on.

[Illustration: INDIAN GAME OF BALL.
After Catlin.]

VI.

THE LAST GREAT INDIAN.

The sound of the Indian drum was heard on Detroit River, and humid May
night air carried it a league or more to the fort. All the Pottawatomies
and Wyandots were gathered from their own villages on opposite shores
to the Ottawas on the south bank, facing Isle Cochon. Their women and
children squatted about huge fires to see the war dance. The river
strait, so limpidly and transparently blue in daytime, that dipping a
pailful of it was like dipping a pailful of the sky, scarcely glinted
betwixt darkened woods.

In the center of an open space, which the camp-fires were built to
illuminate, a painted post was driven into the ground, and the warriors
formed a large ring around it. Their moccasined feet kept time to the
booming of the drums. With a flourish of his hatchet around his head, a
chief leaped into the ring and began to chase an imaginary foe, chanting
his own deeds and those of his forefathers. He was a muscular rather
than a tall Indian, with high, striking features. His dark skin was
colored by war paint, and he had stripped himself of everything but
ornaments. Ottawa Indians usually wore brilliant blankets, while
Wyandots of Sandusky and Detroit paraded in painted shirts, their heads
crowned with feathers, and their leggins tinkling with little bells.
The Ojibwas, or Chippewas, of the north carried quivers slung on their
backs, holding their arrows.

The dancer in the ring was the Ottawa chief, Pontiac, a man at that
time fifty years old, who had brought eighteen savage nations under his
dominion, so that they obeyed his slightest word. With majestic sweep of
the limbs he whirled through the pantomime of capturing and scalping an
enemy, struck the painted post with his tomahawk, and raised the awful
war whoop. His young braves stamped and yelled with him. Another leaped
into the ring, sung his deeds, and struck the painted post, warrior
after warrior following, until a wild maze of sinewy figures swam and
shrieked around it. Blazing pine knots stuck in the ground helped to
show this maddened whirl, the very opposite of the peaceful, floating
calumet dance. Boy papooses, watching it, yelled also, their black eyes
kindling with full desire to shed blood.

Perhaps no Indian there, except Pontiac, understood what was beginning
with the war dance on that May night of the year 1763. He had been
laying his plans all