While the council was in progress Colonel Bradstreet arrived at Niagara with his troops, and when it was over he proceeded up Lake Erie to Detroit, for Pontiac and his tribes had not come to the conference, and Detroit was still in danger. During the winter the Indians had left the town in peace, but in the spring warriors had returned to encamp on the strait and had made occasional attacks. In August, 1764, fifteen months from the time when Pontiac and his sixty chiefs sat in Gladwin’s council chamber, the English army under General Bradstreet came to relieve the weary garrison. Pontiac sent a message of defiance to the English chief, but he sent it from the safe distance of a village on the Maumee River, forty or fifty miles away, in what is now the state of Ohio. Fresh troops were put in place of the worn-out veterans of the siege; such Indians as remained in the vicinity came in and offered their allegiance to the English; and Gladwin, weary of fighting the Indians, started down Lake Erie on his way to England. Now that his defence of Detroit was honorably ended, he was glad to resign his commission. Lesser posts had fallen, but Detroit had been saved, and with it the upper lakes. Pontiac spent the next two years among the western tribes of the Illinois region. In the summer of 1766 he went to Oswego, and as official representative of the tribes of the West offered to Sir William Johnson his friendship and theirs. His conspiracy had failed and he returned sadly to his home in the Illinois villages. For two years little is known of him, but in April, 1769, his name became once more the watchword of bloodshed and slaughter. From tribe to tribe runners carried the news that he had been murdered in an Indian village, and the nations rose in their wrath to avenge the death of their great chieftain. The Illinois nation, to which the assassin belonged, was almost wiped out, and internal feuds sprang up between the tribes till all the Indians of the southern lake region were involved, and the death of Pontiac was avenged among his people by a period of universal tribal war. _Chronology of the Ending of French Rule_ 1759. Capture of Quebec and Niagara. 1760. Capture of Montreal and surrender of Canada. Taking possession of Detroit. 1763. Pontiac’s attack, and the fall of the other posts of the western lakes. Treaty of Peace. 1764. Sir William Johnson’s conference at Niagara. Bradstreet’s expedition up Lake Erie, and the close of the blockade of Detroit. CHAPTER XI THE ADVENTURES OF A TRADER