The road being cleared for the passage of the troops, Captain Sterling, with one hundred Highlanders from Fort Pitt, received possession, October 10, of Fort Chartres, and the French flag was hauled down. True to his promise, Pontiac met Johnson at Oswego July 23. Amid every possible accessory of impressive display and ceremony, the sacramental wampum, the sacred promises of peace and tokens of friendship were exchanged. Then Pontiac and his braves moved out in their canoes over Lake Ontario to the west and to obscurity. Henceforth the way of Teutonic civilization was cleared, and the march to the Pacific began. As we write in 1891, the centre of population is near Chicago. In October, 1768, the great council called for the purpose of making a scientific frontier met at Fort Stanwix. This great concourse, not only of Indians, but of the governors and other distinguished men of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, makes one of the historical pictures in the story of America well worth the artist’s interpretation on canvas. Johnson, being at this time heartily interested in the welfare of St. George’s Episcopal Church, built next to the British barracks in Schenectady, in which he was a frequent worshipper, profited by the presence and happy mood of so many prominent men. He took up a collection, and secured sixty-one pounds and ten shillings for the little stone church on whose spire in Ferry Street still veers the gilded cock of St. Nicholas, the symbol of vigilance and of the resurrection. Of the Six Nations and other tribes, thirty-two hundred individuals were present to witness the bartering away of their birthright for such pottage as the pale-faces had to tempt these Esaus of the wilderness. For ten thousand pounds, unlimited rum, and after due exchange of eloquence and wampum, they sold to the king the ground now occupied by Kentucky, Western Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania. Fort Stanwix was dismantled. The Indians moved out of Eastern New York, and the next year Daniel Boone led that great emigration of white men from the Southern Atlantic coast which resulted in the winning of the West. Boone’s was a movement for the annihilation of savagery, the extinction of Latin, and the supremacy of Teutonic civilization in North America, parallel to that rolling westward from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. This was the last of the most important meetings and negotiations of Johnson with the men who claimed by hereditary right to occupy the continent. Though afterward full of toilsome detail, and busy in conference, in hearing complaints, and securing the performance of stipulations, Johnson’s constructive career as Superintendent of Indian Affairs virtually closed at Fort Stanwix. CHAPTER XII. LIFE AT JOHNSON HALL.