io at the beginning
of October by the circuitous route I have already mentioned, crossed to
the other side somewhere near Sackett's harbour, and soon arrived in
the neighbourhood of the Onondaga fort, which is placed by the best
authorities a few miles to the south of Lake Oneida. It was on the
afternoon of the 10th of October, when the woods {84} wear their
brightest foliage, that the allied Indians commenced the attack with
all that impetuosity and imprudence peculiar to savages on such
occasions. The fort was really a village protected by four concentric
rows of palisades, made up of pieces of heavy timber, thirty feet in
height, and supporting an inside gallery or parapet where the defenders
were relatively safe from guns and arrows. The fort was by the side of
a pond from which water was conducted to gutters under the control of
the besieged for the purpose of protecting the outer walls from fire.
Champlain had nine Frenchmen under his direction--eight of them having
accompanied Father Le Caron to the Huron village. It was utterly
impossible to give anything like method to the Indian assaults on the
strong works of the enemy. Champlain had a high wooden platform built,
and placed on it several of his gunners who could fire into the
village, but the Iroquois kept well under cover and very little harm
was done. The attempts to fire the palisades were fruitless on account
of the want of method shown by the attacking parties. At last the
allied Indians became disheartened when they saw Champlain himself was
wounded and no impression was made on the fort. They returned to the
cover of the woods, and awaited for a few days the arrival of Stephen
Brule and the expected reinforcements of Andastes. But when nearly a
week had passed, and the scouts brought no news of Indians from the
Susquehanna, the Canadians determined to return home without making
another attack on the village. And here, I may {85} mention, that
Stephen Brule was not seen at Quebec until three years later. It
appeared then, from his account of his wanderings, that he succeeded
after some vexatious delay in bringing the Andastes to Oneida Lake only
to find that they had left the country of the Iroquois, who tortured
him for a while, and then, pleased with his spirit, desisted, and
eventually gave him his liberty. He is reported to have reached in his
wanderings the neighbourhood of Lake Superior, where he found copper,
but we have no satisfactor