VI.
THE LAST GREAT INDIAN.
The sound of the Indian drum was heard on Detroit River, and humid May night air carried it a league or more to the fort. All the Pottawatomies and Wyandots were gathered from their own villages on opposite shores to the Ottawas on the south bank, facing Isle Cochon. Their women and children squatted about huge fires to see the war dance. The river strait, so limpidly and transparently blue in daytime, that dipping a pailful of it was like dipping a pailful of the sky, scarcely glinted betwixt darkened woods.
In the center of an open space, which the camp-fires were built to illuminate, a painted post was driven into the ground, and the warriors formed a large ring around it. Their moccasined feet kept time to the booming of the drums. With a flourish of his hatchet around his head, a chief leaped into the ring and began to chase an imaginary foe, chanting his own deeds and those of his forefathers. He was a muscular rather than a tall Indian, with high, striking features. His dark skin was colored by war paint, and he had stripped himself of everything but ornaments. Ottawa Indians usually wore brilliant blankets, while Wyandots of Sandusky and Detroit paraded in painted shirts, their heads crowned with feathers, and their leggins tinkling with little bells. The Ojibwas, or Chippewas, of the north carried quivers slung on their backs, holding their arrows.
The dancer in the ring was the Ottawa chief, Pontiac, a man at that time fifty years old, who had brought eighteen savage nations under his dominion, so that they obeyed his slightest word. With majestic sweep of the limbs he whirled through the pantomime of capturing and scalping an enemy, struck the painted post with his tomahawk, and raised the awful war whoop. His young braves stamped and yelled with him. Another leaped into the ring, sung his deeds, and struck the painted post, warrior after warrior following, until a wild maze of sinewy figures swam and shrieked around it. Blazing pine knots stuck in the ground helped to show this maddened whirl, the very opposite of the peaceful, floating calumet dance. Boy papooses, watching it, yelled also, their black eyes kindling with full desire to shed blood.
Perhaps no Indian there, except Pontiac, understood what was beginning with the war dance on that May night of the year 1763. He had been laying his plans all 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 Bœuf, 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.
