Illustration by Britt Spencer
The English called him Pontiac, and Americans branded a car after him. But his real name was Obwandiyag, chief of the Ottawa. Tall, his powerful body covered in tattoos and his words eloquent, he had a presence people heeded. Wary of European motives, he commandeered warriors from 18 First Nations. They launched the most successful resistance effort in North American history.
He came to St. Louis in April 1769, at the invitation of Captain Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, for the wedding of the captain’s nephew. The day after the festivities, Obwandiyag crossed the Mississippi to Cahokia, disregarding his friend’s warning that an English trader named Williamson lived there and bore Obwandiyag a grudge.
By the most common account, the chief went shopping, came out on the village’s muddy main street, and was clubbed from behind, then stabbed, by a young Peoria, a nephew of Black Dog. But why? The young man’s uncle, Black Dog, was a Peoria chief (some sources say Osage), and Obwandiyag had attacked the chief three years earlier. Another rumor whispered that the young man would do anything for whiskey or money—maybe even kill a famous chief for a hostile English trader? Some believed that the English had hired Obwandiyag’s death. Others said it was a vendetta by other First Nations, and the assassination plan had been mentioned in a Peoria council weeks earlier.
Despite his military feats, Obwandiyag was bitterly resented—and had even been exiled from his own village—because he’d signed a treaty with the British in 1766. Obwandiyag’s words to the Brits were graceful: “It is the will of the Great Spirit that we should meet here today and before him and all present I take you by the hand and never will part from it.” But he signed out of necessity, because most of the First Nations who’d joined with him had left the fight.
A romantic account of Obwandiyag’s death, written a century later in an 1892 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, described him as melancholy the night before he died, singing of his own exploits and ready to die at age 49 rather than watch “the tramp of those English dogs over the land where his fathers lay.” That night, he reportedly asked to be buried at the Big Mound (now long gone). Yet by most accounts, St. Ange brought his friend’s body back to St. Louis and had him buried at Broadway and Walnut.
That’s now the Stadium East parking garage. On one corner, street level, you’ll find a plaque in his honor. The least we could do.
