Maechelle did not know either, how long the Illini remained in their craggy death trap. Far away on the other side of the river were the corn fields and food supplies of no use to them, in their agony of hunger.

The blue waters of the Illinois, filled with game fish swirled below the rock, but again was a mockery. Some historians have asserted the besieged cut leather thongs, carrying drinking vessels lowered to the river to obtain water.

Meachelle told Judge Caton, that 11 of the trapped Illini escaped and made their way down river to seek shelter from the French and their Indian friends, which was granted.

But back of the legends was the basis of the attack against the Illini and that was the failure of the conspiracy of Pontiac, great chief of the Ottawas in Michigan.

The Pottowattomies were allied with the Ottawas and Pontiac crafty, cruel, scheming, hating the English and all they stood for, wielding in effect a despotic war club over a loosely formed confederation of hun-dreds of Indians.

September 13, 1759 the English defeated the French on the heights of Abraham at Quebec and the fall of Canada to the British became inevitable.

Pontiac lived in a small village about five miles north of Detroit. When the British came to take over their new possessions he was at first cordial, but insistent, that he be treated for what he was-the great sachem of many Indian tribes.

He smoked the pipe of peace with Major Robert Roberts detailed by Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the British royal governor, to take possession of the British forts at Detroit and Mackinac, in far northern Michigan at the confluence of Lakes Huron anJ Michigan.

Pontiac detailed a detachment of warriors to help troops of Rogers on their way with 100 head of cattle, which they were driving from Fort Pitt in Pennslyvania through the wilderness to British forts for slaughter for the garrison.

But the French were bitter at their fate. Their agents visited the Indian tribes, incited them to further hatred of the British, stiried them to frenzy.

The French had supplied them with guns and food and ammunition. The British cut off their supplies and when the warriors visited the forts, where the British flag now flew, instead of the familiar fleur-de-lis they were some times booted out of the fort at the end of a sentry's big foot.

All this led Pontiac to form his great conspiracy against the English and their scattered forts and settlements. The French had laid them out along the thundering waters of the Great Lakes and their little rivers that linked them~places that became famous in colonial history-Green Bay, St. Joseph, Mich, Detroit, the Maumee, Sandiasky, Ohio, Niagara, Fort Pitt, and others.

It was the aim of Pontiac to capture these or as many as he could. The conspiracy got underway late in 1762, when Indian agents visited the tribal leaders and enlisted their aid. The war drums throbbed in a' score of villages, squaws mixed war paint, moulded bullets, sharpened knives. Children practised the use of bows and arrows. Terror struck the frontier. British lives were sacrificed in a frenzy of hate. Warriors drummed up their courage with savage rituals.

April 27, 1763 the conspirators, says Francis Parkman great American historian, met on the river called Aux Etorces near Detroit. Pontiac, then nearing middle age, harangued the great council inciting them to fury against the hated British, whom he called "dogs in reds," the supreme insult. Mackinac fell to Indian strategy and the garrison was slaughtered on June 4, the birthday of King George by the combined Ojibway, Chip-pewa and Sac tribes.

A month before early in May, Detroit then a settlement of about 2,500 was attacked. But tradition is that, Catherine, an Ojibway, Indian woman, warned Captain Gladwyn, commander of the fort at Detroit, that an attack was imminent. The plans of Pontiac to capture the fort by strategy failed. Then he and his allied Indians laid siege to the fort and that too failed, after many months. Pontiac hastened to the distant Illini tribes and tried to enlist their aid in his grand scheme to chase the white men out of the weStern wilderness. But the Illini would have no part of it. By that time, 1764 they had become a degenerate tribe weak-ened by constant war and they evaded any part of the grand conspiracy of Pontiac.

The latter saw the handwriting on the wall and capitulated to the British at a grand council on the Wabash near the site of what is now LaFayette. Indiana. Here the Ojibways and the Pottowattomies concluded the treaty of peace with George Croghan, agent for Sir William Johnson, the British governor over the territory.

It was in April 1769 that Pontiac made another trip to the Illinois country this time to visit his old friend St. Ange, the French army officer, who had offered his service to the Spanish at St. Louis after the cession of Louisiana to the French, Pierre Chaoteau, the French trader St. Ange and others entertained Pontiac as a great chief, who it is said wore the full uniform of a French officer given him by Montcalm, French general, who was killed at the battle in Quebec.

In that kind of a uniform his presence in the nearby Indian village at Cahokia was an insult to the British traders, who treated him with contempt, while Pontiac in turn looked down on the Illinois Indians, who five years before had rejected his plea for aid in his conspiracy.

Murder was the inevitable end of all this hatred and Pontiac was felled at Cahokia in April, 1769 and was murdered. News of his slaying spread like a prairie fire among his old followers, the Miamis, the Kicka-poos and the Pottawattomies. Once again the war drums throbbed, the war paint was donned, the weapons prepared and a campaign of exter-mination was planned against the remnants of the once great Illinois tribe.

Some writers have drawn on their imagination, to say the body of Pontiac was cleaned of its flesh, in accordance with Indian customs, and the skull and leg bones carried off to a village of the Indians allied now against the Illinois. These ghastly relics so the tellers of fancy tales relate, were attached to a long pole and waved from Camp Rock as a horrible taunt to the Illinois of what their fate would be.

More prosaic writers say that actually Pontiac was buried in St. Louis, where the Southern Hotel was built.

Uproar and arguments spurred on by the inevitable fire water, that accompanied what started out to be a love feast increased on Indian creek, northeast of Ottawa in the spring of 1770 according to Eaton Osman of ttawa. He was author of the "Last of a Great Indian Tribe" and a historian who had access to material that now is lost.

Osman contended the allied Kickapoos and Pottowattomies met to split the territory taken from the vanquished Illini, whose bones, if tradition is to be believed, then were bleaching on top of Starved Rock.

The Miamis to quote Osman claimed the greater part of the territory of the once great Illinois. That, in the fashion of all, who claim credit for doing more than their allies, did not make them any more popular with the Kickapoos and Pottowattomies; more the Miamis told their now angry allies they had muskets while presumably the other Indians besieging the Illinois on Starved Rock had to be content with showering them with arrows, which may or may not have sent some of the besieged to the happy hunting ground.

The squaws, old crones, children and senile warriors took sides in the raging controversy, which then developed into a general brawl. Heads were bashed and presumably some of the warriors joined their ancestors.

The matter could not be settled despite days of argument and battling. Off and on the Miamis and their one time allies fought here and there and many a warrior "kicked the bucket" after these bloody encounters.

Finally the chiefs smoked a pipe of peace and agreed to settle the matter by a battle to be waged on Sugar Creek about 200 miles from the Wabash river in eastern Illinois. The Miamis were to pick 300 of their finest and toughest warriors, the Kickapoos and the Pottowattomies the same number combined.

The argeement was that each side with its 300 warriors was to cross to the east side of the Wabash. Weapons were to be the tomahawk, the bow and arrow, and the spear, the old time Indian weapons.

Dawn came cool and clear on a September day, when the first signs of autumn-the golds, the reds, the bronzes and the scarlets on the hills were brightening the otherwise solid green wilderness.

The roar of battle started as warriors sneaked up on their enemies hidden in the brush and behind the bushes and rocks. Tomahawks cracked skulls, knives did their deadly work, arrows struck home and clubs crushed bones to make their victims helpless and the scalping knives did the rest.

All that day, so the legend goes, the bloody horror went on. At sun-down there were only 12 men left out of the 600, who had been alive at sunrise. There were five Miamis and seven Kickapoos and Pottawat-tomies. Perry Armstrong of Morris the early day historian, listed the seven survivors as including chiefs Shick Shack, and Sugar. The five Miamis understandably took to their collective heels and fled not knowing, if the seven opponents might suddenly have a "hankering" for further combat, with the five Miamis as their targets. Thereafter the Miamis re-tired east of the Wabash-and the Kickapoos and the Pottawattomies split the land of the Illini.

The Kickapoos claimed the land between the Wabash and a vague line, according to Osman, running north and south through what is now Livingston county, Illinois.

The Pottawattomies took over the land, including what is now Starved Rock. Their camp was northeast of the famous old rock.

Guerdon Hubbard, one of the hustling young men of Illinois in the early 1820's did business with them as a fur-trader. A native of New England, he was in the egg and butter business at 12 years, to help out the family income. At 20 he was chief clerk in the Illinois valley for the American Fur Company. Hubbard had a hand in the founding of Danville and Chicago and Ottawa and for years was one of the important figures in the state.

One of the last camp sites of the Pottawattomies was at Kankakee and the site is marked by a monument on the court-house lawn.

The pitiful remnants of the Pottawattomies passed through Ottawa in the fall of 1840 (Ottawa Free Trader) from Michigan, under United States army guard, for a western reservation.

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