ns were dumfounded. These were not soft words. Not thus had
the French spoken, with the giving of manifold presents. But powder
was exhausted. No more was coming from the French traders of the
Mississippi. Winter was approaching, and the Indians must hunt or
starve. Again the coureurs are sent spurring the woods from tribe to
tribe with wampum belts, but this time the belts are the white bands of
peace. While Bouquet waits he sends back over the trail for hospital
nurses to receive the captives, and the army is set knocking up rude
barracks of log and thatch in the wilderness. Then the captives begin
to come. It is a scene for the brush of artist, for all frontiersmen
who have lost friends have rallied to Bouquet's camp, hoping against
hope and afraid to hope. There is the mother, whose infant child has
been snatched from her arms in {291} some frontier attack, now scanning
the lines as they come in, mad with hope and fear. There is the
husband, whose wife has been torn away to some savage's tepee,
searching, searching, searching among the sad, wild-eyed, ill-clad
rabble for one with some resemblance to the wife he loved. There is
the father seeking lost daughters and afraid of what he may find; and
there are the captives themselves, some of the women demented from the
abuse they have received. England may have spent her millions to
protect her colonies, but she never spent in anguish what these rude
frontiersmen suffered at Bouquet's camp.

[Illustration: RETURN OF THE ENGLISH CAPTIVES (From a contemporary
print)]

So ended what is known as the Pontiac War. Up at Detroit in 1765
Pontiac, in council with the whites, explains that he has listened to
bad advice, but now his heart is right. "Father, you have stopped the
rum barrel while we talked," he says grimly; "as our business is
finished, we request that you open the barrel, that we may drink and be
merry."

Not a very heroic curtain fall to a dramatic life. But pause a bit:
the Pontiac War was the last united stand of a doomed race against the
advance of the conquering alien; and the Indian is defeated, and he
knows it, and he acknowledges it, and he {292} drowns his despair in a
vice, and so he passes down the Long Trail of time with his face to the
west, doomed, hopeless, pushed westward and ever west.

Pontiac goes down the Mississippi to his friends, the French fur
traders of St. Louis. One morning in 1767, after a drinking bout, he
is fo