Wolfe's Illness and Despondency: Pontiac and Detroit

Captain Dalyell, aide-de-camp to General Amherst was sent in a vessel with reinforcements and supplies for the garrison at Detroit. They ran up the river in the night at the close of July, and succeeded in getting both into the fort. Dalyell at once proposed to make a sally from the fort and attack the besiegers, who lay about a mile up the river. Gladwin thought it would be imprudent. Dalyell persisted, and with two hundred and forty chosen men, he marched in the darkness at three o'clock in the morning of the 31st of July, to surprise Pontiac. The chief was on the alert, and at a small stream at the northern verge of the city of Detroit, the English, furiously assailed, were forced to make a precipitate retreat, leaving twenty of their comrades killed and forty-two wounded, on the borders of the brook, which, to this day, bears the name of Bloody Run. Dalyell was slain while trying to carry off the wounded, and his scalp was an Indian's trophy.

This victory encouraged the Indians, and they swarmed around Detroit and Fort Pitt. For the relief of the latter, Colonel Bouquet was sent with a force of regulars from Pennsylvania. Early in August he approached the fort, when the besieging savages attacked him. He had two desperate fights with them, in which he lost about one-fourth of his command and all of his horses, but he drove the assailants away and entered the fort with the remainder. Detroit was relieved the next summer by a force under Colonel Bradstreet.

The power of the Indian Confederacy was now broken, and chiefs of the hostile tribes sued for pardon and peace. The haughty Pontiac would not yield. He tried to rally the confederate tribes, but in vain. He went to the Illinois country where no Englishman had been, and where the French flag yet waved. Among the tribes there he exerted his eloquence to induce them to make war on the English. He sent an ambassador to New Orleans to ask the French to aid him. His efforts were vain. The cause that lay next to his heart was ruined. Afterward we find him holding a friendly conference with Sir William Johnson at Oswego; then he is seen at St. Louis trying to arouse the French people there to drive the English out of the Illinois country, which they had seized. At last, in 1769, this haughty Indian prince--this Catawba prisoner adopted by the Ottawas--who had swayed almost unbounded power over thousands of square miles of territory, was slain near Cahokia. A strolling Indian was bribed by an English trader to murder him. That savage, for the gift of a barrel of rum, stole softly behind Pontiac in the forest and buried his hatchet in his brain.