms of squatters invaded the lands of the border tribes, and crowded them from their homes.

No race on earth has a more intense and unyielding individuality than the Indian, To the weakness and vices inseparable from all low degrees of human development, he joins a peculiar reserve and pride. He will not coalesce with superior races, and will not imitate them. When enslaved, he dies, kills himself, kills his master, or runs away. It has been his lot to be often hated, but seldom thoroughly despised. His race has never received a nickname, and he has never served as a subject of amusement. There is some humor in him, but he is too grim a figure to be laughed at. One is almost constrained to admire the inflexible obstinacy with which he clings to his own personality, rejects the advances of civilization, and prefers to die as he has lived.

Such, indeed, is the alternative; and it was after the peace of 1763 that this inexorable sentence of civilization or destruction was first proclaimed over the continent in tones no longer doubtful.

That the Indians understood the crisis, it would be rash to affirm; but they felt it without fully understanding it. The result was the great Indian war under Pontiac. The tribes leagued together, rose to drive out the English, and the frontiers were swept with fire. The two great forts, Detroit and Fort Pitt, alone withstood the assailants, and both were reduced to extremity. Pontiac himself, with the tribes of the Lakes, beleaguered Detroit, while the Delawares and Shawanese, with some of the Wyandottes, laid seige, in their barbarous way, to Fort Pitt, or Pittsburgh. Other bands of the same tribes meanwhile ravaged the frontiers of Pennsylvania, burning houses, murdering settlers, laying waste whole districts, and producing an indescribable distress and consternation.1

S. G. Drake, in a little work, has aptly told of some conditions preceding the outbreak. Speaking of the change of sovereignty, Drake says:

All thinking men saw that such a political upheaval as this would leave many ugly questions unsettled. In the first place, a vanquished population of foreigners was to be reconciled. As to this, the temper of the Canadians was sullen, though subdued. England was no less hated that her rule was silently assented to. Not so, however with the French Indians. They also, were sullen, but unsubdued. This feeling was artfully kept alive by the French traders, who often secretly hinted that English rule would soon come to an end.

Fickle as these savages were, habit had strongly attached them to the French. Many spoke the language. Some had been baptized. Others had intermarried with the traders and bush-rangers, so that there had come to be in most villages a distinct body

1"An Historical Account of an Expedition against the Ohio Indians, etc.;" Introduction, pp. xiii-xiv.

of half-breeds, who might be described as uniting the worst qualities of both races. Not unfrequently these strangers had been adopted into the tribes, and sometimes made chiefs. Such bonds as these, it is plain, could not be sundered in a day.

When the Indians were told that they would shortly see themselves turned out of their hunting grounds, they believed it. Savage though he was, the Indian could not fail to read the signs of the times in the history of his race. Within the memory of their old men his people had been pushed over the Endless Mountains by the everadvancing whites, who also drove back the game, so that every year the range grew less and less. Their wise men said that either the white men must turn back, or the Indians all turn women and hoe corn for the Englishmen.2

Bishop De Schweinitz, in his biography of Zeisberger the Moravian missionary among the Delawares, naturally had to write much of Pontiac's uprising. Referring to the growing power of the English, De Schweinitz says:

No one realized this more keenly than Pontiac, the great chief of the Ottawas. The Iroquois, and especially the Senecas, in spite of Sir William Johnston's unceased efforts, had for two years been looking with extreme distrust upon the progress of the British flag, and had incited the Delawares and Shawanese to take up the hatchet; and the Delawares and Shawanese had again stirred up the tribes of the West with the note of alarm, "The English mean to make slaves of us, by occupying so many posts in our country!" But it is not likely that a well-concerted, general rising of the natives would have occurred had it not been for Pontiac. He was the head of the confederacy which embraced his own tribe and the Ojibiwas and Potawatomies, but exercised, also, undisputed and supreme influence throughout the Northwest, being "the king and lord of all that country," as Rogers called him. Endowed with natural qualifications of a high order, born to rule, brave, far-sighted, a wild statesman, and a savage hero, he organized and upheld that conspiracy which has made his name famous, which had for its aim the expulsion of the English from the American continent, which inflicted severe injury upon the Colonies, and which might have been successful had France, as he hoped, lent her aid.

As the year 1762 drew to a close, Pontiac sent out his ambassadors. They passed through the entire West to the many tribes that hunted there; they proceeded far down the Mississippi, almost to its mouth; they everywhere displayed the broad war-belt of the chief, and rehearsed his words of fiery eloquence, calling upon all red men to save the race to which they belonged from slavery and ruin. A chief of the Abanakis, who gave out that he was possessed of a prophetic spirit, and that the Great Manitou commanded the extirpation of the English, effectually seconded Pontiac's scheme, until nearly the whole Algonquin stock of Indians, the Wyandots, several tribes of the lower Mississippi, and the Senecas, were banded in a conspiracy.

With the subtleness for which the aborigines are noted, this widespread plot was kept a secret. In February of the new year, when the peace of Paris had been ratified (February 10, 1763) which gave a continent to England, not one of her Colonial officers suspected that, in all the villages of the West, the savages were silently preparing to wrench that continent from her grasp. On the twenty-seventh of April, Pontiac convened a council on the bank of the Ecorces, a small stream not far from Detroit. Representatives of many tribes were present; and their deep ejaculations of assent to the chief's impetuous speech showed that they were terribly in earnest. First Detroit, next the other posts and forts-the garrisons of which severally numbered a mere handful of men-were to be captured, and then desolation, with bloody strides, was to take its way to the settlements.3

2"Making of the Ohio Valley States;" Drake, pp. 80-81.

8"Life and Times of David Zeisberger;" E. De Schweinitz, pp. 268-270.