Pontiac's Rebellion
by Joerg Probst
North America, 1763: The Seven Years' War is over, yet on the frontier to the Wild West a new, far bloodier conflict smolders. Inspired by the visions of the prophet Neolin, the charismatic Ottawa chief Pontiac unites the tribes in a holy war against British supremacy. In the midst of this storm of violence, the peaceful Tygart Valley is visited by a cruel Seneca war party under the leadership of the merciless Sagonaska. Settlers are killed, houses burn, and the Harrington children Tom and Sarah are abducted deep into the impassable wildernesses on French Creek. The experienced woodsman Sam and his Indian blood brother Awan do not hesitate. Together with a band of loyal Shawnee warriors of the Wolf Clan they take up the dangerous pursuit. A merciless hunt begins through treacherous bogs and dense primeval forests, past the smoking wreckage of British forts. In a world in which the boundaries between friend and foe blur, they must risk everything to save the children before the great war finally lays the land in rubble and ashes. Joerg Probst drafts a gripping historical panorama of courage, loyalty, and the untamed soul of America.
- Historical Fiction
- Adventure
- Western
- Literary Fiction
- Frontier
- Wilderness
Prologue
It was a land that lived in the deep, undisturbed breath of an almost infinite time. Long before the first European axe split the bark of a centuries-old oak or an iron plow broke the virgin earth, the North American continent stretched out as an immeasurable carpet of ancient forests, rushing rivers, and unconquered mountain ridges.
Whoever turned their gaze westward from the eastern cliffs lost themselves in an almost endless, undulating sea of treetops. The primeval forests of the Northeast were of such gigantic growth and such a dense canopy that it was said a man could travel from the Atlantic coast to the muddy banks of the Mississippi without ever once leaving the dim forest floor. It was a twilight, sacred realm beneath a canopy of giant beeches, elms, chestnuts, hemlocks, and monumental white pines, whose crowns seemed to touch the sky itself. The ground was soft with centuries of rotting leaves, covered with a thick carpet of moss and ferns, and the air tasted sharply of damp earth and bitter resin.
It was in the sultry summer of the year 1758 when, with the fall of Fort Frontenac, the first decisive blow was struck against Bourbon power in the impassable wildernesses of North America. And when, in the late autumn of that same year, the flag of His Britannic Majesty was also raised over the smoking ruins of Fort Duquesne, that leaden tension t…The Prophet's Vision