THIRTY

JUNE 2, 1763

At Michilimackinac, nearly three hundred miles north of Detroit, Ojibwa warriors and their wives fool the commander of the British garrison into letting them capture the fort by luring them to a game of baggattaway—now known as lacrosse. This event takes place during Pontiac’s revolt, which culminates in the Native American leader laying siege to Detroit. While the siege fails, Pontiac is remembered for his resistance to the destruction of the indigenous population and its way of life. Historical accounts of Detroit have marginalized Native Americans, as have those of the country in general, but, in a small and belated sign of acknowledgment, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nation is now represented in international lacrosse competition.

In 1851, roughly eighty years after Pontiac’s revolt, historian Francis Parkman would picture that fateful morning as “warm and sultry.” It had been the fourth of June, he claimed, King George’s birthday (though he was actually mistaken about the date). The soldiers at Michilimackinac had some license to celebrate their monarch, and it seemed like a nice day for a game. “Encamped in the woods, not so far off,” Parkman wrote, “were a large number of Ojibwas, lately arrived; while several bands of the Sac Indians, from the River Wisconsin, had also erected their lodges in the vicinity. Early in the morning, many Ojibwas came to the fort, inviting officers and soldiers to come out and see a grand game of ball, which was to be played between their nation and the Sacs.”1

Nothing like a fun outing in early summer—half of the fort’s population attended, leaving the place largely undefended. This is how Parkman wants us to imagine the scene:

The houses and barracks were so ranged as to form a quadrangle, enclosing an extensive area, upon which the doors all opened, while behind rose the tall palisades, forming a large external square. The picturesque Canadian houses, with their rude porticoes, and projecting roofs of bark, sufficiently indicated the occupations of their inhabitants; for birch canoes were lying near many of them, and fishing-nets were stretched to dry in the sun. Women and children were moving about the doors; knots of Canadian voyageurs reclined on the ground, smoking and conversing; soldiers were lounging listlessly at the doors and windows of the barracks, or strolling in careless undress about the area.

Outside, everything was chill as well; the soldiers sat in the shade of the palisades, watching the Native Americans play. “Most of them were without arms, and mingled among them were a great number of Canadians, while a multitude of Indian squaws, wrapped in blankets, were conspicuous in the crowd. Captain Etherington and Lieutenant Leslie stood near the gate, the former indulging his inveterate English propensity; for, as Henry informs us, he had promised the Ojibwas that he would bet on their side against the Sacs.”

Suddenly, the narrative turns ominous: “Indian chiefs and warriors were also among the spectators, intent, apparently, on watching the game, but with thoughts, in fact, far otherwise employed.” But before we learn what was really going on, Parkman treats us to a description of the sport:

The game in which they were engaged, called baggattaway by the Ojibwas, is still, as it has always been, a favorite with many Indian tribes. At either extremity of the ground, a tall post was planted, marking the stations of the rival parties. The object of each was defend his own post, and drive the ball to that of its adversary. Hundreds of lithe and agile figures were leaping and bounding upon the plain. Each was nearly naked, his loose black hair flying in the wind, and each bore in his hand a bat of a form peculiar to this game. At one moment the whole were crowded together, a dense throng of combatants, all struggling for the ball; at the next, they were scattered again and running over the ground like hounds in full cry. Each, in his excitement, yelled and shouted at the height of his voice. Rushing and striking, tripping their adversaries, or hurling them to the ground, they pursued the animating contest amid the laughter and applause of the spectators.

Fate turns on a dime—when a ball soared out of the crowd and descended in a wide arc towards the pickets of the fort, it must have looked like a mistake, an accident, and when the ball players, all at once, “a maddened and tumultuous throng,” rushed after it, the spectators may have wondered about the rules of the game. And then, the players were at the gate.

The amazed English had no time to think or act. The shrill cries of the ball players were changed to the ferocious war-whoop. The warriors snatched from the squaws the hatchets, which the latter, with this design, had concealed beneath their blankets. Some of the Indians assailed the spectators without, while others rushed into the fort, and all was carnage and confusion. At the outset, several strong hands had fastened their grip upon Etherington and Leslie, and led them away from the scene of the massacre towards the woods.

The account, first published in 1851, is part of Parkman’s famous account of Pontiac’s War, which focuses primarily on the siege of Detroit. This is, possibly, the earliest recorded instance of a sporting event in Michigan. While Michilimackinac is about three hundred miles from Detroit by canoe, skirting around Lake Huron, and roughly the same distance by car today, the event is closely connected to the city.

Parkman’s classic history, which went through ten editions in his lifetime, has come under heavy criticism by modern scholarship. Like many historians of his time, he gave himself considerable license when it came to filling in the inevitable gaps in the sparse written record. The way he characterizes Pontiac and Native Americans in general, while sympathetic by the standards of his day, is riddled with prejudice and stereotypes. He relied almost entirely on the words of Europeans for his sources, never thinking to ask for Native American views or accounts. It appears that he got even simple details wrong. By Etherington’s own eyewitness account, for instance, the events at Michilimackinac took place on June 2, not June 4.2 That said, the roughly dozen extant accounts of the incident he describes, including some by Native Americans, at least appear to confirm the basic outline of his story. The subterfuge by ball game was a historical event.

Pontiac was a tribal leader of the Odawa (Ottawa), one of the Algonquin peoples, and, along with the Ojibwa (Chippewa) and the Potawatomi, a part of the Three Fires Alliance that had been formed one thousand years earlier at Michilimackinac.³ These nations dominated the hunting grounds around Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, which enclose the territory of what is now the state of Michigan. The first European settlers they encountered were the French, following the voyages of Jacques Cartier over two hundred years earlier. In 1608, Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec; in 1682, Sieur de La Salle reached the Mississippi from Lake Michigan, canoed the length of the river, and claimed Louisiana for France; and in 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded a settlement on the straits joining Lake Erie to Lake St. Clair and Lake Huron. He called it Detroit. In the French plan to build a colonial empire from Quebec to New Orleans, the fort at Detroit was a critical link at a time when the only viable means of long-distance trade was by water, and the route from north to south went through the Great Lakes.⁴

The French colonization of the region focused on two main interests: furs and Catholicism. While Jesuit priests sought to convert Native Americans, French traders lived in close contact with them and disturbed their way of life far less than the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish tribes who built farms, brought whole families, and claimed ownership of land. Both French and British settlers, however, did tremendous damage by introducing guns, whiskey, and disease.⁵

In the 1700s, Britain and France were the two great global powers struggling for mastery of the trade routes. Their conflict played out in the so-called French-Indian wars, which culminated in the capture of Quebec and the surrender of all French interests in Canada in 1760.⁶ At first, the competition between Britain and France may have seemed to work to the benefit of the Native Americans, as the two competing European powers lavished gifts upon them in the hope of building alliances. The British had allied with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nation, who were the dominant power before the European arrivals, while the Algonquins acknowledged the French King as their “Great Father.” The victory of the British over the French was thus a double blow to the Algonquin peoples: not only had their ally lost, but the end of French competition meant that the British no longer needed to compete for favors. In the fall of 1760, British garrisons were dispatched to the frontier forts, carrying copies of the treaties signed by the French ceding their interest, meant to convince Native Americans that the regime change was permanent. At Detroit, the French commander Sieur de Belêtre reluctantly surrendered to Major Robert Rogers, and the French town formally came under British rule.7

The disadvantages of living with a British monopoly soon became apparent to the Native Americans, allies or not. The British became less generous in the provision of gifts, rationing alcohol and gunpowder, and generally treating the indigenous peoples as the inferiors they no doubt thought them to be. Worse, the tribal leaders soon realized that the defeat of the French would likely mean that a flood of settlers would move into the Ohio Valley and further west, steal their lands, and destroy their way of life.⁸

In 1761, the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) prophet Neolin, from the Ohio Valley, recounted visions in which he visited the Great Spirit, who instructed his people to return to the old ways of life and to give up the use of guns, alcohol, and other European goods. The Great Spirit also told him to drive the Europeans out of their country. Pontiac had some edits: he understood the message to dictate that only the British needed to be cleared out—so that the trading relationship with the French could resume.⁹

While he is often referred to as a general, Pontiac’s exact role as a leader is contested—the nineteenth century portrayed him as a mastermind, but later scholars believe his importance might have been exaggerated. While he had a following in his own right, the success of his plan to attack the British and restore the French rested on his capacity to persuade other tribes to join his enterprise. By 1763, he had achieved that goal.¹⁰ In addition, he had listened to the promises of French Canadians, who assured Pontiac that the king of France would soon send troops to aid the displacement of the British—it is unclear whether this was a deliberate lie or a delusion on the part of the French. While we do not know how much of a role Pontiac played in coordinating the seizure of British forts such as Michilimackinac, he was the unquestioned leader of the siege of Detroit.11 The plan to seize the fort was settled at a meeting on the Ecorse River about ten miles south of the fort, now known as Council Point Park.¹²

The siege began on May 7, 1763, when Pontiac planned to enter the fort under the guise of friendly negotiations with the commander, only to murder the entire garrison. This plan failed when Major Henry Gladwin, the commander, got wind of it.¹³ A standoff followed—Pontiac did not have the means to take the fort by force, so he waited for the French to come to his aid, while the British did not have a large enough force to break out. Pontiac’s allies foiled Detroit’s first attempt to bring reinforcements, and on July 31, he and his men defeated a second British detachment during the Battle of Bloody Run, fought by a stream just east of the downtown that has now dried up, on the site of what is now Elmwood Cemetery, a hundred yards away from where the Detroit City FC Fieldhouse now stands.¹⁴

While Pontiac triumphed in that battle—twenty-seven British soldiers were killed and a further thirty wounded—the fort remained invincible, and the promised French soldiers did not arrive.¹⁵ As winter approached, many of Pontiac’s confederates started to drift away; the siege was finally raised at the end of October.¹⁶ In the end, then, Pontiac’s War was a failure, and he was assassinated two years later.¹⁷ However, the conviction that had driven his attacks, the principle that the land belonged to the Native Americans and not the European invaders, made him a hero to generations of Native Americans and to some thoughtful descendants of the invaders.

The French may have given up possession of Detroit in 1760, but the French settlers did not leave, and many of the city’s leading figures would be drawn from their ranks. The families of Joseph Campau, Francois Rivard, Charles Peltier, Peter Desnoyers, and Charles Girardin would wield considerable influence in nineteenth-century Detroit.¹⁸ Even in the 1990 census, 6.8 percent of the residents of Grosse Pointe, the wealthy enclave north of the city, still claimed French ancestry, more than twice the national average.¹⁹ In contrast to a city like New Orleans, little of French culture, lan guage, or cuisine has survived in Detroit, but French origins still echo in the names of families, streets, or places—foremost among them, “Detroit,” city of the straits. The streets running perpendicular to the Detroit River also still carry the names of families who owned the strip farms of the early settlement—Beaubien, St. Antoine, Rivard, Riopelle, DeQuindre, St. Aubin, Dubois, Chene, Beaufait, and Bellevue. The same is true for some of the grand avenues of the city: Gratiot, Kercheval, and Livernois. The name of Cadillac is to be found everywhere, not least in the name of the luxury cars. One-quarter of the city’s flag carries the fleur-de-lis, the symbol of Royal France.

There is no such recognition of Native American origins in the flag, and none of the major streets is named after prominent Native families, while Woodward, Campau, and Macomb are the names of slaveholders. At least the name of Michigan itself derives from an Ojibwe word meaning “large lake.” Additionally, the great arteries of Detroit—Michigan, Woodward, and Gratiot—are thought to be built following old Native American trails. Pontiac is remembered in the city bearing his name, twenty-five miles northwest of Detroit, for a few decades the home of the Detroit Lions, and there is the Pontiac division of General Motors, founded in 1926. You can learn Ojibwa at the University of Michigan, but not Kickapoo, Menominee, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Mesquakie-Sauk, or Huron. And nobody seems to remember that Detroit’s history of slavery includes the owning of both Native and African Americans and that it was established under the French, tolerated by the British, and maintained by the U.S. government even when the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, establishing American rule, outlawed slavery.20

What survived, as the names were erased, was that ball game that drenched a sunny June day in 1763 in blood, “baggattaway” to its inventors, named “lacrosse” by French missionaries. European witnesses describe variants of it from the seventeenth century on.²¹ It involved a crooked stick, attached with deerskin strips, that enabled the players to scoop up a small ball and propel it toward a goal. Those goals could be set at great distances apart, and a game could involve hundreds of players—not unlike the folk football played in early modern English towns. Many of the Europeans remarked upon the game’s violence, but the British, whose own games of football often involved a good amount of bloodshed, would have taken that in stride.22 Baggattaway had a spiritual as well as physical dimension, and there is a significant mythology surrounding the Native American tradition. In some cases, it appears to have been a preparation for battle, as indicated by its alternate name: “the little brother of war.” In other versions, it simply seems to have been a joyous form of communal self-expression. Like Captain Etherington, the players liked to gamble on the outcome, and they often ruined themselves in the process—not unlike the English lords who played cricket around the same time.

Lacrosse was formalized as a game by William Beers, a Canadian dentist, at the end of the 1850s. He envisaged the sport as a manly form of physical exercise, along the lines of the many versions of football that were being codified around this time, but with truly Canadian roots.²³ It soon spread to the rest of the English-speaking world—the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, where it is played to this day.

Continuing their general pattern, the colonizers took over the game and proceeded to exclude the ones who had invented it. While Native Americans were “pure” and “natural” and “noble” when it served the invaders’ purposes, they did not make for acceptable opponents at their own game. Since many of the Native American lacrosse teams could simply not afford to pursue their sport without some form of compensation, the ruling Anglo-Saxon elite insisted on rigid amateurism—at least when it suited them. And it certainly suited them to refuse to compete against professional or semiprofessional Native players.

By the early twentieth century, North America had generally accepted professional lacrosse, but the Olympic Games still insisted that competitors be amateurs, which barred some of the greatest players from international competition, many of whom were Native Americans. From the mid-century onward, Haudenosaunee players began to campaign for the right to compete as a national team in international competition, stressing their independence from either Canada or the United States. In 1987, the men’s national Haudenosaunee team was finally recognized by the Federation of International Lacrosse as the Iroquois Nationals. In the World Championships of 2014 and 2018, they took the bronze medal—an impossibly small token in recompense for centuries of erasure. As Tiya Miles writes in her formidable introduction to The Dawn of Detroit:

For centuries the fire has raged, consuming lives, igniting passions, churning up the land and animals, swallowing humans whole. The burn that Detroiters feel—that the nation uncomfortably intuits as it looks upon the beleaguered city as a symbol of progress and defeat—traces back to distant times, to the global desire to make land into resources, the drive to turn people into things, the quest for imperial dominance, and the tolerance for ill-gotten gain…. Deep histories flow beneath present inequalities, silent as underground freshwater streams.24

The history of Detroit runs deep indeed, and we have sought to pay attention to its joy and its sorrow alike. In the end, all history ought to be in the service of imagining a different future—or multiple, intertwining futures. In closing, we want to pick up, in a light-hearted key, one strand of the possible futures of Detroit and return to the image of the City of Champions—but in this vision, the champions come to Detroit.