The chiefs of the various tribes had flocked to Detroit to confer with Sir William.  He won them all by his honeyed words and liberal distribution of presents; he was told that his ’presents had made the sun and sky bright and clear, the earth smooth and level, the roads all pleasant’; and they begged that he ’would continue in the same friendly disposition towards them and they would be a happy people.’  His work completed, Johnson set out, September 19, on his homeward journey, leaving behind him the promise of peace in the Indian territory. [Footnote:  It is remarkable that Johnson in his private diary or in his official correspondence makes no mention of Pontiac.  The Ottawa chief apparently played no conspicuous part in the plots of 1761 and 1762.]

For the time being Johnson’s visit to Detroit had a salutary effect, and the year 1761 terminated with only slight signs of unrest among the Indians; but in the spring of 1762 the air was again heavy with threatening storm.  The Indians of the Ohio valley were once more sending out their war-belts and bloody hatchets.  In several instances Englishmen were murdered and scalped and horses were stolen.  The Shawnees and Delawares held British prisoners whom they refused to surrender.  By Amherst’s orders presents were withheld.  Until they surrendered all prisoners and showed a proper spirit towards the British he would suppress all gifts, in the belief that ’a due observance of this alone will soon produce more than can ever be expected from bribing them.’  The reply of the Shawnees and Delawares to his orders was stealing horses and terrorizing traders.  Sir William Johnson and his assistant in office, George Croghan, warned Amherst of the danger he was running in rousing the hatred of the savages.  Croghan in a letter to Bouquet said:  ’I do not approve of General Amherst’s plan of distressing them too much, as in my opinion they will not consider consequences if too much distressed, tho’ Sir Jeffery thinks they will.’  Although warnings were pouring in upon him, Amherst was of the opinion that there was ’no necessity for any more at the several posts than are just enough to keep up the communication, there being nothing to fear from the Indians in our present circumstances.’  To Sir William Johnson he wrote that it was ’not in the power of the Indians to effect anything of consequence.’

In the spring of 1763 the war-cloud was about to burst; but in remote New York the commander-in-chief failed to grasp the situation, and turned a deaf ear to those who warned him that an Indian war with all its horrors was inevitable.  These vague rumours, as Amherst regarded them, of an imminent general rising of the western tribes, took more definite form as the spring advanced.  Towards the end of March Lieutenant Edward Jenkins, the commandant of Fort Ouiatanon, learned that the French traders had been telling the Indians that the British would ’all be prisoners in a short time.’  But what caused most alarm