252 PONTIAC AT DETROIT. [1763, May, June. 



seventeen years since the Ojibwas of Michillimack- 

 inac, combined with the Sacs and Foxes, came 

 down to destroy you. Who then defended you? 

 Was it not I and my young men 1 Mickinac, great 

 chief of all these nations, said in council that he 

 would carry to his village the head of your com- 

 mandant — that he would eat his heart and drink 

 his blood. Did I not take your part? Did I not 

 go to his camp, and say to him, that if he wished 

 to kill the French, he must first kill me and my 

 warriors] Did I not assist you in routing them 

 and driving them away ? ^ And now you think 

 that I would turn my arms against you ! No, 

 my Brothers ; I am the same French Pontiac who 

 assisted you seventeen years ago. I am a French- 

 man, and I wish to die a Frenchman ; and I now 

 repeat to you that you and I are one — that it is 

 for both our interests that I should be avenged. 



1 The annals of these remote and gloomy regions are involved in such 

 obscurity, that it is hard to discover the precise character of the events 

 to which Pontiac here refers. The only allusion to them, which the 

 writer has met with, is the following, inscribed on a tattered scrap of 

 soiled paper, found among the M'Dougal manuscripts : — 



"Five miles below the mouth of Wolf River is the Great Death 

 Ground. This took its name from the circumstance, that some years 

 before the Old French War, a great battle was fought between the French 

 troops, assisted by the Menomonies and Ottaways on the one side, and 

 the Sac and Fox Indians on the other. The Sacs and Foxes were nearly 

 all cut off; and this proved the cause of their eventual expulsion from 

 that country." 



The M'Dougal manuscripts, above referred to, belonged to a son of the 

 Lieutenant M'Dougal who was the fellow-prisoner of Major Campbell. 

 On the death of the younger M'Dougal, the papers, which were very- 

 voluminous, and contained various notes concerning the Indian war, and 

 the captivity of his father, came into the possession of a family at the 

 town of St. Clair, in Michigan, who permitted such of them as related to 

 the subjects in question to be copied by the writer. 



