War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire. By Gregory Evans Dowd. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 384 pages.
This review first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 7, 2003, No. 4214, p. 31.
War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire
Gregory Evans Dowd
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when Francis Parkman made him the eponymous tragic hero of an ill-fated “conspiracy”, the Ottawa Indian Pontiac has fascinated historians. As Britain and British colonists celebrated victory over the French and the end of the French Empire in America in 1763, several thousand Native Americans — one of the largest pan-Indian alliances in history — rose up in rebellion against newly occupied British outposts in the Great Lakes region. Striking with what seemed to be an unprecedented degree of coordination, the Native American alliance scored enough notable victories in the early stages of the rebellion to convince most observers that a concerted conspiracy was afoot.
In The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman created a hero to account for British setbacks, and in doing so constructed an enduring myth. In this most recent interpretation of the origins and nature of the uprising, Gregory Evans Dowd draws on his considerably expertise of eighteenth-century Native American resistance movements to construct a detailed retelling of the rebellion. Far from a hopeless uprising led by a noble Pontiac against the advance of civilization, as Parkman would have it, the rebellion, Dowd reveals, had its origins in a host of Native American grievances — ranging from agitation within tribes and Indian villages for cultural and spiritual reform, to a more general demand for greater respect from British officers. Dowd painstakingly reconstructs the different motives and actions of a wide range of participants, ultimately reinforcing the important point that there was no single Native American perspective, nor, for that matter, a single British viewpoint.
Yet if Dowd succeeds in complicating the story that Parkman over-simplified, the story is — perhaps inevitably — less well told. Dowd’s tale is punctuated by intrusive historiographical digressions, and the thematic treatment leads to some repetition. Moreover, while Parkman constructed an almost entirely fictitious hero out of Pontiac, Dowd’s Pontiac is a less pivotal, more shadowy figure. As Dowd points out, few sources give us much of a picture of Pontiac or his role in the uprising, and many of the sources we do have are flawed. Finally, unlike Parkman, whose assured but flawed conclusion was inevitable doom for the savage Native American, Dowd ends less satisfying but more convincingly by showing that Pontiac’s war was ultimately inconclusive. Parkman told an epic story; Dowd gives us a fine history.