The rising which Pontiac headed came too late for the Indians to be permanently successful. In any case it could have had, eventually, but one ending, the overthrow of the red men: but, while it lasted, it seriously delayed the consolidation of English authority over the West. After most wars of conquest there supervene minor wars or rebellions, waves of the receding tide when high-water is past, disturbances due to local mismanagement and local discontent; but the Indian war, which began in 1763, had special characteristics. In the first place, the rising was entirely a native revolt. No doubt it was fomented by malcontent French traders and settlers, disseminating tales of English iniquities and raising hopes of a French revival; but very few Frenchmen were to be found in the fighting line; the warriors were red men, not white. In the second place it was a rising of the Western Indians, of the tribes who had not known in any measure the strength of the English, and who had known, more as friends than as subjects, the guidance and the spirit of the French. Of the Six Nations, the Senecas alone, the westernmost members of the Iroquois Confederacy, joined in the struggle, and the centre of disturbance was further west. In the third place the rising was more carefully planned, the conception was more statesmanlike, the action was more organized, than has usually been the case among savage races. There was unity of plan and harmony in action, which betokened leadership of no ordinary kind. The leader was the Ottawa chief Pontiac. [Sidenote: Indian suspicions of the English.] ‘When the Indian nations saw the French power, as it were, annihilated in North America, they began to imagine that they ought to have made greater and earlier efforts in their favour. The Indians had not been for a long time so jealous of them as they were of us. The French seemed more intent on trade than settlement. Finding themselves infinitely weaker than the English, they supplied, as well as they could, the place of strength by policy, and paid a much more flattering and systematic attention to the Indians than we had ever done. Our superiority in this war rendered our regard to this people still less, which had always been too little.’[3] The Indians were frightened too, says the same writer, by the English possession of the chains of forts: ‘they beheld in every little garrison the germ of a future colony.’ Ripe for revolt, and never yet subdued, as their countrymen further east had been, they found a strong man of their own race to lead them, and tried conclusions with the dominant white race in North America. [Sidenote: Rogers’ mission to Detroit.]