Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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“But that’s Casteene,” you Concluded. “Do you know who he really is?”

The Doctor twitched his nose. “No idle ontologies, Jacob Horner. ‘Casteene’ is sufficient for our purposes. So. Like yourself, I find our Saint Joseph to be altogether rational, certainly hostile, not so certainly threatening. He has paid in advance for the month of April, so we shall be seeing him for a while yet. If he does not murder us or have us arrested – either of which I regard him as quite capable of doing but not very likely to do – his presence here may have its benefits. Bibi and Pocahontas have certainly been easier to live with lately, though I foresee trouble if he shows a preference for one or the other. But you.”

You Waited.

“You Locked Up again, did you?”

“Not Locked Up,” you Corrected, “Petered Out. When Joe spoke of redreaming history, we were both looking out of the window. I was Waiting for him to explain and at the same time Thinking of all that water going by, that started out clean in Lake Superior and then flushed down through Huron and Erie. Heraclitus says you can’t step into the same stream twice: I’d be Content to Step Into It once. And Horace speaks of the man standing on the riverbank, shoes in hand, forever waiting to take the first step, till all the water’s run by. I’m that man.”

“Literature,” the Doctor said contemptuously. “That reminded me that the corps of engineers is supposed to turn off Niagara Falls this summer, the American side, to see whether it can be made as spectacular as the Canadian Falls: the most American project I Ever Heard Of. It’s expected to be a great tourist attraction, a sort of negative natural wonder. Then I Got To Thinking about negativism, how it would be positive in the antiworld, where entropy would be ectropy and we’d be running an Immobilization Farm—”

“Horner, Horner.”

“That was it, till Tombo X came by and laid his Straight-Razor Therapy on me.” It is that young man’s wont, with white male immobiles, to terrify them into motion by whipping out an old-fashioned straight razor, rolling his eyeballs and flashing his teeth blackamoor-style, and, seizing the patient by the scrotum, threatening in Deep Dixie dialect to relieve him of his honky nuts. “One day he’ll go too far with that.”

“One day,” the Doctor said, “you will Tell my son to get his pickaninny hands off you or you will Burn a cross on his lawn. That day the conversation can begin.”

“He cheats,” you Complained. “By squeezing. It wasn’t fear of castration that fetched me up. It was pain.”

“Never mind. You had Been Out for five hours. And you might Still Be There if he had not been dodging Pocahontas. It was exactly like old times?”

“Exactly. I was Aware of everything going on, but Weatherless. Couldn’t Bring myself to Move. Zen Buddhists speak of the air breathing you…”

“For pity’s sake, Horner, do not Add Zen Buddhism to your White Socks and Skinny Neckties. This is 1969. You are Forty-Six. Most men of your Age and Class have children in college who have gotten over their own adolescent mysticism by this time. We are right where we started.”

You Waited. The Doctor took his time. His own hair and mustache, now entirely white, he has let grow longer in the current fashion, and has added a small goatee: he looks like a bald black Colonel Sanders, or a dapper negative of Albert Einstein. Your Mind Began to Wander, then to Dissipate. Though you Would Not Join the Generation, seriously to yourself you Enounced the current test pattern of your Consciousness:

You’ve Got a lot to live,

And Pepsi’s got a lot to give.

Then it too trickled away into the void. Across a measureless distance the Doctor said: “I have no razor. But I will cheerfully crotch you if you do not Wake Up.”

Okay.

“Okay. Your Friend Saint Joseph has the right idea, whether he and the former Joe Morgan are the same or not.”

“They’re the same.”

The Doctor shrugged his eyebrows. “Heraclitus’s dictum cuts two ways: even if the river had not flowed, the You would have. I am remembering how Morgan sent his wife back to you when he could not assimilate her first infidelity. As if a replay might clarify it…”

The Doctor slid his chair away, stood, relit his long-dead cigar. The interview was apparently over.

“An impressive chap, your Friend. But this Wiederträumerei is a dangerous business. You set about to kill two birds with one stone, and sometimes you wipe out the whole flock. So. Forget what we decided earlier about you and Pocahontas, at least until Saint Joseph makes his choice. You and I must go back to weekly P-and-A’s, as in the old days.” He frowned. “Reenactment. But if there is no Freshman English requirement on the campuses nowadays, surely there is no Prescriptive Grammar. And you Ought to Stay Residential. How will you Teach?”

~ ~ ~

R: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of A. B. Cooke III: Pontiac’s conspiracy.

At Castines Hundred

Niagara, Upper Canada

2 April 1812

My Dearest Henrietta or Henry,

Read, dear child, when you shall have been born & begun to be educated, a great tiresome epical poem call’d Columbiad, by Joel Barlow of Connecticut & Paris, wherein the dying & despondent Columbus, in a dream or trance, is fetcht to the Mount of Vision by Hesper, Spirit of the Western World: thence like Aeneas in Hades he beholds panoramically the future history (up to 1807, the date of the poem’s appearance) of the empire for whose initiation he is responsible. This vision, stout Barlow assures us – of white Americans pushing ever westward, clearing the forests, draining the marshes, harvesting the fish & game, building canals & roads & cities from coast to coast – cheers Columbus & reconciles him to his obscure death.

The conceit is admirable. The poem itself is a bore because, unlike the Aeneid, its concerns do not range much beyond sentimental patriotism, and because, unlike Virgil, its author is a merely educated, sensible fellow with an amateur’s gift for making verses. Joel Barlow was one of the self-styled “Hartford Wits”; another was your grandfather, Henry Burlingame IV, who befriended Barlow at Yale College just before the American Revolution and suggested both The Vision of Columbus (the poet’s 1st & briefer version of Columbiad) & a passable satire of Daniel Shays’ rebellion call’d The Anarchiad, of which more anon. The Cooke-Burlingame line is given neither to longueurs nor to longevity: my father is said to have died in 1785 at the age of 39, before either of the poems that covertly memorialize him was publisht.

As for Barlow: that gentleman survives as U.S. Minister to France, whence he will have reported by now to President Madison that “Le Comte Édouard de Crillon”—who lately sold Secretary Monroe the notorious John Henry Letters for $50,000 and then exacted from Madison’s operatives another $21,000 (half of which Andrée & I have safely bank’d for you in Switzerland) – does not exist. The late actual Duc de Crillon was a Spanish grandee, conqueror of Minorca, attacker of Gibraltar, & member of the French Assembly, who in 1788 tried unsuccessfully to seduce my mother at a diplomatic soirée in London. The current Duke, his only son, lives in Paris, smarting at the £1,200 he was lately swindled out of by one “Jean Blanque,” and doubtless enraged at the scandal now attaching to the family name. Father & son are both acquaintances of Barlow, to whom my father introduced them years ago. Thus the Minister will have immediately guess’d, as I want him to, that Madison has been duped. What he will not guess is that I did both the duping & the unduping, to lead the U. States closer to war and so promote the schism betwixt New England & the rest of that nation. That I chose the name Édouard de Crillon precisely to excite his suspicion (as well as to settle a little score for Mother), and the name Jean Blanque to echo Barlow’s own & provide him a blank to fill.

Rather, to provide such a blank to History, since the Hartford Wits, for all their wit, are short on the finer ironies. There is more to it: I chose the name Édouard for my imposture of the Count, for example, because it was Mother’s descent from Le Comte Cécile Édouard of Castle Haven in Maryland that had aroused the late Duke’s lecherous interest. If the fellow currently posing as Aaron Burr in Paris is in fact my father, he will recognize in that touch the family trademark, & understand that I understand that he is alive.

Thus the messages we Cooks & Burlingames amuse one another by sending with our left hands, as we play the Game of Governments with our right and undo, as far as is in us possible, the Vision of good Joel Barlow!

So then, dear child in the making: the fat is fairly in the fire since my letter of last month. Whilst you have been growing hair & toenails, and opening your eyes (What do you see, little Burlingame? That most of the world’s eyes are closed?), Wee Jamie Madison has sent the Henry Letters to Congress – that is, my fair paraphrase of the fourteen cipher’d originals, plus John Henry’s nattering Proposal for the Final Reunion of His Majesty’s Dominion in North America with the States of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Now Henry Clay & the War Hawks are making the most of them to embarrass the New England Federalists, to justify their own Anglophobia, & to push gentle Jamie ever closer to a “Second War of Independence”—their pretext for snatching the Canadas & the Floridas.

More anon, more anon, of

The Henry papers, bought & sold,

And paid for with the nation’s gold,

when I come to my own & your mother’s histories. This is to apprise you of your great-grandfather’s, the 3rd Andrew Cooke’s, whereto your genealogy had got when I closed my last. I pray you, review the chart of it, overleaf.

There are, all over this tree, other fruits, to be sure: brothers, sisters, by-blows on nearly every branch & twig. With a few exceptions, I have enter’d only those in the main line of your descent. And the wives of all those Barons Castine are not really nameless, but (always excepting Madocawanda) they made vocations of being their husbands’ wives, and are of no individual interest here. That fellow in the box, my grandfather, was, you recall, sired out of wedlock on the “Maryland Laureate’s” twin sister by the 3rd Henry Burlingame, who then disappear’d into the Dorset marshes with the avow’d intention of thwarting the “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of escaped African slaves & displaced Indians. To cover the scandal, Grandfather was given the surname Cooke and raised as the son of the poet Ebenezer, whose wife had died still-bearing their own child.

A.B.C. III thus never knew his father, tho thro his childhood he was retail’d stories by Eben Cooke of the mysterious “Uncle Henry” who, for aught they knew, might dwell among them incognito, looking after the welfare of his “favorite nephew.” How else explain the anonymous gifts of money & goods that from time to time appear’d as from Heaven, addrest either to Anna Cooke or to the boy?

So far did the aging poet fall into this folly, in 1730 he composed a sequel to his major work, The Sot-Weed Factor, call’d Sot-Weed Redivivus, or, the Planter’s Looking-Glass, which, in the guise of an economic tract in verse, incorporates to the knowledgeable eye broad signals to Henry Burlingame III, of the “Édouard de Crillon” variety. The opening words of Cooke’s preface, for example—

May I be canoniz’d for a Saint, if I know what Apology to make for this dull Piece of Household Stuff, any more than he that first invented the Horn-Book…

– allude to the once-popular belief that Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Lord Baltimore & 1st Lord Proprietary of Maryland, had struck a bargain with Pope Urban VIII to make Maryland into a Jesuit colony in return for posthumous sainthood. Cooke 1st learnt of this presumable slander from Burlingame, who of course had also, as his childhood tutor, “invented the Horn-Book” for his little charges. Similarly, a few lines farther on—

… one Blast from the Critick’s Mouth, would raise more Flaws in this Looking-Glass, than there be Circles in the Sphere…

– we are reminded that Burlingame was ever Cooke’s severest literary critic. That his political intrigues led him into mirror-like reversals & duplications (he also posed as Baltimore’s enemy John Coode, & cet., & cet.). That Cooke’s “inventor of the Horn-Book” was also his instructor in geometry & astronomy. In the poem itself, such allusions swarm like bees (themselves a reduplicated image, punning on Burlingame’s initial): the most obvious is the poet’s not only re-meeting but re-sleeping with a tobacco-planter (“cockerouse” in the argot of the time, & a naughty pun too) with whom he had dealings in the original Sot-Weed Factor, & who was Burlingame “much disguis’d”:

I boldly crav’d his Worship’s Name

And tho’ the Don at first seem’d shy,

At length he made this smart Reply

I am, says he, that Cockerouse

Once entertain’d you at his House,

When aged Roan, not us’d to falter,

If you remember, slipt his Halter;

Left Sotweed Factor in the Lurch,

As Presbyterians leave the Church…

The horse-couplet is a quotation from the earlier poem; the original Roan had inspired a trial of rhyming betwixt Cooke & Burlingame-disguised-as-“Cockerouse”; Ebenezer & his sister had indeed been “left in the lurch,” and Andrew III born therefore outside “the Church.”

More subtle is the reference to his guide as “the Spurious Offspring of some Tawny-Moor” (Ebenezer’s prostitute-wife, Joan Toast, was once ravisht by the Moorish pirate Boabdil, and Burlingame’s ancestry, like yours & mine, was racially mixt). “… to glut the Market with a poisonous Drug” refers of course to the overproduction of “sot-weed” in the colony, the poem’s explicit theme; but it alludes covertly to the opium traffic in which Burlingame involved Ebenezer Cooke in the 1690’s.

I call’d the drowsy Passive Slave

To light me to my downy Grave…

and

…we thought it best

To let the Aethiopian rest…

overtly refer to the “one that pass’d for Chamber-Maid” at the inn where this encounter takes place (note that she too is suspected of being other than she seems), whilst they secretly remind Burlingame of the poet’s near-martyrdom at the stake in 1694 by that conspiracy of escaped slaves & Ahatchwhoop Indians on Bloodsworth Island, which Burlingame had gone ostensibly to “put to rest.”

Most interesting of all is Cooke’s prediction that his fellow Marylanders

Will by their Heirs be curst for [their] Mistakes,

E’er Saturn thrice his Revolution makes…

That is, literally, within three generations, when the land will have been deforested & the soil exhausted by one-crop tobacco farming. But the “three revolutions” (Saturn’s period is 29½ years), reckon’d roughly from the date of Cooke’s composing Sot-Weed Redivivus, echo a prediction by Henry Burlingame III of three “revolutionary” upheavals: 1st, the Seven Years War betwixt Britain & France, which by 1759 would have reacht the fall of Fort Niagara to the British & the consequent shift of Indian allegiances from the losing to the winning side, paving the way for the surrender of the Canadas to Lord Jeffrey Amherst & for “Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” as shall be shown; 2nd, the American & French Revolutions (i.e., about 1789, when George Washington was elected, the Tennis Court Oath sworn, the Bastille taken); 3rd, what we now approach: the decline & fall of Napoleon’s Empire & the commencement of America’s 2nd Revolution. “Rise, Oroonoko, rise …” Cooke urges his disguised mentor at the beginning of Canto III, which in cunning emblem of eternal recurrence, or revolution without end, he ends with the exhortation “Begin…” and the invocation of time’s Stream

That runs (alas!) and ever will run on.

Anna Cooke indulged this folly, if folly it was, but resisted the temptation to folie à deux. Upon her brother’s death in 1732, she confided to her “nephew” Andrew (by then a successful lawyer in Annapolis) that his “Uncle Henry” had been her common-law husband; she declared moreover her private conviction that he had not, as Ebenezer believed, gone over to the side of the conspirators whose ally he had pretended to be: had he done so, she was firmly convinced, the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy would have succeeded, and Maryland at least, if not all thirteen of the English colonies, would no longer exist. It was Anna’s belief that H.B. III had successfully divided & thwarted the designs of the Indians & Negroes, then been discover’d & kill’d by them; otherwise he would have rejoin’d & officially married her long since. As for the anonymous donations, they were in her opinion the compensation traditionally provided sub rosa by governments to the widows of secret operatives lost in the line of duty, whose supreme sacrifices must perforce & alas go as officially unacknowledged as her brief “marriage.”

Upon Anna Cooke’s death not long after, Andrew found among his “aunt’s” papers a letter addrest to him, to be open’d & read along with her will (both documents are here in the Castines’ library). It confest the facts as aforerehearst: that she, not Joan Toast Cooke the prostitute, was his mother, Henry Burlingame III his father, Eben Cooke his uncle.

At his then age (about 36), his parents’ names were of less interest to Grandfather than their nature: accepting as true Anna Cooke’s final version of the former, what Andrew felt the greatest urgency to decide was whether, as his Uncle Eben had maintain’d, his father had been a fail’d revolutionary in the cause of his Indian brothers & their African allies, or, as his mother affirm’d, a victorious anti-revolutionary in the cause of the British colonial government. Nota bene, nota bene, dear child! It is that same question which has vext all of his descendants vis-à-vis their progenitors, & which occasions these pre-natal epistles!

In the absence of any documentary evidence – for which he scour’d the colonies as tenaciously as had his father before him in search of his—A.B.C. III hearken’d to the verdict of his heart: he decided that while his grandfather Chicamec, the originator of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, had been an unsuccessful idealist, his father Henry Burlingame III had been a deplorably successful hypocrite, betraying his own aboriginal blood in the venal interest of the British Crown. Anna Cooke’s insistence that her lover’s motive had been her own & their son’s welfare he dismist as romantical, given the absence of any word from Burlingame himself to this effect, or any manifest attempt on his part to communicate with her & their natural child. That my Grandfather apparently did not allow for the possibility of Burlingame’s having been discover’d & put to death before he could make any such communication, tells us something about the state of heart of this “old bachelor orphan,” as he refers to himself in his diary of the period.

This hard judgement upon his lately-discover’d, long-dead father profoundly changed Grandfather’s life. The course of his researches up & down the country had brot him into contact with Indians of various nations as well as with officials of the several colonies & the British & French provincial authorities. His eyes were open’d to thitherto-unsuspected dimensions of a history he had largely taken for granted. It surprised him (and surprises me) that a man of early middle age, practicing law all his adult life in the seat of a colonial government, could have remain’d politically innocent for so long. But a certain naivety, together with extraordinary complication, is a family curse that dates from the mating of Cookes & Burlingames.

They had also & no less importantly, these researches, led him here: to the newly-raised seat of the half-breed Baron Henri Castine II, son of André Castine & the Tarratine princess Madocawanda. His object was to learn what he could of that ubiquitous “Monsieur Casteene” whose name haunts the archives of the English colonies. In pursuit of it he spent a season at Castines Hundred as a guest & hunting-companion of its owner, who like all the Barons Castine (including my present host, Andrée’s brother), was an hospitable, gregarious, anti-political sportsman. And here, like Yours Truly two generations later, he lost his heart to & won the hand of the daughter of the house, whom we must call Andrée Castine I to distinguish her from your mother.

For in other respects, grandmother & granddaughter are like as twins: the fine-edged physiognomy of the Gascoigne Castines, the dark eyes & hair & skin of Madocawanda’s people – and the audacity, political passion, & disregard for convention of “Monsieur Casteene”! She it was, Andrée I, who relieved Grandfather of both his political & his carnal innocence, which he seems to have preserved as remarkably as did his Uncle Ebenezer, the virgin poet. And she it was who insisted he 1st get her with child if he would have her to wife. So scrupulous was Grandfather on this point – and on the irregularity, of which Andrée was contemptuous, of the two-decade difference in their ages – that no less than another dozen years pass’d before (in 1746) they finally conceived my father and became man & wife, when Andrew was 50 & Andrée 30 years of age! But thro those decades they were faithful, if intermittent, lovers, as often together as apart, and not uncommonly travelling as husband & wife (or father & daughter) to appease Grandfather’s curious decorum & avoid attracting undue attention as they pursued their political objective.

This objective, if Andrew III’s own declaration is to be believed, was not the victory of the French in America, but the defeat of the British, for which in the existing circumstances the French & Indians were the obvious instrumentality. Having decided that his father had been a British anti-insurgent, Andrew III set about in the 2nd half of his life to be an anti-British insurgent; Andrée (still in the 1st half of hers) to be an organizer of the Indian nations 1st against the British, whom she saw as the greater menace to aboriginal integrity, and ultimately against the French, who had ever been less ruthless in displacing native populations, less interested in despoiling the land, and less disdainful of intermarriage betwixt the races. To the extent that their theatres of concern can be distinguisht, Andrée’s was to resist the extension of British hegemony northward above the Great Lakes & St. Lawrence River, Andrew’s to resist its extension westward across the Appalachians toward the Mississippi. These concerns came together in the period of the French & Indian War, along the frontier betwixt Fort Niagara & Fort Detroit.

Attend me closely now, child, if you would understand your heritage. To the simple it might appear that my grandparents’ ends would best be served by their doing all they could to ensure a French victory in North America. But so skillfully & harmoniously did the French get on with the Indians – advancing them guns & ammunition on credit against the hunting & trapping season, providing them free gunsmithing at every fort, plying them liberally with gifts of blankets, iron utensils, & brandy – the red men became insidiously dependent on the white man’s skills & manufactures, ever farther removed from their former self-reliance. They had also been decimated & re-decimated by the white man’s measles, influenza, & smallpox, against which they had no hereditary defences. And the survivors, for a hundred years already by 1750, were helpless drunkards. An immediate wholesale victory of the French over the British, my grandparents fear’d, would so extend this “benevolent” exploitation as to make impossible the forging of an independent, regenerated Indian nation: in another century, they believed, the French would be the real masters of the continent, the Indians their willing, rum-soak’d subordinates. What was needed (so they came to feel by the mid-1750’s) was a temporary British victory in America – especially under the puritanical Jeffrey Amherst, who did not believe in giving rum, or anything else, to the worthless savages. The Indian nations would then be obliged to unite for their own survival, so impossible were the Anglo-Saxons to deal with; and they would be freed of the curse of alcohol will-they nill-they. Once a genuine, sober confederacy had been forged among, say, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the principal tribes of the Upper Great Lakes, & the nations of the Ohio Valley & the Illinois, the Indians could accept from a position of strength the assistance of the defeated French in driving out the British, whilst remaining masters in their own house.

Thus their strategy, to implement which my grandparents decided that Fort Niagara – controlling the very jugular of the Great Lakes and thus of the whole upper & central parts of the continent – must fall to the British! Lord Amherst’s campaign against the French had come, by 1759, to center on the taking of that fort: for the Indians he had only contempt, but his blockade of the St. Lawrence had had the incidental effect of cutting off the supply of cognac with which the French marinated their Indian diplomacy, and thus of driving the thirsty Senecas (in whose territory the Fort lay), and the Six Nations generally, into hopeful new alliances with the English. The force Amherst dispatcht against Niagara included, along with British regulars & colonial militiamen, some 1,900 of these Iroquois, among whom Andrew Cooke III moved easily under the nom de guerre of John Butler: it was the largest such force ever assembled on the side of the British. Their plan was not to take the fort by storm, but to besiege it, cut off the reinforcement of its garrison, and so force its surrender. The French relief force, sent up promptly from the Ohio Valley & Detroit to lift the siege, consisted of 1,600 Indians – Hurons, Mingoes, Shawnees – and 600 French: amongst the latter was Andrée, in the rôle of a half-breed habitant camp-follower.

By early July the French force was assembled at Presque Isle and ready to march up the shore of Lake Erie. Andrew slipt down from the British camp, Andrée up from the French, to a week-long tryst and strategy-conference on Chautauqua Lake, betwixt the two armies. There, as they embraced among the sugar maples & black willows which line that water, they workt out their tactics, not only for the battle to come, but for the larger campaign ahead. Andrew’s candidate to lead the projected Indian confederation was a young war-chief of the Senecas named Kyashuta: the Iroquois had long been the most politically advanced of Indians; they had 200 years of confederacy already under their belts, a confederacy so effective that Benjamin Franklin had proposed it as the model for a union of the British colonies in America. They were generally fear’d for their ferocity: they had never been much committed to either the French or the English; and their combination of matriarchy & patriarchy (the Sachems were all male, but the power of their nomination was reserved exclusively to a council of women) appeal’d to my grandparents. And the Senecas (in whose country they were trysting) were the fiercest, least “Eastern,” & most independent of the Iroquois.

Andrée for her part was much taken with a young Ottawa named Ponteach, or Pondiac, or Pontiac. The confederacy, she argued, must be center’d well west of the Alleghenies if it was to hold out against disease & alcohol. The Iroquois League could serve as an example & a 1st line of defence, but they were too hated by the Great Lakes tribes, on which they had prey’d for decades, to be able to unite them: their very name was a Huron hate-word meaning “vipers who strike without warning.” Pontiac had in his favor that he was, after the manner of other great leaders in history, not quite native to the tribe he had begun to lead (his mother was an Ojibwa). More important, in addition to his courage, eloquence, energy, good humor & political judgement, he had what amounted to a Vision (transmitted to him by Andrée herself from a prophet of the Delawares): a return to aboriginal ways & implements, a sacrifice of comfort & efficiency in the interest of repurification & the achievement of sufficient moral strength to repel the white invaders. This Delaware Prophet – also known as “The Impostor”—was an authentic mystic & certifiable madman, very potent nonetheless among the Ohio Valley tribes. Pontiac was neither mystical nor mad, and even more potent was his canny modification of the vision, retail’d in parable form: the Prophet himself loses his way in the forest, encounters a beautiful maiden (Andrée, in the rôle of Socrates’s Diotima), & is by her instructed to give up his firearms & firewater for the manlier hunting-bow, tomahawk, & scalping knife. His reward is regeneration in the arms of the maiden herself.

Your great-grandfather (like your father) was a tactful husband: he kiss’d Andrée – by then his wife of a dozen years & mother of his son, my father – and agreed that this Pontiac must be their man. She in turn agreed that he must not rise to power prematurely: a decisive, even shocking defeat at Fort Niagara would weaken the leadership of his older rivals, impress the beaten tribes with the necessity of confederation, and oblige their retreat westward toward Fort Detroit, a better center for their regrouping. And it would be well if this defeat were at the hands more of Sir William Johnson’s Iroquois than of the British regulars and colonials: the Hurons & Shawnees would be thereby more effectually stung; the Iroquois would be encouraged in their largest joint military operation & properly set up, not for warmer relations with the British, but for militant disaffection when – as would inevitably be the case under Amherst’s administration – they were denied the massacre, plunder, rape, torture, & rum they regarded as the victor’s due.

With this accord the couple parted, planning to reunite at Castines Hundred in the fall. Two days later, within a few hours after dinner on 20 July, surely by “John Butler’s” arrangement, both of the British officers in command at the siege of Fort Niagara were kill’d, the one by a “French” sniper, the other by “accidental” explosion of a siege-gun, and leadership of the besieging army (which rightfully pass’d to Colonel Haldemand in Oswego) was effectively usurpt next day by Sir William Johnson & his Iroquois. On the morning of the 24th, against Captain Pouchot’s urgent warnings, Captain de Lignery “inexplicably” led the French relief column straight up the portage road on the east bank of the Niagara into Johnson’s ambush at the shrine of La Belle Famille, two miles below their destination. 500 French & Indians died before Pouchot surrender’d the fort at 5 P.M. The Iroquois night of plunder, promist them by Johnson, was so thoro that it took a thousand troops two months to clean up & repair the damage. Even so, Andrew managed to persuade the Senecas (some of whom had fought with the French inside the fort) that their brothers the Mohawks, Johnson’s own adopted tribe, had got the best of the pillaging. At this point the real Captain John Butler came on the scene, and Grandfather rejoin’d his family at Castines Hundred.