CONTENTS
I. PONTIAC'S CONSPIRACY
II. "A LAIR OF WILD BEASTS"
III. THE REVOLUTION BEGINS
IV. THE CONQUEST COMPLETED
V. WAYNE, THE SCOURGE OF THE INDIANS
VI. THE GREAT MIGRATION
VII. PIONEER DAYS AND WAYS
VIII. TECUMSEH
IX. THE WAR OF 1812 AND THE NEW WEST
X. SECTIONAL CROSS CURRENTS
XI. THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE OLD NORTHWEST
Chapter I. Pontiac's Conspiracy
The fall of Montreal, on September 8, 1760, while the plains about the
city were still dotted with the white tents of the victorious English
and colonial troops, was indeed an event of the deepest consequence to
America and to the world. By the articles of capitulation which were
signed by the Marquis de Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, Canada and
all its dependencies westward to the Mississippi passed to the British
Crown. Virtually ended was the long struggle for the dominion of the
New World. Open now for English occupation and settlement was that
vast country lying south of the Great Lakes between the Ohio and the
Mississippi--which we know as the Old Northwest--today the seat of five
great commonwealths of the United States.
With an ingenuity born of necessity, the French pathfinders and
colonizers of the Old Northwest had chosen for their settlements sites
which would serve at once the purposes of the priest, the trader, and
the soldier; and with scarcely an exception these sites are as important
today as when they were first selected. Four regions, chiefly, were
still occupied by the French at the time of the capitulation of
Montreal. The most important, as well as the most distant, of these
regions was on the east bank of the Mississippi, opposite and below
the present city of St. Louis, where a cluster of missions, forts, and
trading-posts held the center of the tenuous line extending from Canada
to Louisiana. A second was the Illinois country, centering about the
citadel of St. Louis which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of
"Starved Rock," near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A third was
the valley of the Wabash, where in the early years of the eighteenth
century Vincennes had become the seat of a colony commanding both the
Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was the western end of Lake
Erie, where Detroit, founded by the doughty Cadillac in 1701, had
assumed such strength that for fifty years it had discouraged the
ambitions of the English to make the Northwest theirs.
