George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 5, 13th edition.

[164] the monument to Pitt's name at the head of the Ohio,

chap. IX.} 1763. Oct.

and have brought all the settlers to this side the mountains. ‘The country to the westward of our frontiers, quite to the Mississippi, was intended to be a desert for the Indians to hunt in and inhabit.’ ¹

Such a policy was impossible; already there was at Detroit the seed of a commonwealth. The long protracted siege drew near its end. The belts sent in all directions by the French, reached the nations on the Ohio and Lake Erie. The Indians were assured² that their old allies would depart; the garrison in the Peorias was withdrawn; the fort Massiac was dismantled; its cannon sent to St. Genevieve, the oldest settlement of Europeans in Missouri. The missionary, Forget, retired. At Vincennes³ the message to all the nations on the Ohio was explained to the Piankishaws, who accepted the belts and the calumets.

The courier who took the belt to the north, offered peace to all the tribes wherever he passed;⁴ and to Detroit, where he arrived on the last day of October, he bore a letter of the nature of a proclamation, informing the inhabitants of the cession of Canada to England; another, addressed to twenty-five nations by name, to all the Red Men, and particularly to Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas; a third to the commander, expressing a readiness to surrender to the English all the forts on the Ohio, and east of the Mississippi. The next morning Pontiac sent to Gladwin, that he accepted the peace which his father, the