Chief Pontiac - Later Years

Later Years

After the failure to capture Fort Detroit in 1763, Pontiac withdrew to the Illinois Country, where he continued to encourage militant resistance to British occupation. Although the British had successfully pacified the uprising in the Ohio Country, British military dominance was tenuous, and they decided to negotiate with the Ottawa leader. Pontiac met with Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, on July 25, 1766, at Oswego, New York, and formally ended hostilities.

By the British Crown's attention to Pontiac, he asserted more power among the Indians of the region than he possessed by tradition. Local rivalries flared up, and in 1768 he was forced to leave his Ottawa village on the Maumee River. Returning to the Illinois Country, Pontiac was murdered on April 20, 1769, at the French village of Cahokia (nearly opposite St. Louis, Missouri) by a Peoria Indian, perhaps in retaliation for an earlier attack by Pontiac. Various rumors quickly spread about the circumstances of Pontiac's death, including one that the British had hired his assassin. According to a story recorded by historian Francis Parkman in The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), a terrible war of retaliation against the Peoria resulted from Pontiac's murder. Although this legend is still sometimes repeated, there is no evidence that there were any reprisals for Pontiac's murder.