ABSTRACT
In the Great Lakes region after the withdrawal of France, the belief that the French king would return his armies to North America found remarkably wide acceptance. Held by individuals among both the French and the Indian communities, this belief influenced many of the warriors in the western theater of the war that bears Pontiac’s name. Encountered and seized upon by British traders and officers, it was carried into the upper echelons of both the British Indian department and the British North American military establishment, where it was transmuted into an understanding that the war was the result of a French conspiracy. Pontiac’s own version of Neolin’s message, however, spoken in a Detroit that still supported a significant and influential French community, clearly distinguished between the habitants and the English. Detroit’s French, in short, presented the Indians with divisions of their own. Taken as a whole, the French at Detroit were, at most, reluctant suppliers of the desperate Indians.
