The result of these successes was to cow and terrify the Senecas, who came to Johnson Hall and made peace. General Gage vigourously pressed operations against the hostile tribes, and sent Bradstreet westward. As a reinforcement, Johnson persuaded over five hundred of the Confederate Iroquois to join Bradstreet. He then went himself to Niagara, arriving July 8, 1764, to hold a grand council with all the Indians favourable to the English cause, from Dakota to Hudson Bay, and from Maine to Kentucky. Besides a treaty of peace with the Hurons, the earth-hunger of the pale-faces was temporarily satisfied by a cession of land along the lakes, accompanied with the promise of protection to navigation. The Senecas also ceded, not for private use, but to the Crown, a strip of land eight miles wide between Lakes Erie and Ontario, bisected by the Niagara River. They made a promise of the islands in the river to Johnson himself, who immediately transferred them to the British Government. A considerable number of white prisoners were delivered up. In this policy of possibly mistaken kindness, in which the change of life to those who had forgotten their old home and friends and had become habituated to Indian life, was like a resurrection, there were many incidents like those upon which Cooper has founded his romance of “The Wept of the Wish-ton-wish.” Johnson’s advertisement to friends of the captives is one of the pathetic curiosities in the American journalism of the eighteenth century. After interviews between Johnson’s agent, Croghan, and Pontiac, arrangements were made for the amicable dwelling together of the two races. Johnson had proposed to the Lords of Trade in London that the territory west of the Ohio River should be forever reserved to the Six Nations as a hunting-ground. Another great council was held at his house April 27, at which over nine hundred Indians, including one hundred and twenty Senecas, the Delaware chiefs Squash-Cutter and Long-Coat, were present. The various conferences lasted nearly a month, resulting in a fresh treaty of peace with the Western Indians. They covenanted to allow the boundary to be made, protect traders, allow the passage of troops, deliver up murderers to the nearest garrison, and endeavour to win over the Illinois tribes. Later, Croghan, the agent of Johnson, visited Detroit, on the way collecting the white captives delivered up, and meeting the penitent Pontiac, who of his own accord made overtures of peace and accompanied Croghan. On the 17th of August, at Detroit, he met the Ottawas, Pottawatamies, and Chippewas, and in one of several conferences presented Johnson’s road-belt to “open the path of the English from the rising to the setting sun.” Ten days later, on the 27th, with Pontiac and the tribes of the great Ottawa Confederacy, the war-hatchet was buried, the tree of peace planted, and the calumet of peace smoked. Pontiac even gave a promise to visit Johnson at Oswego to ratify the peace thus made.