Fortunately for the Commonwealth, Governor Clinton had taken other advice than that so liberally furnished in the past by the particular member so obnoxious to the Assembly; and his opening message was commendably brief, being merely a salutation, which was as briefly and courteously returned. Now that the Tory firebrand was “out of politics” for a while, peace once more reigned. An era of good feeling set in, and harmony was the rule until Clinton’s administration ended. A new Board of Indian Commissioners was chosen, by a compromise between the governor and his little parliament. Plans for paying the colonial debt, for strengthening the frontier, and for establishing a college were all carried out. Oswego was the watch-house on the frontier. In the early spring of 1753 the advance guard of a French army left Montreal to take possession of the Ohio Valley. Descried alike by Iroquois hunters at the rapids of the St. Lawrence and by the officers at Oswego, the news was communicated to Johnson by foot-runners with wampum and by horseback-riders with letters. Thirty canoes with five hundred Indians under Marin were leading the six thousand Frenchmen determined to hold the domain from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico. Whether troubled the more by the encroachments of the warlike French, or by the English land-speculators and enterprising farmers who were now clearing forests and settling on their old hunting-grounds, the Indians could scarcely tell. Dissatisfied at having lost officially their friend Johnson, disliking the commissioners, seeing what they considered as their property, the Ohio, invaded by the French, while the New York Government seemed to be inert or asleep, they sent a delegation to lay their complaints before the governor and Council in New York. There they roundly abused the whole government, and threatened to break the covenant chain. As matter of fact, the trouble concerning land patents arose out of transactions settled before Clinton’s time, which could not at once be remedied in curt Indian fashion. All legal land alienations in New York were, after the custom originating in Holland, and thence borrowed by the American colonists and made a national procedure in all the United States, duly registered; and into these examination must be made. Both house and governor, however, agreed in choosing Johnson as the man for the critical hour, and requested him to meet the tribes at the ancient council-fire at Onondaga. Johnson, hearing that the Iroquois had broken faith and again attacked the Catawbas in the Carolinas, hastened matters by summoning one tribe, the Mohawks, to meet him at his own home.