By many of the French and Indians he was distrusted as a pensioner of the British, and by the British traders and settlers he was hated for his past deeds.

In 1769 he visited the Mississippi, and while at Cahokia he attended a drunken frolic held by some Indians.

When he left the feast, stupid from the effects of rum, he was followed into the forest by a Kaskaskia Indian, probably bribed by a British trader.
And as Pontiac lurched among the black shadows of the trees, his pursuer crept up behind him, and with a swift stroke of the tomahawk cleft his skull.

Thus by a treacherous blow ended the career of a warrior whose chief weapon had been treachery.
For twelve years England, by means of military officers, ruled the great hinterland east of the Mississippi--a region vast and rich, which now teems with a population immensely greater than that of the whole broad Dominion of Canada--a region which is to-day dotted with such magnificent cities as Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis.
Unhappily, England made no effort to colonize this wilderness empire.

Indeed, as Edmund Burke has said, she made 'an attempt to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, had given to the children of men.' She forbade settlement in the hinterland.
She did this ostensibly for the Indians, but in reality for the merchants in the mother country.