Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/345

Rh project of some of the most desperate spirits in our own civil war, by favoring the dispersion among the Indians of blankets infected with the small-pox, and the sending for bloodhounds to be used in hunting the scalpers. The campaign of the bold and gallant Colonel Bouquet, with a strong body of provincials, put a period to these border massacres, and brought the conspirators to sue for peace. Pontiac, raging under the failure of his first prospering enterprise, made one desperate effort to enlist the tribes farther West, on the Illinois. Orders had come from France, in 1763, to the French officers to surrender to the English the strongholds which they still held here. The French traders openly and covertly abetted the futile effort of Pontiac to change the scene of the same struggle, by embarrassing and delaying the formal occupation of the territory by the English; but there was only delay, with the mutterings and threatenings of the discomfited French and their Indian partisans. The triumph on the side of colonization and civilization for that line of frontier longitude was secure. The great chief, heartbroken and worsted in his schemes, was treacherously killed in the woods near Cahokia by a drunken Indian, bribed by an English trader, in 1769.