POPULATION OF THE CANADAS.

The result of the late population returns has been published. From it we learn that, for the first time, the population of Upper exceeds that of Lower Canada. The Upper Province has increased more rapidly in population within the last four years, than in any similar period which preceded it, with the single exception of the four years between 1830 and 1834, a time of extraordinary emi gration:

1824..

.407,515

1830..

1832.

1834.

..151,097

1839.

1836....

If the ten years from 1841 to the end of 1851, the population was considerably more than doubled, while during the same period, that of the neighboring Union only increased a little more than a

third.

The population of the Lower Province is announced by the Quebec "Canadien" at 904,782, a much larger number than was expected, which leaves a majority to Upper Canada of only 45,748. The Lower Province, during the last eight years, has been advancing faster than ever before, as will be seen by the following

statement:

1825...............423,680

1831.

1844...............690,782

.511,919 1832....

...904,782

Great as this is, the same period of eight years has enlarged the population of Upper Canada far more:

Upper Canada.

Lower Canada.

1844.

560,000

950,530 690,772

904,782

Montreal.-Ville Marie, now called Montreal, had on the

LITERARY DEPARTMENT.

Conspiracy of Pontiac.

History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac and the War of the North American Tribes against the English Colonies after the Conquest of Canada. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Boston, 1851.

There is no event connected with the history of the North American Indians, marked with such ability, and conducted with such persevering daring on their part, as the Conspiracy, as it is rather insolently termed, of Pontiac against the British, in 1762.

It was indeed a heroic and manly combination of the northwestern tribes against their most offensive and dangerous enemies; and they had as much right to enter into it, as any other nation or tribe on the earth. They were made by the God of Indians, as well as white men, independent of both the French and the English and possessed all the rights of war and peace, which their more civilized conquerors alternately claimed exclusively for each other.. For fifteen months, from May 1762 to August 1763, Pontiac, at the head of the Indians of the Northwest, kept the British garrison. at Detroit, beleaguered in defiance of all the power and influence, which the British government, fresh from the conquest of Canada, could bring to bear on that, then remote, point-now, only a stage in the great current of travelling between the eastern and western frontiers of this republic. From Mackinaw to Presque d'Isle, including Saint Joseph on Lake Michigan, and Sandusky on Lake Erie, the British garrisons were captured by the Indians. Fort. Pitt and Detroit only withstood the storm. Never since the colonization of North America by the whites, were more barbarities perpetrated by the Indians, than in this most fearful combination. Henry tells us, in his interesting Travels, that while concealed in a garret, whither he had fled for concealment during the Indian massacre at Fort Michillimackinac, he saw some of the fiendish orgies of that terrible scene. "The dead were scalped and mangled; the dying were writhing and shrieking under the unsatiated knife and tomahawk; and from the bodies of some ripped open, their butchers were drinking the blood, snatched up in the hollow of joined hands, and quaffed amid shouts of rage and victory." At Detroit the same savage fate overtook the prisoners taken by the Indians from the British. "The heart of Major Campbell, the second in command, is said to have been eaten by his murderers, to make them courageous." P. 261. He had gone on the invitation of Pontiac as ambassador to make peace. Happily for humanity, these cannibal rites have, in a great measure, if not entirely ceased with our Indians. No instances of them occurred during our Indian hostilities in the war of 1812, or subsequently.

But that prisoners were burnt-their entrails devoured, during our early conflicts with the Indians, is matter of mournful notoriety.

It is this most interesting period of colonial warfare with the aborigines, spreading from Michillimackinac to Fort Pitt, and from Green Bay to Niagara, that this work undertakes to portray; and most skilfully has its purpose been achieved. No work has come within the knowledge of the writer, (and he has read and studied every book he could meet with on the history of the western frontiers of the United States) that presents western events, and par. ticularly the traits of Indian character, so truthfully, and yet with an interest so lively and ardent. It is evidently a work written con amore, with all the zeal of a warm heart, assisted by careful, skilful and laborious investigation. No sources of information at home or abroad have been neglected-all, everything has been consulted, to exhibit a full and faithful account.

The author with a devotion worthy of a missionary of the church, spent some time in 1846, among various primitive tribes of the Rocky Mountains; and was for a time domesticated in a village of the western Dahcotah, on the high plains between Mount Laramieand the range of the Medecine Bow.

The Indian character has never been so faithfully and elegantly delineated, as by this author. It has none of the abstract, closet air of so many learned treatises; it breathes the fresh atmosphere of the forest.

But it is time that something was said more particularly about the subject of this work. It is the story of British defeat and conquest under Braddock and Bouquet, Forbes, Amherst and Wolfe with our own beloved Washington. The author has gathered every flower, and even the cypress over many and distant fields, some of mournful and bloody defeat and massacre, others of triumphant renown and glory. It is eminently an American story in which the prowess of our Starke, Putnam, Dalzell, Rogers are prominently displayed by the side of Gladwyn, the heroic defender of Detroit, at the head of their brave and hardy countrymen. The ways of the forest, its dangers, its precautions, the arts of the native red man, the great lines of savage intercourse over the wide wilderness from Montreal to New Orleans, are most engagingly narrated. The story is too long and too various for minutiæ in this sketch, but its outlines shall be attempted so far as the great Ottowa chief is concerned.

After the brilliant success of Amherst and Wolfe, on the 12th of September, 1760, Major Rogers was ordered by Gen. Jeffrey Amherst to ascend the Lakes with a detachment of rangers, our own New Hampshire boys, and to take possession of Detroit, Michillimackinac and other western ports, included in the capitulation of the French of all Canada to the British, on the 8th of September, 1760. On the 7th of November following, Rogers reached the mouth of Cayahoga river, the present site of Cleveland on

Lake Erie. Soon after the arrival of the Rangers, a party of Indian chiefs and warriors entered the camp. They proclaimed themselves an embassy from Pontiac, ruler of all that country, and directed in his name that the English should advance no further until they had an interview with the great chief who was already close at hand.

Before the day closed Pontiac himself appeared, and for the first time is distinctly exhibited in the history of the country as a great commanding chief. Yet he is said to have commanded the Ottowas at the bloody defeat of Braddock, and was certainly highly distinguished by the Marquis Montcalm, and honored by the French officers. The chief haughtily demanded of Rogers, what was his business in that country, and how he dared enter it without his permission. "The British told him of the conquest of Canada and defeat of the French by his countrymen, and that he was sent to take possession of Detroit, and make a general peace to white men and Indians alike." Pontiac listened with attention; but only replied that he would stand in the path of the English until morning. In the morning, after a night of fearful anticipations, Pontiac inade his appearance, and informed the British officer, that he was willing, he said, to suffer them to remain in his country, so long as they treated him with due respect and deference. The British detachment proceeded on its way to the western end of Lake Erie ; where, but for the powerful interference of the great Ottowa chief, it would have been attacked by a body of 400 warriors lying in ambush, at the mouth of the river Detroit. By the influence of Pontiac the British were permitted to proceed on their way to Detroit without molestation; they arrived there on the 29th of November, 1760. During the next season, the remote posts at Michillimackinac, Sainte Marie, at the mouth of Lake Superior, and Green Bay were taken possession of by the English troops. The whole northwestern portion of North America, which had been claimed and partially possessed by the French, appeared to be in the undisputed power of the British, with the exception of the old forts at Vincennes or St. Vincents, Ouatanou on the Wabash, and Fort Chartres on the Mississippi. There no English forces could yet dare to venture.

The remotest dependencies of Canada towards the North to the Spanish possessions on the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic almost to the Mississippi, seemed to all appearances under the government of the British. Yet, throughout these vast regions, there were deep and ominous causes of estrangement and hostility at work, to shake, if not subvert the British dominion, over the Bourbon provinces of Florida and Canada. The French had been indefatigable in winning the good graces of the native tribes; not only by the solemn and imposing rites of a splendid worship; but by the most skilful adaptation to Indian manners. In this latter respect, they have always exceeded both British and Americans.

Our most capable and influential interpreters between the Indians and the whites have ever been Frenchmen. Both British and Americans are too eager to occupy and reduce by agricultural labor, the favorite hunting grounds of the Indian, to admit of any permanent peace or harmony. The one are the worshippers of the forest, the other its insatiable enemy. The conflicting state and interests of the hunter and the farmer, are too directly opposed to each other, to suffer any arbitrament but the bloody one of arms. This is the history of the two conditions of society on the Eastern continent, as much as on our own. To these radical causes of animosity are to be added the insulting arrogance and insolent airs of superiority, which so much characterize the deportment of both these people to the proud and warlike children of the forest. Perhaps our own countrymen are more censurable in this respect than the British; yet, the latter people have not been distinguished by remarkable habits of sympathy with foreigners; not even with the people of the remoter portions of their own insular empire. But these were not the only causes of resentment; the passions engendered by the old French wars, in which the Indians of the Northwest (always excepting the six nations) had so disastrously to the British settlements cooperated, still rankled between these new friends. To this was added a system of new economy and retrenchment by the British, aggravated by occasional peculation of public officers employed about Indian intercourse. These combined causes provoked the temper of the Indians to madness. Pontiac, an old French partizan, who is said to have headed the Ottowas at Braddock's defeat, no doubt shared in all these feelings of animosity to the British. He skilfully availed himself of them, to form the most formidable combinations of Indians known to the history of the two races in North America.

The first steps of this confederacy seem to have been taken in the summer of 1761; but this attempt was "nipped in the bud" by timely precaution. Again in the summer of 1762 similar attempts on the part of the Indians were detected and suppressed. "They were but the precursors of the tempest.' Among so many incensed barbarian tribes, all equally smarting under the same causes of animosity, it is difficult to assign his proper part to any one tribe or chief in particular. The Delawares and Senecas were the most incensed; and Kiashuta, chief of the latter, was perhaps foremost to apply the torch. But a greater chief was wanting, whose comprehensive mind could take into one view all the perils and precautions of the crisis, could master and direct the irregular and loose combinations of independent tribes to one object and with united energies. This chief seems, by the universal consent of both enemies and friends at the time, to have been Pontiac, or Pondiac, as he is sometimes called; without his commanding genius, this third outbreak of the Indians against the British, might have had similar results with its predecessors.