Battle of Point Pelee to Fort Niagara. The Indians took their captives to Detroit, where they were tortured and mutilated. The bodies were then tossed into the river to float by Fort Detroit, which undermined morale in the fort. Battle of Point Pelee The Battle of Point Pelee was a military engagement in 1763 during Pontiac's Rebellion. Pontiac's Indian warriors surrounded Fort Detroit, besieging the British forces inside. On May 28, a supply convoy commanded by Lieutenant Abraham Cuyler stopped at Point Pelee on its way to Detroit. Unaware of the ongoing siege, Cuyler and his men made camp without taking extra security precautions.
Illinois campaign the region. When the American Revolutionary War began, in 1775, the Ohio River marked the border between the Illinois Country and Kentucky, an area recently settled by American colonists. The British had originally sought to keep American Indians out of the war, but in 1777 Lieutenant Governor Hamilton received instructions to recruit and arm Indian war parties to raid the Kentucky settlements, opening a western front in the war with the rebel colonists. "From 1777 on," wrote historian Bernard Sheehan, "the line of western settlements was under almost constant assault by white-led [Indian] raiding parties that had originated at Detroit."