Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/174

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170
THE OLD GLADE ROAD

fathers must be encouraged and relied upon. The utensils of the white man must be banished from the wigwams. Bows and arrows and tomahawks and stone hatchets should not be discarded. Otherwise the Great Spirit would take away their land from them and give it to others. And so, much of the fury which accompanied the war was a sort of religious frenzy. "The Master of Life himself has stirred us up," said the warriors.

Pontiac's plot—undoubtedly the most comprehensive military campaign ever conceived in redman's brain—was discovered by the British at Fort Miami, on the Maumee River, in March 1763, four years after the fall of Quebec. There the Bloody Belt was found and secured before it could be forwarded to the Wabash with its murderous message. By threats and warnings the untutored English officers thought to quell the disturbance. Amherst, his Majesty's commanding general in America, haughtily condemned the signs of revolution as "unwarranted." Moreover he gave his officers in the West authority to declare to the Indian chieftains that if they should con-