The plan now was to starve out the garrison by killing all the settlers outside the fort who were in any way sympathetic with the English cause. At the same time they waylaid all relief expeditions sent from the East, and at first were very fortunate, as the English officers did not understand the Indian method of warfare and were easily led into ambuscades. For five months this little garrison had been surrounded by a thousand or more savages, but notwithstanding various successes the Indians were becoming tired. Siege warfare long continued was not congenial to them, and little by little they began to desert until by October there were only the Ottawas, his own tribe, left. When, therefore, at the end of that month the French governor at Fort Chartres sent a message to Pontiac that the Great Father in France had given up all his possessions over here to the English, the great chief raised the siege in disgust and left for the south. There he hoped to rally the Indians for a final stand, but when he found it could not be done he reluctantly made terms of peace with the representative of Sir William Johnson at Detroit in August of 1764. On that occasion he spoke in the Peace Council as follows: “Father, we have all smoked out of this pipe of peace. It is your children’s pipe; and as the war is over and the Great Spirit and Giver of Light who has made all the earth and everything therein has brought us all together this day for our mutual good, I declare to all nations that I have settled my peace with you before I came here, and now deliver my pipe to be sent to Sir William Johnson that he may know I have made peace and taken the King of England for my father in the presence of all the nations now assembled; and whenever any of these nations go to visit him they may smoke out of it with him in peace. Fathers, we are obliged to you for lighting up our old council fire for us and desiring us to return to it, but we are now settled on the Miami river not far from hence. Whenever you want us you will find us there.” In 1766 Pontiac visited Sir William Johnson at his castle on the Mohawk and smoked the pipe of peace with that great warrior. Thence he went south to Fort Chartres, the last place in New France where floated the lilies of France, that flag which for over two centuries had been the symbol of sovereignty from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. There he became embroiled in a quarrel and was killed by one of the Illinois in a cowardly manner, an act for which that tribe had to pay dearly in the vengeance exacted by the friends of the great old chief.