arried out.

During the winter of 1762-63 his messengers passed stealthily from
nation to nation throughout the whole western country, bearing the
pictured wampum belts and the reddened tomahawks which symbolized war;
and in April, 1763, the Lake tribes were summoned to a great council
on the banks of the Ecorces, below Detroit, where Pontiac in person
proclaimed the will of the Master of Life as revealed to the Delaware
prophet, and then announced the details of his plan. Everywhere the
appeal met with approval; and not only the scores of Algonquin peoples,
but also the Seneca branch of the Iroquois confederacy and a number of
tribes on the lower Mississippi, pledged themselves with all solemnity
to fulfill their prophet's injunction "to drive the dogs which wear
red clothing into the sea." While keen-eyed warriors sought to keep up
appearances by lounging about the forts and begging in their customary
manner for tobacco, whiskey, and gunpowder, every wigwam and forest
hamlet from Niagara to the Mississippi was astir. Dusky maidens chanted
the tribal war-songs, and in the blaze of a hundred camp-fires chiefs
and warriors performed the savage pantomime of battle.

A simultaneous attack, timed by a change of the moon, was to be made on
the English forts and settlements throughout all the western country.
Every tribe was to fall upon the settlement nearest at hand, and
afterwards all were to combine--with French aid, it was confidently
believed--in an assault on the seats of English power farther east.
The honor of destroying the most important of the English strongholds,
Detroit, was reserved for Pontiac himself.

The date fixed for the rising was the 7th of May. Six days in advance
Pontiac with forty of his warriors appeared at the fort, protested
undying friendship for the Great Father across the water, and insisted
on performing the calumet dance before the new commandant, Major
Gladwyn. This aroused no suspicion. But four days later a French settler
reported that his wife, when visiting the Ottawa village to buy venison,
had observed the men busily filing off the ends of their gunbarrels; and
the blacksmith at the post recalled the fact that the Indians had lately
sought to borrow files and saws without being able to give a plausible
explanation of the use they intended to make of the implements.

The English traveler Jonathan Carver, who visited the post five years
afterwards, relates that an Ottawa girl with who