With all formality of pipes and tobacco, splendour of Indian and civilized costume, the council opened next morning. It was a contest of tongues, and one garrulous Irishman was here to enter the lists and to pit himself, with seemingly interminable prolixity of speech and the fixed ammunition of Indian rhetoric, against a host of tireless tongues. With plenty of talk to fill their ears and abundance of good things to tickle their stomachs, Johnson succeeded in strengthening the covenant of Corlaer; and the issue of the council was, on the whole, all that, even to Johnson, could be expected. In reporting results, Johnson suggested to the governor that proper regulation of the sale of rum among the Indians was the first thing to be considered. Clinton, while happy in knowing that the Iroquois would come to the Albany council, was brooding over the tendency everywhere manifest in the colonies to assert their independence. Johnson’s full report of the tongue-victory at the Onondaga council was laid before the Assembly, June 21. The governor added, that to hold the Indians loyal to the English it would be necessary to prosecute the expedition against Crown Point, and at once make arrangements for exchange of prisoners. In this latter suggestion, and with that recommending a severe enactment against rumsellers, the Assembly at once concurred. A few days after came news of the treaty of peace at Aix-la-Chapelle. Johnson, by unremitting exertion, had succeeded in securing the largest attendance of Indians that had ever assembled in Albany. They came from all the tribes of the Confederacy and from the lake region westward, besides remnants of New England and Hudson River Indians. Many of these Indians had never seen a civilized town, and greatly enjoyed the regular meals and other comforts of civilization, while interested in studying houses with chimneys, carpets, glass windows, and other things unknown to forest life. Great preparations had been made to receive them and to keep them in the best of humour. What with the clerks, quartermasters, interpreters, and others of the official class, the militia and the citizens, the farming folk who had flocked into the city to see the sights, in addition to villagers from the region around, Albany had never before beheld so large a population, nor shown such picturesque activity in her streets. In the oldest city in any of the colonies north of the municipality on Manhattan Island, these few days in the month of July were long remembered. The eighteenth day of July had come; and all the Indians expected, hundreds in number, had already arrived, and were beginning to think “Brother Corlaer” was as dilatory as his war operations had all along been. Governor Shirley and the Massachusetts commissioners, however, had come; and all lay down at night expecting the great palaver would be but a day or two off. But before Clinton was to arrive, they were to learn how near the enemy was even at that moment.