Other trips for the sake of health were made to the sea-shore at New London, Conn.; but owing to the fact of his being so often overworked, he was frequently prostrated in summer by his old enemy. When Cresap’s war broke out in 1774, he was almost discouraged. Chief Logan’s relatives—the Delaware chief Bald Eagle, and the Shawanese sachem Silver Heels—had been murdered by white men, who were too eager to improve red men off the face of the earth. The treaty of Fort Stanwix had not only been trampled under foot by the whites, but the murderers of Silver Heels had, perhaps unwittingly, but certainly in accordance with Indian interpretation, committed a symbolical act which was not private, but national and declarative. It meant war. After the white murderer had shot Bald Eagle, who was alone on the river, he scalped the chief, and propping his body upright in his canoe, sent him adrift down the stream. No note of a congress or decree of a royal court could be to the red man more distinctly a declaration of war than was the bloody freight which this boat bore to the Indians. To the Six Nations the murder of Logan, their kinsman, was a direct insult and irritating challenge; yet instead of rushing to massacre, they came to their friend Johnson to ask his counsel. For weeks before the congress which he called to meet at his house, July 7, 1774, he was in constant correspondence with his agents in the Ohio and Illinois country. As fast as the chiefs arrived, he persuaded them privately to refrain from war, and to trust in him to obtain justice. Six hundred Indians, many of them from great distances, were impatiently waiting at Johnson Hall while the war raged on the borders of Virginia. Though Johnson was sick with dysentery, he took no thought of self. From a sick-bed he rose to attend the council. After preliminaries, the meeting on the 9th of July, 1774, was addressed by an eloquent Seneca chieftain. Fortunately, God’s day of rest intervened; but on Monday—the last of Johnson’s days on earth—his answer was given. For two hours, on a hot day and in the glare of a July sun, with all his old-time fire of eloquence, this friend of the red man spoke in grave discourse. His diction was fiery, rhetorical, impassioned at times; but he spoke judicially on the problem in hand, pleading that they should not rush into war, but await the course of law. Six hundred dark faces, unrippled with emotion, were fixed intently with burning but immovable eyes, and with the gravity of statues, on the speaker during the long discourse. Then after the peroration, pipes and tobacco were passed around, and the conference broke up, that the auditors might prepare, through their orator, a reply. Johnson never heard the Indians’ rejoinder. A few minutes after the conclusion he was taken with relapse. Supported to his library, he soon became unconscious, and before sunset was dead.