It was the head centre of the military life of the entire region, the guardian of the great highway and portage to and from the West; and hereabouts, as the forerunners of a coming civilisation and frontier settlement, the traders were securing for themselves the greatest advantages. To the rude transient population--red hunters, trappers, Indianised bush-rangers--starting out from this centre, or returning from their journeys of perhaps hundreds of miles, trooping down the portage to the fort, bearing their loads of peltries, and assisted by Indians who here made a business of carrying packs for hire, Fort Niagara was a business headquarters. There the traders brought their guns and ammunition, their blankets, and cheap jewelry, to be traded for furs; there the Indians purchased, at fabulous prices, the white man's "fire water," and many, yes, numberless were the broils and conflicts in and around the fort, when the soldiers under orders tried to calm or eject the savage element which so predominated in the life of the Garrison. [Illustration: Youngstown, N. Y., from Paradise Grove.] Pontiac's rebellion came fast on the heels of the old French War, so fast indeed that we cannot really distinguish the line of division except for the fact of English occupation of Fort Niagara; with astonishing alacrity the incorrigible Senecas took up Pontiac's bloody belt, especially disgruntled with English rule in the Niagara country because the carrying business at the Niagara portage had been taken away from them upon the introduction of clumsy carts which carried to Fort Schlosser what had before been transported on the backs of Seneca braves. The retaliation for this serious loss of business was the terrible Devil's Hole Massacre of September 14, 1763, which occurred on the new portage road between Fort Schlosser and Lewiston at the head of what is known as Bloody Brook, in the ravine of which at the Gorge lies the Devil's Hole. Here a party of five hundred Senecas from Chenussio, seventy miles to the eastward of Niagara, waylaid a train of twenty-five waggons and a hundred horses and oxen, guarded, probably indifferently, by a detachment of troops variously estimated from twenty-five to three hundred in number, on its way from Lewiston to the upper fort. But three seem to have escaped that deadly ambuscade, and a relieving party, coming hurriedly at the instance of one of the survivors, ran into a second ambush, in which all but eight out of two companies of men escaped. On the third attempt the commander of the fort hastened to the bloody scene with all of the troops at his command except what were needed to defend the fort. But the redskins had gone, leaving eighty scalped corpses on the ground. The first convoy probably numbered about twenty-five and the relieving party probably twice that number. The Indians had thrown or driven every team and all the whites surviving the