Odd Wisconsin

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Why We Speak English in Wisconsin

When the war broke out, the French controlled the interior of North America and the English the Atlantic seaboard. Here are a French map from 1757 and an English one from 1754 showing what they knew about each other. Charles de Langlade, Wisconsin's first permanent French settler, led 1,500 Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Ottawa warriors from Wisconsin to defend their homeland against the English invaders. On July 9, 1755, they routed the English at Pittsburgh, even though the English outnumbered them and were led by Gen. Edward Braddock and a young Virginian named George Washington. The British forces had just sat down for lunch with pinned napkins on their bright red uniforms when the Wisconsin warriors attacked. De Langlade told his grandson that "the English officers, who had their little towels pinned over their breasts, seized their arms… and a good many of them were killed with these napkins still pinned on their coats." Braddock met his death that day, and legend has it that Wisconsin fighters nearly killed Washington, too.

Five years later, though, the tables had turned and the British forces seized the French capital of Montreal. The commander of the French forces wrote to Langlade on Sept. 9, 1760, "I must inform you, Monsieur, that I was compelled to surrender yesterday to the army of Gen. Amherst. This city is, as you know, defenseless. Our troops were greatly diminished, our means and resources totally exhausted. We were surrounded by three armies, numbering at least 80,000 men. ... The citizens and inhabitants of Michilimackinac [as well as Green Bay] will consequently be under the command of the officer that General Amherst will have detailed for this post." That officer was Lt. James Gorrell, whose diary (given here) is the first writing in English about Wisconsin.

Many of de Langlade's Indian allies didn't want to obey the hated British. Pontiac, an Ottawa leader who had followed de Langlade to Pittsburgh in 1755, organized a multi-tribal resistance movement. Speaking in Milwaukee in 1763, he tried to recruit the Wisconsin tribes:

"My Friends! I have come here to consult you in behalf of our common cause. When the white man came across the ocean, and landed on our shores, he spoke with a sweet and silver-tongued mouth, saying that we had large possessions of land, and that he had none, and asked to be permitted to settle in a corner, and live with us like brothers. We received and admitted them as such, and they lived true to their proposition and promise, until they had gained strength. They then commenced to encroach upon us more and more. Their purpose is plain to me -- that they will continue to encroach upon us, until they discover that they have sufficient power to remove us from our country to a distant land, where we will be confronted with all kinds of danger, and perhaps be annihilated. The time is not far distant when we shall be placed in a critical position. It is now in our power to force the whites back to their original settlements. We must all join in one common cause, and sweep the white men from our country, and then we shall live happy, and we shall have nothing more to do with the hated race."

With the exception of the Menominee, warriors from the Wisconsin Indian nations joined Pontiac's resistance movement. In a cunning sneak attack they captured the entire British garrison at Mackinaw and killed virtually every soldier. According to Menominee oral tradition, the lives of the English officers, too, were required by the manitous who guided Pontiac's warriors, and they were about to be killed when "the Bravest of the Brave came and snatched the officers out of his hands -- and the war-chief squatted down, foiled in his purpose. ... The Bravest of the Brave was Aukewingeketawso, or "Defender of his Country" -- Charles de Langlade, the grandfather of Augustin Grignon -- and he was too well known all over the western world for any one to dare oppose him." Green Bay, where only a handful of British sodliers were stationed under Gorrell, quickly fell to the Indians along with all the other forts west of Niagara Falls.

Pontiac's forces then laid siege to Detroit, the largest and strongest British fort. From June to November 1763 Indians from across the region surrounded the outnumbered British soldiers at Detroit, cutting off communication and food. But when the French refused to come to Pontiac's aid and his tribal support began to melt away, he withdrew and moved west to Ohio and Illinois. Green Bay, LaPointe, and Prairie du Chien, whose tiny fur trade posts constituted all of "Ouisconsin" at the time, settled in to life under a new regime -- that spoke English.

So click the remote over to Wisconsin Public Television on Wednesday or Thursday evening to see "The War That Made America" and learn more about Wisconsin's origins.

:: Posted in Curiosities on January 21, 2006