But to return to Pontiac. With all his talents, he could not maintain a standing or permanent army, such a thing being contrary to all the Indian usages, and quite incompatible with their mode of life. His warriors fell away from him every season, and departed to their hunting grounds to provide food for their families. The British pressed forward, took possession of their whole country, and the tribes were obliged to beg for peace. Pontiac disdained to take any part in these negotiations, and retired to the Illinois, where he was murdered, from some motive of private animosity, by a Peoria Indian. The Ottawas, Chippewas, and Pottowottomies, who had been allied under his command, thought it incumbent on them to avenge his death, and nearly exterminated the whole nation of the Peorias--and this was the life and the fall of Pontiac. The name of this great chief is commemorated in that of a flourishing village, or rising town, about twenty miles west of Detroit, which is called _Pontiac_, as one of the townships in Upper Canada is styled _Tecumseh_: thus literally illustrating those beautiful lines in Mrs. Sigourney's poem on Indian names:-- "Their memory liveth on your hills, _Their baptism on your shore_; Your everlasting rivers speak Their dialect of yore!" For rivers, bearing their old Indian names, we have here the Miami, the Huron, the Sandusky: but most of the points of land, rivers, islands, &c., bear the French appellations, as Point Pelée, River au Glaize, River des Canards, Gros-Isle, &c. The _mélange_ of proper names in this immediate neighbourhood is sufficiently curious. Here we have Pontiac, Romeo, Ypsilanti, and Byron, all within no great distance of each other. * * * * * Long after the time of Pontiac, Detroit and all the country round it became the scene of even more horrid and unnatural conflicts between the Americans and British, during the war of the revolution, in which the Indians were engaged against the Americans. When peace was proclaimed, and the independence of the United States recognised by Great Britain, this savage war on the frontiers still continued, and mutual aggressions and injuries have left bitter feelings rankling on both sides. Let us hope that in another generation they may be effaced. For myself, I cannot contemplate the possibility of another war between the English and Americans without a mingled disgust and terror, as something cruel, unnatural, fratricidal. Have we not the same ancestry, the same father-land, the same language? "Though to drain our blood from out their being were an aim," they cannot do it! The ruffian refuse of the two nations--the most ignorant, common-minded, and vulgar among them, may hate each other, and give each other nicknames--but every year diminishes the number of such; and while the two governments are shaking hands across the Atlantic, it were indeed supremely ridiculous if they were to go to cuffs across the Detroit and Niagara!