All, however, was not yet peace in the northern provinces. The English might possess themselves of French territory, but they could not win the hearts of the Indian, whom the devoted missionaries and the kind and politic French traders had attached to their nation. When, therefore, the English, who treated the Indians with cold contempt, were about to take possession, Pontiac, the brave and intellectual chief of the Ottawas, who cherished the hope of restoring his nation to independence, endeavoured to excite the Red men against their new lords. “If,” reasoned he, addressing his people, “the English have expelled the French, what should hinder, but that the Indian should destroy them before they have established their power, and thus the Red man once more be lord of the forest?” Pontiac, by his eloquence and energy, gained the co-operation of the whole north-western tribes, and the plan of a simultaneous attack on all the British posts on the lakes was formed without any suspicion being excited. The day fixed was the 7th of July, and on that day nine forts—all, indeed, excepting those of Niagara, Detroit and Fort Pitt—were surprised and taken. Nor was the outbreak confined to the forts; the whole frontier of Pennsylvania and Virginia, especially the former, was attacked, and the scattered traders and settlers plundered and cruelly murdered. The back settlers of Pennsylvania—principally Scotch and Irish Presbyterians, men of a character very different to that of the mild Quakers, and who, in the spirit of the older Puritans, regarded the Indians as the Canaanites of the Old Testament—rose up in vengeance, and the leaders of this movement coming principally from a place called Paxton, the body assumed the name of “the Paxton Boys,” and pursued their victims with a bloodthirsty spirit, which aimed at nothing less than extermination. In vain Benjamin Franklin interfered to save such friendly Indians as had fled for refuge to Philadelphia and other towns; the avengers knew no mercy, and for these unhappy remnants of a once powerful race there appeared no place of refuge but the grave. Such of the Christianised Indians as escaped this cold-blooded massacre established themselves on a distant branch of the Susquehanna; though their peace there was but of short duration, being again compelled, within a few years, to emigrate to the country north-west of the Ohio, where they and their missionaries, the Moravians, settled in three villages on the Muskinghum.