Reviewed by: Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763 by Keith R. Widder Matthew Smith Keith R. Widder, Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; Mackinac Island: Mackinac State Historic Parks, 2013. 331 pp. $49.95. Keith R. Widder’s Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow was published to mark the 250th anniversary of Pontiac’s War; or the Anglo-Indian War of 1763, as it is called here. Notwithstanding his panoramic vision, Widder focuses on the micro-historical significance of a single site—Fort Michilimackinac—captured from the British at the start of the conflict. Michilimackinac was, he emphasizes, “part of a larger story that reached to Montreal, Quebec, London, Paris, New York, the Ohio country, Detroit, the Illinois country, the Mississippi River, New Orleans, Lake Superior, and to points further north and west” (xii). Yet Michilimackinac deserves consideration in itself, as a microcosm of the changing world beyond its palisades. Departing from conventional narratives depicting the conflict as a rupture in the fabric of colonial America, Widder focuses on the fort’s capture as a bloody but ambiguous episode in “the saga of Indians, British, French-Canadians, and métis struggling to build an enduring peace and a viable fur trade based upon trust” (55). No historian is better qualified to trace this saga than Widder, the former curator of history for Mackinac State Historic Parks (co-publishers here with Michigan State University Press), who has written extensively on the colonial and early national history of the Great Lakes. Widder’s work complements the ethnographic turn in recent borderlands history, most notably Richard White’s The Middle Ground, as well as Michael A. McDonnell (Masters of Empire), credited with the present construction of the Anglo-Indian War. Fort Michilimackinac dominated the straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan, and with it the strategic and commercial fortunes of the Great Lakes borderlands, or pays d’en haut. It was, wrote one contemporary, “a rendezvous for all the Canadians trading with the northern savages” (9). But it was much more than that. It was the crucible in which early alliances between the British, Indians, and Canadians were forged—the center of the all-encompassing fur trade, binding peoples of the region through complex networks of trade and credit, religion and kinship. The loss of Fort Michilimackinac on June 2, 1763, Widder contends, was a traumatic but temporary blow to British authority. As the presumptive colonial power following victory in the French and Indian Wars and the Treaty [End Page 81] of Paris earlier that year, the British were humiliated when a small party of Ojibwe warriors stormed the garrison under the cover of a game of bagatiway (lacrosse). Such unpreparedness highlighted the key factors underwriting the conflict. The Ojibwe and other Indians refused to acknowledge British treaty claims, considering that French cessions were never France’s to cede. Initial attempts to extend the ritual Covenant Chain first brokered between the British and the Iroquois in the seventeenth century quickly broke down in the pays d’en haut. Much blame is laid at Governor General Jeffrey Amherst, whose “parsimony and low opinion of Native people” (75) revealed itself in the withholding of diplomatic gifts. While Amherst disdained gift giving as unnecessary extravagance, Indian leaders understood the custom as a proper form of tribute. Indian resistance reflected fears that European relations, characterized by diplomacy under the French, were being replaced by coercion under the new regime. Amherst’s failing, argues Widder, was to see “both the cause and solution to the violence of 1763 to be military in nature” (170). In fact, the fall of Michilimackinac was the climax rather than the prelude of efforts to expel the British. In spite of deep mistrust Amherst and other British leaders held towards local Indians, Native people were in fact most anxious to prevent their region disintegrating into bloody chaos. Widder moves beyond the obvious facts of bloodshed and conflict, “allowing Native people, Canadians, and British in the Michilimackinac borderland to tell us how they lived their everyday lives and their story about their participation in the war.” He notes that...
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Nov 21, 2018
Tiopira Mcdowell 
Open Access