One interesting experience, unusual for a French nobleman, came to him during this tedious waiting. The Indians on the frontier became restless, and General Schuyler called a council of many tribes to meet "at Johnson Town" in the Mohawk Valley. He invited Lafayette to attend, hoping by his presence to reawaken the Indians' old partiality for the French. Five hundred men, women, and children attended this council, and very picturesque they must have looked with their tents and their trappings against the snowy winter landscape. The warriors were as gorgeous as macaws in their feathered war-bonnets, nose-jewels, and brilliant paint, but Lafayette noted that they talked politics with the skill of veterans, as the pipe passed from hand to hand. [Pg 99]He appears to have exercised his usual personal charm for Americans upon these original children of the soil as he had already exercised it upon the whites who came to supplant them. But he says of it only that they "showed an equal regard for his words and his necklaces." Before the council was over he was adopted into one of the tribes, and returned to Albany the richer by another name to add to his long collection--"Kayewla," which had belonged to a respected chief of a bygone day. The new Kayewla was so well liked that a band of Iroquois followed him south and became part of his military division. On his return to Albany an unexpected duty awaited him. A new form of oath of office, forever forswearing allegiance to George III and acknowledging the sovereignty and independence of the United States, had come, with the order that all must subscribe to it. So, to use the picturesque phrase of the Middle Ages, it was "between" his French hands that the officers of the northern military department swore fealty to the new United States of America.