News of Boquet's victory, and the approach of Colonel Bradstreet with a force of three thousand men, soon reached the Indians besieging Detroit, in the summer of 1764. Pontiac was too well aware of the superiority of the English arms to indulge a hope of resisting successfully so great a force in battle. Many of his allies were now ready to desert him and make peace with the English. Early in the summer of 1764, a grand council was held at Niagara by Sir William Johnson and Colonel Bradstreet, who stopped there on his way to Detroit and the Northwest. Nearly two thousand Indians attended, including representatives from twenty-two different tribes, eleven of them Western--a fact strikingly indicating the immense train of operations managed by the influence of Pontiac. Before Bradstreet and his army reached Detroit, Pontiac and his Ottawas abandoned the siege, at least temporarily, and repaired to the Illinois. His allies at Detroit made a treaty of peace with Colonel Bradstreet, and thus ended the siege which had continued a year, but, as Rogers says, "_he_ (Pontiac) _would not be personally concerned in it,_ saying, that when he made a peace, it should be such a one as would be useful and honorable to himself and to the King of Great Britain. _But he has not as yet proposed his terms._" What the great chief attempted to do about this time was to rally the western tribes of Indiana and Illinois into a new confederation to resist the English invaders to the last. Crossing over to the Wabash, he passed from village to village, among the Kickapoos and the three tribes of the Miamis, rousing them by his eloquence and breathing into them his own fierce spirit of resistance. He next, by rapid marches, crossed to the banks of the Mississippi, and summoned the four tribes of the Illinois to a general council. But these degenerate savages, beaten by the surrounding tribes for several generations past, had lost their warlike spirit, and though still noisy and boastful, they had become "like women, using only tongues for weapons." They showed no zeal for fight, nor did they take any interest in the schemes of the great war chief of the Ottawas. But Pontiac knew how to deal with such cravens. Frowning on the cowering assembly, he exclaimed: "If you hesitate, I will consume your tribes as a fire consumes the dry grass on the prairie." They did not hesitate, but professed concurrence in his views at once. It is quite probable, however, those threatening words cost Pontiac his life, as will be seen. Even cowards have good memories.