Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/173

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MILITARY ROAD TO THE WEST
169

changed man. The implements and utensils of the white man were adopted by the red. The independent forest arts of their fathers were beginning to be forgotten. Kettles and blankets and powder and lead were taking the place of the wooden bowls and fur robes and swift flint heads. In another generation the art of making a living for himself in the forest would be forgotten by the Indian, and he would henceforth be absolutely dependent upon the foreigner. All this Pontiac saw. He felt commissioned to lead a return to nature. The arts of the white man must be discarded and the Indians must come back to their primitive mode of living in dependence upon their own skill and ingenuity.

And so Pontiac waged a religious war. At a great convention of the savages he told them that a Delaware Indian had, while lost in the forests, been guided into a path which led to the home of the Great Spirit, and, on coming there, had been upbraided by the Master of Life himself for the degenerate state to which his race was falling. The forest arts of their