Note 1464 — Chapter IX

N. Y. Col. Doc., vii. 783; Hildreth's Pioneer History, p. 75. Pontiac kept his promise, visited Sir William Johnson in the spring, concluded a peace, and departed laden with presents. He returned to his village on the Maumee, and little is known of him for the next three years. He then reappeared in the Illinois country, and visited his old friend M. St. Ange, who was in command of the post of St. Louis, then under Spanish rule. Like other Indians, Pontiac indulged at times in the excessive use of intoxicating liquors. Against the advice of his friend, St. Ange, he attended an Indian drinking carousal, at which he was waylaid and brained with a hatchet by a Kaskaskia Indian, who had been paid a barrel of rum by an English trader, named Williamson, to commit the deed. St. Ange claimed the body, and buried it with the honors of war, in an unknown grave near the fort of St. Louis. J. N. Nicollet, in his sketch of St. Louis (p. 82), says: "This murder, which roused the vengeance of all the Indian tribes friendly to Pontiac, brought about the successive wars and almost total extermination of the Illinois nation. Pontiac was a remarkably well-looking man, nice in his person, and full of taste in his dress and in the arrangement of his exterior ornaments. His complexion is said to have approached that of the whites. His origin is still uncertain, for some have supposed him to belong to the Ottawas, others to the Miamis, etc.; but Col. P. Chouteau, senior, who knew him well, is of the opinion that he was a Nipissing." (Reprinted in Olden Time, i. 322.)