Places: Fort Beausejour/Cumberland, New Brunswick

To Americans, the Revolutionary War was about winning independence from Great Britain.  For the colonial powers, Britain and France, it was a decades-old grudge match over land in North America.  During these frequently colonial wars, both France and Great Britain had been willing to use/exploit Native warriors as auxiliaries to do the often dangerous work of scouting and skirmishing, but also psychological warfare.  Just the thought, let alone the reality of an Indian attack on the frontier struck terror into the adherents of either side.  George Washington, who'd fought for the British as a young militia colonel, hoped to sow discord behind enemy lines by use of the Native tribes in Canada.

Large portions of the Maritime Provinces, what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as well as Quebec and parts of Maine, had been the area of Acadia under French rule.  In 1751, the French began construction of a fort on the Isthmus of Chignecto, a strip of land connecting Nova Scotia with New Brunswick.  As was often the case in the windup to the French and Indian War, military planners sought to place forts near connecting bodies of water both to stop any enemy advance and to better control the fur trade with local natives.  The outpost, known as Fort Beausejour, was begun in 1751.  But the French didn't have possession of it for all that long.  It was besieged in the Battle of Fort Cumberland in 1755 and the French promptly surrendered it.  The British renamed it after the then Duke of Cumberland (not Victoria's grinchy uncle, but her great-uncle, a son of George II).  The British lost no time expelling the local French-speaking inhabitants, known as the Acadians/Cajuns, and trying to conciliate the local Native tribes. 

One of these tribes was the Maliseet, who participated in 1761 in a burying of the hatchet ceremony in Annapolis along with other tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy.  As far as the British wanted to believe, the Natives were compliant allies of the Crown.  However, Natives in Canada had the same problems as Natives on the American frontier, incessant demands for land concessions, trespassing on tribal hunting range, lack of quality trade goods for their furs.  While most of the Wabanaki Confederacy leaders were willing to pass on the idea of open resistance to the Crown, there were individuals who were willing to fight.  And, they had allies.  The Acadian Expulsion had left farmland that was filled by New England families known as the New England Planters.  Though most of them were Loyalists, some were affiliated enough with their New England roots that they, too, might rise. 

Washington appointed as his Indian Agent for New England a Scotsman named John Allan.  Allan was born in Edinburgh, grew up in Nova Scotia, and was educated in Massachusetts.  As a child and young man, he took a keen interest in the Natives around him, learning some local dialects as well as French.  Being a prosperous merchant before the war, he had contacts in both Canada and the United States.  When war broke out in America, Allan became a vocal Patriot and found himself charged with treason.  He fled Nova Scotia for Maine and was soon in the employ of Washington as an Indian Agent for Nova Scotia and Maine.  In 1775, he succeeded in persuading individual Mi'kmaq and Maliseet warriors to participate in an abortive raid on Fort Cumberland.  The British repulsed several attacks of these kind on Fort Cumberland during the War.

Allan then turned his attention to the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet, signing a treaty with some individuals, who may or may not have had authority to speak for their tribes, to rise on behalf of the Patriots.  He would go on to other attempts to rouse the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet for the Patriot cause but the majority chose to stay neutral.  Washington soon realized that igniting a rebellion behind British lines in Canada wasn't a profitable endeavor and turned his attention elsewhere.  Fort Cumberland remained in British hands until it was abandoned shortly after the War of 1812.  It's a historic site today.