The Paxton Boys now set their sights on other natives living within eastern Pennsylvania, many of whom have fled to Philadelphia for protection.

Several hundred Paxtonians march on Philadelphia in January 1764, where the presence of British troops and Philadelphia militia prevents them from committing more violence.

Benjamin Franklin, who had helped organize the local militia, negotiates with the Paxton leaders and brings an end to the immediate crisis.

Franklin publishes a scathing indictment of the Paxton Boys.

"If an Indian injures me," he asked, "does it follow that I may revenge that Injury on all Indians?"

One leader of the Paxton Boys is Lazarus Stewart, who will be killed in the Wyoming Massacre of 1778.

General Amherst, held responsible for the uprising by the Board of Trade, had been recalled to London in August 1763 and replaced by Major General Thomas Gage.

In 1764, Gage sends two expeditions into the west to crush the rebellion, rescue British prisoners, and arrest the natives responsible for the war.

According to historian Fred Anderson, Gage's campaign, which had been designed by Amherst, prolongs the war for more than a year because it focuses on punishing the natives rather than ending the war.

Gage's one significant departure from Amherst's plan is to allow William Johnson to conduct a peace treaty at Niagara, giving those natives who are ready to "bury the hatchet" a chance to do so.

Native raids on frontier settlements escalate in the spring and summer of 1764.

The hardest hit colony this year is Virginia, where more raids occur on July 26, when four Delaware native soldiers kill and scalp a school teacher and ten children in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

Incidents such as these prompt the Pennsylvania Assembly, with the approval of Governor Penn, to reintroduce the scalp bounties offered during the French and Indian War, which pay money for every native killed above the age of ten, including women.

Johnson negotiates a treaty at Fort Niagara with about two thousand natives in attendance, primarily Iroquois, from July to August 1764.

Although most Iroquois have stayed out of the war, Senecas from the Genesee River valley have taken up arms against the British, and Johnson works to bring them back into the Covenant Chain alliance.

As restitution for the Devil's Hole ambush, the Senecas are compelled to cede the strategically important Niagara portage to the British.

Johnson even convinces the Iroquois to send a war party against the natives in Ohio Country.

This Iroquois expedition captures a number of Delawares and destroys abandoned Delaware and Shawnee towns in the Susquehanna Valley, but otherwise the Iroquois do contribute to the war effort as much as Johnson had desired.

The British, having secured the area around Fort Niagara, launch two military expeditions into the west.

The first expedition, led by Colonel John Bradstreet, is to travel by boat across Lake Erie and reinforce Detroit.

Bradstreet is to subdue the Native Americans around Detroit before marching south into the Ohio Country.

The second expedition, commanded by Colonel Bouquet, is to march west from Fort Pitt and form a second front in the Ohio Country.

Bradstreet sets out from Fort Schlosser in early August 1764 with about twelve hundred soldiers and a large contingent of Native allies enlisted by Sir William Johnson.

Bradstreet feels that he does not have enough troops to subdue enemy Native Americans by force, so when strong winds on Lake Erie force him to stop at Presque Isle on August 12, he decides to negotiate a treaty with a delegation of Ohio Native Americans led by Guyasuta.

Bradstreet exceeds his authority by conducting a peace treaty rather than a simple truce, and by agreeing to halt Bouquet's expedition, which has not yet left Fort Pitt.

Gage, Johnson, and Bouquet are outraged when they learn what Bradstreet had done.

Gage rejects the treaty, believing that Bradstreet had been duped into abandoning his offensive in the Ohio Country.

Gage may have been correct: the Ohio Native Americans will not return prisoners as promised in a second meeting with Bradstreet in September, and some Shawnees are trying to enlist French aid in order to continue the war.

Bradstreet continues westward, as yet unaware that his unauthorized diplomacy is angering his superiors.

He reaches Fort Detroit on August 26, where he negotiates another treaty.

In an attempt to discredit Pontiac, who is not present, Bradstreet chops up a peace belt the Ottawa leader had sent to the meeting.

According to historian Richard White, "such an act, roughly equivalent to a European ambassador's urinating on a proposed treaty, had shocked and offended the gathered Indians."

Bradstreet also claims that the natives had accepted British sovereignty as a result of his negotiations, but Johnson believes that this has not been fully explained to the natives and that further councils will be needed.

Although Bradstreet has successfully reinforced and reoccupied British forts in the region, his diplomacy proves to be controversial and inconclusive.

Colonel Bouquet, delayed in Pennsylvania while mustering the militia, finally sets out from Fort Pitt on October 3, 1764, with eleven hundred and fifty men.

He marches to the Muskingum River in the Ohio Country, within striking distance of a number of native villages.

Now that treaties have been negotiated at Fort Niagara and Fort Detroit, the Ohio natives are isolated and, with some exceptions, ready to make peace.

In a council that begins on October 17, Bouquet demands that the Ohio Native Americans return all captives, including those not yet returned from the French and Indian War.

Guyasuta and other leaders reluctantly hand over more than two hundred captives, many of whom have been adopted into native families.

Because not all of the captives are present, the natives are compelled to surrender hostages as a guarantee that the other captives will be returned.

The Ohio natives agree to attend a more formal peace conference with William Johnson, which will be finalized in July 1765.

The military conflict had essentially ended with the 1764 expeditions, but natives still call for resistance in the Illinois Country, where British troops have yet to take possession of Fort de Chartres from the French.

A Shawnee war chief named Charlot Kaské emerges as the most strident anti-British leader in the region, temporarily surpassing Pontiac in influence.

Kaské travels as far south as New Orleans in an effort to enlist French aid against the British.

In 1765, the British decide that the occupation of the Illinois Country can only be accomplished by diplomatic means.

As Gage comments to one of his officers, he is determined to have "none our enemy" among the native peoples, and that includes Pontiac, to whom he now sends a wampum belt suggesting peace talks.

Pontiac has by now become less militant after hearing of Bouquet's truce with the Ohio Country natives.

Johnson's deputy, George Croghan, accordingly travels to the Illinois Country in the summer of 1765, and although he is injured along the way in an attack by Kickapoos and Mascoutens, he manages to meet and negotiate with Pontiac.

While Charlot Kaské wants to burn Croghan at the stake, Pontiac urges moderation and agrees to travel to New York, where he will make a formal treaty with William Johnson at Fort Ontario on July 25, 1766.

It is hardly a surrender: no lands will be ceded, no prisoners will be returned, and no hostages will be taken.

Rather than accept British sovereignty, Kaské will leave British territory by crossing the Mississippi River with other French and native refugees.

Relations between British colonists and natives, which had been severely strained during the French and Indian War, had reached a new low during Pontiac's Rebellion.

People on both sides of the conflict had come to the conclusion that colonists and natives are inherently different and cannot live with each other. 

The British government had also come to the conclusion that colonists and natives must be kept apart.

On October 7, 1763, the Crown had issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, an effort to reorganize British North America after the Treaty of Paris.

The Proclamation, already in the works when Pontiac's War erupted, had been hurriedly issued after news of the uprising reached London.

Officials had drawn a boundary line between the British colonies along the seaboard, and native lands west of the Allegheny Ridge (i.e., the Eastern Divide), creating a vast 'Indian Reserve' that stretched from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi River and from Florida to Quebec.

It thus confirmed the antebellum demarcation that had been set by the Treaty of Easton in 1758.

By forbidding colonists from trespassing on native lands, the British government hopes to avoid more conflicts like Pontiac's Rebellion.

The effects of Pontiac's War will be long-lasting.

Because the Royal Proclamation of 1763 officially recognizes that indigenous people have certain rights to the lands they occupied, it has been called the natives' "Bill of Rights", and still informs the relationship between the Canadian government and First Nations.

For British colonists and land speculators, however, the Proclamation seems to deny them the fruits of victory—western lands—that had been won in the war with France.

The resentment which this creates undermines colonial attachment to the Empire, contributing to the coming of the American Revolution.

For natives, Pontiac's War demonstrates the possibilities of pan-tribal cooperation in resisting Anglo-American colonial expansion.

Although the conflict had divided tribes and villages, the war had also seen the first extensive multi-tribal resistance to European colonization in North America, and is the first war between Europeans and natives that does not end in complete defeat for the natives.