The date and the plan were approved. The council broke up. As silently as they had come, the chiefs went home; some by water, some afoot, and no white man knew of the meeting! Detroit was the largest and most important of the English posts. Pontiac himself would seize this by aid of his Ottawas, some Potawatomis and Wyandots. To the Chippewas and the Sacs was given over the next important fur-trade station, that of Mich-il-i-mac-ki-nac, north. CHAPTER VII THE BLOODY BELT OF PONTIAC (1763-1769) HOW AN INDIAN GIRL SAVED FORT DETROIT Old Fort Detroit was a stockade twenty feet high, in the form of a square about two-thirds of a mile around. It enclosed a church and eighty or one hundred houses, mainly of French settlers with a sprinkling of English traders. In the block-houses at the corners and protecting the gates, light cannon were mounted. The garrison consisted of only one hundred and twenty men of the Eightieth Foot. In the village there were perhaps forty other men. On both sides of the river lay the fertile farms of the French settlers. Back of the farms on the east or Canadian side, and about five miles from Detroit, was the teeming village of Pontiac's Ottawas. Potawatomis and Wyandots also lived near. At Pontiac's call there waited more than a thousand warriors. The set time approached. On May 1 Pontiac and forty chiefs and warriors entered the fort, and danced the calumet, a peace dance, for the pleasure of their officers. Pontiac said to Major Gladwyn that he would return, at the change of the moon, May 7, or in one week, to hold a council with him, and "brighten the chain of peace with the English." The major agreed. He was a very foolish man, for a chief. Having returned to his village, Pontiac called a different kind of a council, there--a war council of one hundred chiefs. They were to have their people cut off the ends of muskets that should be carried concealed under the blankets. Sixty chiefs and warriors should go with him into the council chamber at the fort; the others should linger in the streets of the town and at the fort gates. He would speak to the major with a belt, white on the one side, green on the other. When he turned the belt and presented it wrong end first, let every warrior kill an English soldier, beginning with the officers. At the sound let every warrior outside the council use gun and hatchet. On May 5 a French settler's wife crossed the river to buy maple-sugar and deer-meat at the Ottawa village. She saw the warriors busy filing at their gun-barrels--shortening the guns to scarce a yard of length. This was a curious thing to do. When she went back to the post she spoke about it. "That," said the blacksmith, "explains why those fellows have been borrowing all my files and hack-saws. They wouldn't tell me what for. Something's brewing."