Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/172

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168
THE OLD GLADE ROAD

mons to war. It passed to the Delawares and to the Shawanese and Miamis and Wyandots, and where it went the death halloo sounded through the forests. The call was to the Indians of the Black Forest to rise and cast out the English from the land. If the French could not have it, certainly no one else should. The dogs of war were loosened. The young warriors of the Allegheny and Muskingum and Scioto and Miami and Detroit danced wildly before the fires, and the old men sang their half-forgotten war chants.

The terrible war which in 1763 burst over the West has never been paralleled by savages the world over in point of swift success. This may be attributed to the fact that a leader was found in Pontiac, a chieftain in the Ottawa nation, who for daring and intelligence was never matched by a man of his race. He had the courage of sweeping and patriotic convictions. He saw in the English occupation of the land the doom of the red man. Indeed he must have seen it before, but if so he had not had an opportunity to put his convictions to a public test. The Indian was becoming a