Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/206

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196
MINNESOTA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS.

resided, and though they did not openly aid and advise them in the strenuous effects which they continued to make even after the French as a nation had retired from the field, to prevent the occupation of their country by the British, yet their silence and apparent acquiescence conduced greatly to their noble and protracted efforts headed by the great Algic leader Pontiac.

The fact of their love and adherence to the French people cannot be gainsaid, and to more fully illustrate this feeling, as it actuated their conduct even after the great French nation had delivered them over to the dominion of the British, I will refer to the respected authority of Alexander Henry, the first British trader whom the Ojibways tell of having resided with them after the termination of the disastrous war which we are about to notice.

In 1760, the French forts on the northern lakes were given up to the British, and for the time being the northern tribes of Indians apparently acquiesced in the peace which, their Great Father, the French King, had made with Great Britain. In the spring of the following year, Mr. Henry, the well-known author of "Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, between the years 1760 and 1766," tells of making a trading voyage from Montreal to Michilimackinac. He came across a large village of Ojibway Indians on the small island of La Cloche in Lake Huron who treated him in the kindest and most friendly manner, till, "discovering that he was an Englishman," they told his men that the Michilimackinac Indians would certainly kill him, and that they might as well anticipate their share of the pillage. They accordingly demanded a part of his goods, which he prudently gave them. He observed afterwards that from the repeated warnings which he daily received, his mind became "oppressed and much troubled," and learning that the