s, and the
Delawares. The Senecas were the only members of the Iroquois confederacy
that joined the league. The onslaught was to be made in the month of
May, 1763, the tribes to rise simultaneously at the various points and
each tribe destroy the British garrison in its neighborhood.

It was a vast scheme, worthy the brain and courage of the greatest
general and shrewdest statesman. The plan was divulged by individual
Indians to officers at two or three of the posts, but was either
disbelieved or its importance ignored. While this gigantic and almost
chimerical plot was being developed by Pontiac and his associate chiefs,
the treaty of peace between France and England was signed at Paris,
February 10, 1763. By this compact France yielded to England all her
territory north of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence and east of the
Mississippi. The Spanish possessions on the Gulf of Mexico were ceded to
England, the territory west of the Mississippi going to Spain. France
was left no foothold in North America. While the powers of England,
France, and Spain were in the French capital arranging this result, as
Parkman remarks, "countless Indian warriors in the American forests were
singing the war-song and whetting their scalping-knives."

The chief centre of Indian activity and the main point of attack was the
post of Detroit, the Western head-quarters of the British government.
Pontiac was personally to strike the first blow. The rendezvous of his
painted and armed warriors was to be the banks of the little river
Ecorces, which empties into the Detroit River a few miles below the
Fort, now the city of Detroit. It was April 27th when the assembled
warriors listened to the final war-speech of the great chief.

Pontiac was an orator of a high order, fierce and impassioned in style.
He presented at length the injustice of the British as compared with
that of the French; he set forth the danger to his race from the
threatened supremacy of the British power; he predicted the awakening of
"their great father the King of France," during whose sleep the English
had robbed the Indian of his American possessions. In passionate appeals
he aroused the vengeance and superstition of his people and warned them
that the white man's civilization was poisoning and annihilating the red
race. In his dramatic way he related to the superstitious Indians a
dream wherein the Great Spirit sent his message that they were to cast
aside the weapons, t