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The tribes soon began to bring in their prisoners, each chief giving up the captives of his tribe with long harangues, and many gifts of wampum, as pledges of good faith, and promises of a peace never to be broken. They said they had not merely buried the hatchet now, where it might sometime be dug up, but they had thrown it into the sky to the Great Spirit, who would never give it back again. They wished Bouquet to notice that they no longer called the English brothers, as they commonly did when they were friendly, but they called them fathers, and they meant to be their children and to do their bidding like children. They made him a great number of flattering speeches, and he gravely listened to their compliments, but as to the reasons they gave for breaking their promises in the past he dealt very frankly with them. He reminded them of their treacheries, and cruelties of all kinds, and of their failure to restore their captives after they had pledged themselves to do so, and he said, “This army shall not leave your country till you have fully complied with every condition that is to precede my treaty with you…. I give you twelve days from this date to deliver into my hands all the prisoners in your possession, without any exception; Englishmen, Frenchmen, women and children, whether adopted into your tribes, married or living amongst you under any pretense whatsoever, together with all negroes. And you are to furnish the said prisoners with clothing, provisions, and horses, to carry them to Fort Pitt…. You shall then know on what terms you may obtain the peace you sue for.”

These words are said to have quite broken the spirit of the savages, already overawed by the presence of such an army as they had never seen in their country before. One of the great chiefs of the Delawares said: “With this string of wampum we wipe the tears from your eyes, we deliver you these prisoners… we gather and bury with this belt all the bones of the people that have been killed during this unhappy war, which the Evil Spirit occasioned among us. We cover the bones that have been buried, that they may never more be remembered. We again cover their place with leaves that it may no more be seen. As we have been long astray, and the path between you and us stopped, we extend this belt that it may be again cleared…. While you hold it fast by one end, and we by the other, we shall always be able to discover anything that may disturb our friendship.”

Bouquet answered that he had heard them with pleasure, and that in receiving these last prisoners from them he joined with them in burying the bones of those who had fallen in the war, so that the place might no more be known. “The peace you ask for, you shall now have,” he said, but he told them that it was his business to make war, and the business of others to make peace, and he instructed them how and with whom they were to treat. He took hostages from them, and he dealt with the other tribes on the same terms as they brought in their captives. On the 18th of November, he broke up his camp and marched back to Fort Pitt, with more than two hundred men, women, and children whom he had delivered from captivity among the savages.

It is believed that six hundred others were never given up. The captives were not always glad to go back to their old homes, and the Indians had sometimes to use force in bringing them to the camp where their friends and kindred who had come with Bouquet’s army were waiting to receive them. Many had been taken from their homes when they were so young that they could not remember them, and they had learned to love the Indians, who had brought them up like their own children, and treated them as lovingly as the fathers and mothers from whom they had been stolen. In the charm of the savage life these children of white parents had really become savages; and certain of the young girls had grown up and married Indian husbands to whom they were tenderly attached. The scenes of parting between all these were very touching on both sides, and it is told of one Indian who had married a Virginian girl that he followed her back to the frontier at the risk of his life from her people. The Indians gave up the captives often so dear to them, with tears and lamentations, while on the other hand their kindred waited to receive them in an anguish of hope and fear. As the captives came into the camp, parents sought among them for the little ones they had lost, and husbands for the wives who had been snatched from their desolated homes. Brothers and sisters met after a parting so long that one or other had forgotten the language they once spoke in common. The Indians still hung about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show their love for them.

Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health. Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes: even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it; or so, at least, they thought.