We have followed the fortunes of the little English garrisons at Detroit and Mackinac in their struggles against a horde of savages, and have breathed a sigh of relief when a strong British army came to the rescue and England once more resumed possession of her lake posts. We return to Detroit in twelve years to find General Hamilton, the British commander of the French-English town, reading with scorn the announcement in a stray copy of the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ of July, 1776, that a new American nation has been formed and a Declaration of Independence has been adopted. Within two years Daniel Boone, the hero pioneer, is brought to Detroit a British prisoner, taken by Indians in their raid on Kentucky, and before he has made his escape from prison, Hamilton is chanting the war-song and dancing the war-dance at a grand council of Indians. To them he is offering his congratulations on the success of their raids into the southern states of the newly formed Union, on the number of prisoners they have taken, and especially on the far greater number of scalps they have brought. The War of the Revolution has begun, and with it a period of bloodshed in the Northwest. While the main bodies of troops were being marshalled and the decisive battles were being fought in the south and the east, the British carried on upon the western frontier an incessant Indian warfare. This border campaign was marked by a horrible series of bloody raids and massacres, many of which were planned at Niagara and Detroit. Niagara, wrested in the past from the Indians and the French, became at this time a place of refuge for the loyalists of New York, “a nest of Tories,” and a centre of British influence so strong that an American leader could make no more telling expression of his dread of the threatened loss of a southern point of vantage than to say that it must be saved, for if taken by the British it would become “another Niagara.” From Detroit, Hamilton set out in the summer of 1778 with a force of one hundred and seventy-five men to oust from Kaskaskia and Vincennes the American “rebel,” George Rogers Clark, who had taken these British strongholds. But instead of returning to Detroit triumphant, Hamilton was taken by that same young rebel and started on a twelve-hundred-mile journey to a Virginia prison. Even after this it seemed to the Americans that plans and conspiracies came out from Detroit as fast as prisoners and scalps went into the British prison there. There were many schemes to take the fort, but all were abandoned because of its inaccessibility.