This done, the party proceeded on its way, moving downward with the current, and passing from time to time rough openings in the forest, with clusters of Indian wigwams, the inmates of which showed a strong inclination to run off at their approach.  To prevent this, Chabert de Joncaire was sent in advance, as a messenger of peace.  He was himself half Indian, being the son of a French officer and a Seneca squaw, speaking fluently his maternal tongue, and, like his father, holding an important place in all dealings between the French and the tribes who spoke dialects of the Iroquois.  On this occasion his success was not complete.  It needed all his art to prevent the alarmed savages from taking to the woods.  Sometimes, however, Celoron succeeded in gaining an audience; and at a village of Senecas called La Paille Coupee he read them a message from La Galissoniere couched in terms sufficiently imperative:  “My children, since I was at war with the English, I have learned that they have seduced you; and not content with corrupting your hearts, have taken advantage of my absence to invade lands which are not theirs, but mine; and therefore I have resolved to send you Monsieur de Celoron to tell you my intentions, which are that I will not endure the English on my land.  Listen to me, children; mark well the word that I send you; follow my advice, and the sky will always be calm and clear over your villages.  I expect from you an answer worthy of true children.”  And he urged them to stop all trade with the intruders, and send them back to whence they came.  They promised compliance; “and,” says the chaplain, Bonnecamp, “we should all have been satisfied if we had thought them sincere; but nobody doubted that fear had extorted their answer.”

Four leagues below French Creek, by a rock scratched with Indian hieroglyphics, they buried another leaden plate.  Three days after, they reached the Delaware village of Attique, at the site of Kittanning, whose twenty-two wigwams were all empty, the owners having fled.  A little farther on, at an old abandoned village of Shawanoes, they found six English traders, whom they warned to begone, and return no more at their peril.  Being helpless to resist, the traders pretended obedience; and Celoron charged them with a letter to the Governor of Pennsylvania, in which he declared that he was “greatly surprised” to find Englishmen trespassing on the domain of France.  “I know,” concluded the letter, “that our Commandant-General would be very sorry to be forced to use violence; but his orders are precise, to leave no foreign traders within the limits of his government."[6]

[Footnote 6:  Celoron, Journal.  Compare the letter as translated in N.Y.  Col.  Docs., VI. 532; also Colonial Records of Pa., V. 325.]