winter, and sending huge black and purple wampum
belts of war, and hatchets dipped in red, to rouse every native tribe.
All the Algonquin stock and the Senecas of the Iroquois were united with
him. From the small oven-shaped hut on Isle Cochon, where he lived with
his squaws and children, to Michilimackinac, from Michilimackinac to the
lower Mississippi, and from the eastern end of Lake Erie down to the
Ohio, the messengers of this self-made emperor had secretly carried and
unfolded his plan, which was to rise and attack all the English forts on
the same day, and then to destroy all the English settlers, sparing no
white people but the French.

Two years before, an English army had come over to Canada and conquered
it. That was a deathblow to French settlements in the middle west.
They dared no longer resist English colonists pushing on them from
the east. All that chain of forts stretching from Lake Erie down to the
Ohio--Presqu' Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango, Ligonier--had been given up to
the English, as well as western posts--Detroit, Fort Miami, Ouatanon on
the Wabash, and Michilimackinac. The settlements on the Mississippi,
however, still displayed the white flag of France. So large was the
dominion in the New World which England now had the right to claim,
that she was unable to grasp it all at once.

[Illustration: The White Flag of France.]

The Indians did not like the English, who treated them with contempt,
would not offer them presents, and put them in danger of starvation
by holding back the guns and ammunition, on which they had learned to
depend, instead of their bows and arrows. For two years they had borne
the rapid spread of English settlements on land which they still
regarded as their own. These intruders were not like the French, who
cared nothing about claiming land, and were always ready to hunt or
dance with their red brethren.

All the tribes were, therefore, eager to rise against the English, whom
they wanted to drive back into the sea. Pontiac himself knew this could
not be done; but he thought it possible, by striking the English forts
all at once, to restore the French power and so get the French to help
him in fighting back their common foe from spreading into the west.

Pontiac was the only Indian who ever seemed to realize all the dangers
which threatened his race, or to have military skill for organizing
against them. His work had been secret, and he had taken pains to appear
very frien