Episode Details

In the spring of 1763, the British colonies were lighting bonfires for the greatest victory in their history — and within weeks the frontier they had just won was burning. This is the story of Pontiac’s War, told from the colonies that lived through it: of eight British forts that fell in a single summer, of a frontier swept by raids that killed or carried off thousands, and of a war that found no bottom. It is the story of the Ottawa leader Pontiac and the Delaware prophet Neolin, whose vision of the Master of Life gave the uprising its fire — and of what the terror did to the colonists themselves. Of a general who put the word “extirpate” in writing and handed out smallpox blankets under a flag of truce. And of the Paxton Boys, frontiersmen who answered the raids by murdering twenty peaceful Christian Conestoga, children included, in the building meant to keep them safe. The colonists had won their continent. They were about to learn that London meant to fence them out of it.