Note 204 — Chapter XII · 1763. PONTIAC AT THE SIEGE OF DETROIT.
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The annals of these remote and gloomy regions are involved in such obscurity, that it is hard to discover the precise character of the events to which Pontiac here refers. The only allusion to them, which the writer has met with, is the following, inscribed on a tattered scrap of soiled paper, found among the M’Dougal manuscripts:—
“Five miles below the mouth of Wolf River is the Great Death Ground. This took its name from the circumstance, that some years before the Old French War, a great battle was fought between the French troops, assisted by the Menomonies and Ottaways on the one side, and the Sac and Fox Indians on the other. The Sacs and Foxes were nearly all cut off; and this proved the cause of their eventual expulsion from that country.”
The M’Dougal manuscripts, above referred to, belonged to a son of the Lieutenant M’Dougal who was the fellow-prisoner of Major Campbell. On the death of the younger M’Dougal, the papers, which were very voluminous, and contained various notes concerning the Indian war, and the captivity of his father, came into the possession of a family at the town of St. Clair, in Michigan, who permitted such of them as related to the subjects in question to be copied by the writer.