ers of the various provinces at the town of
Easton, before the middle of September. This seeming miracle was wrought
by several causes. The Indians in the French interest, always greedy for
presents, had not of late got enough to satisfy them. Many of those
destined for them had been taken on the way from France by British
cruisers, and the rest had passed through the hands of official knaves,
who sold the greater part for their own profit. Again, the goods
supplied by French fur-traders were few and dear; and the Indians
remembered with regret the abundance and comparative cheapness of those
they had from the English before the war. At the same time it was
reported among them that a British army was marching to the Ohio strong
enough to drive out the French from all that country; and the Delawares
and Shawanoes of the West began to waver in their attachment to the
falling cause. The eastern Delawares, living at Wyoming and elsewhere on
the upper Susquehanna, had made their peace with the English in the
summer before; and their great chief, Teedyuscung, thinking it for his
interest that the tribes of the Ohio should follow his example, sent
them wampum belts, inviting them to lay down the hatchet. The Five
Nations, with Johnson at one end of the Confederacy and Joncaire at the
other,--the one cajoling them in behalf of England, and the other in
behalf of France,--were still divided in counsel; but even among the
Senecas, the tribe most under Joncaire's influence, there was a party so
far inclined to England that, like the Delaware chief, they sent wampum
to the Ohio, inviting peace. But the influence most potent in reclaiming
the warriors of the West was of a different kind. Christian Frederic
Post, a member of the Moravian brotherhood, had been sent at the
instance of Forbes as an envoy to the hostile tribes from the Governor
and Council of Pennsylvania. He spoke the Delaware language, knew the
Indians well, had lived among them, had married a converted squaw, and,
by his simplicity of character, directness, and perfect honesty, gained
their full confidence. He now accepted his terrible mission, and calmly
prepared to place himself in the clutches of the tiger. He was a plain
German, upheld by a sense of duty and a single-hearted trust in God;
alone, with no great disciplined organization to impel and support him,
and no visions and illusions such as kindled and sustained the splendid
heroism of the early Jesuit martyrs.