116 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 
fied this generous judgment. The battle of Quebec 
did not make the supremacy of the English race in the 
world; but as marking the moment at which that 
supremacy first became clearly manifest, it deserves 
even more than the meed of fame which history has 
assigned to it. 
During the progress of this eventful war, the tribes 
of the Long House, under the influence of Sir William 
Johnson, had either remained neutral, or had occasion- 
ally assisted the English cause. The Algonquin tribes, 
however, from east to west — including even the Dela- 
wares, who, since the decline of the Iroquois power, no 
longer consented to call themselves women — made 
common cause with the French, and in many cases 
proved very formidable allies. The overthrow of the 
French power came as a terrible shock to these Indians, 
who now found themselves quite unprotected from 
English encroachment. At first they refused to 
believe that the catastrophe was irretrievable, and one 
great Indian conceived a plan for retrieving it. 
Of all the Indians of whom we have any record, 
there were few more remarkable for intellectual power 
than Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas. He was as fierce 
and treacherous as any of his race, but he was char- 
acterized by an intellectual curiosity very rare among 
barbarians, and he exhibited an amount of forethought 
truly wonderful in an Indian. It seemed to him that 
if all the tribes in the country could be brought 
to unite in one grand attack upon the English, they 
might perhaps succeed in overthrowing them. It was 
a scheme like that which perhaps on insufficient grounds 
has been ascribed to the Wampanoag Philip, but the 
war set on foot by Pontiac was of far greater dimen- 
a ae 
