Thus their strategy, to implement which my grandparents decided that Fort Niagara — controlling the very jugular of the Great Lakes and thus of the whole upper & central parts of the continent — must fall to the British! Lord Amherst’s campaign against the French had come, by 1759, to center on the taking of that fort: for the Indians he had only contempt, but his blockade of the St. Lawrence had had the incidental effect of cutting off the supply of cognac with which the French marinated their Indian diplomacy, and thus of driving the thirsty Senecas (in whose territory the Fort lay), and the Six Nations generally, into hopeful new alliances with the English. The force Amherst dispatcht against Niagara included, along with British regulars & colonial militiamen, some 1,900 of these Iroquois, among whom Andrew Cooke III moved easily under the nom de guerre of John Butler: it was the largest such force ever assembled on the side of the British. Their plan was not to take the fort by storm, but to besiege it, cut off the reinforcement of its garrison, and so force its surrender. The French relief force, sent up promptly from the Ohio Valley & Detroit to lift the siege, consisted of 1,600 Indians — Hurons, Mingoes, Shawnees — and 600 French: amongst the latter was Andrée, in the rôle of a half-breed habitant camp-follower.
By early July the French force was assembled at Presque Isle and ready to march up the shore of Lake Erie. Andrew slipt down from the British camp, Andrée up from the French, to a week-long tryst and strategy-conference on Chautauqua Lake, betwixt the two armies. There, as they embraced among the sugar maples & black willows which line that water, they workt out their tactics, not only for the battle to come, but for the larger campaign ahead. Andrew’s candidate to lead the projected Indian confederation was a young war-chief of the Senecas named Kyashuta: the Iroquois had long been the most politically advanced of Indians; they had 200 years of confederacy already under their belts, a confederacy so effective that Benjamin Franklin had proposed it as the model for a union of the British colonies in America. They were generally fear’d for their ferocity: they had never been much committed to either the French or the English; and their combination of matriarchy & patriarchy (the Sachems were all male, but the power of their nomination was reserved exclusively to a council of women) appeal’d to my grandparents. And the Senecas (in whose country they were trysting) were the fiercest, least “Eastern,” & most independent of the Iroquois.
Andrée for her part was much taken with a young Ottawa named Ponteach, or Pondiac, or Pontiac. The confederacy, she argued, must be center’d well west of the Alleghenies if it was to hold out against disease & alcohol. The Iroquois League could serve as an example & a 1st line of defence, but they were too hated by the Great Lakes tribes, on which they had prey’d for decades, to be able to unite them: their very name was a Huron hate-word meaning “vipers who strike without warning.” Pontiac had in his favor that he was, after the manner of other great leaders in history, not quite native to the tribe he had begun to lead (his mother was an Ojibwa). More important, in addition to his courage, eloquence, energy, good humor & political judgement, he had what amounted to a Vision (transmitted to him by Andrée herself from a prophet of the Delawares): a return to aboriginal ways & implements, a sacrifice of comfort & efficiency in the interest of repurification & the achievement of sufficient moral strength to repel the white invaders. This Delaware Prophet — also known as “The Impostor”—was an authentic mystic & certifiable madman, very potent nonetheless among the Ohio Valley tribes. Pontiac was neither mystical nor mad, and even more potent was his canny modification of the vision, retail’d in parable form: the Prophet himself loses his way in the forest, encounters a beautiful maiden (Andrée, in the rôle of Socrates’s Diotima), & is by her instructed to give up his firearms & firewater for the manlier hunting-bow, tomahawk, & scalping knife. His reward is regeneration in the arms of the maiden herself.
Your great-grandfather (like your father) was a tactful husband: he kiss’d Andrée — by then his wife of a dozen years & mother of his son, my father — and agreed that this Pontiac must be their man. She in turn agreed that he must not rise to power prematurely: a decisive, even shocking defeat at Fort Niagara would weaken the leadership of his older rivals, impress the beaten tribes with the necessity of confederation, and oblige their retreat westward toward Fort Detroit, a better center for their regrouping. And it would be well if this defeat were at the hands more of Sir William Johnson’s Iroquois than of the British regulars and colonials: the Hurons & Shawnees would be thereby more effectually stung; the Iroquois would be encouraged in their largest joint military operation & properly set up, not for warmer relations with the British, but for militant disaffection when — as would inevitably be the case under Amherst’s administration — they were denied the massacre, plunder, rape, torture, & rum they regarded as the victor’s due.
With this accord the couple parted, planning to reunite at Castines Hundred in the fall. Two days later, within a few hours after dinner on 20 July, surely by “John Butler’s” arrangement, both of the British officers in command at the siege of Fort Niagara were kill’d, the one by a “French” sniper, the other by “accidental” explosion of a siege-gun, and leadership of the besieging army (which rightfully pass’d to Colonel Haldemand in Oswego) was effectively usurpt next day by Sir William Johnson & his Iroquois. On the morning of the 24th, against Captain Pouchot’s urgent warnings, Captain de Lignery “inexplicably” led the French relief column straight up the portage road on the east bank of the Niagara into Johnson’s ambush at the shrine of La Belle Famille, two miles below their destination. 500 French & Indians died before Pouchot surrender’d the fort at 5 P.M. The Iroquois night of plunder, promist them by Johnson, was so thoro that it took a thousand troops two months to clean up & repair the damage. Even so, Andrew managed to persuade the Senecas (some of whom had fought with the French inside the fort) that their brothers the Mohawks, Johnson’s own adopted tribe, had got the best of the pillaging. At this point the real Captain John Butler came on the scene, and Grandfather rejoin’d his family at Castines Hundred.
The next two years they spent establishing new identities for themselves & cultivating young Pontiac, whose influence was growing rapidly amongst the Ottawas & their neighbours. Grandfather took the role of an habitant trader from Lake St. Clair named Antoine Cuillerier. Andrée, in order to free herself for a certain necessary flirtation in Detroit, pretended to be, not his wife, but his daughter Angélique. And my father Henry Burlingame IV — by then a stout lad of fourteen — happily play’d the rôle of his mother’s young brother, Alexis: his 1st involvement in the family enterprise, to which he took like a duck to water.
As they had expected, the fall of Fort Niagara inclined many Indian leaders, if not to the surly but victorious British, at least away from the French, toward neutrality. When New France surrender’d at Montreal in September 1760, and Lord Amherst claim’d for Britain a territory twelve times its size, my family began their counter-campaign. The British refusal to provide ammunition on credit for the hunting season, they explain’d to Pontiac, was the 1st step of a plan to exterminate the Indians altogether; only solidarity among the nations could withstand them. Pontiac agreed, but set forth his doubts: just as using the white man’s rifles & drinking his spirits had made the Indians less than Indians, so he fear’d that real political alliances & concerted military campaigns in the white man’s fashion, while they might be the only alternative to extinction, would if successful transform the Indians into red Englishmen. Very well to preach the taking up of firearms to fight firearms, to the end of returning to the noble bow & arrow: he could not seriously believe that, once taken up wholesale, they would ever be laid down, any more than he himself would ever again in his life be able to remain sober in the presence of alcohol.