All the people had
been massacred or taken prisoners in the absence of the warriors who
were mostly in pursuit of a band of Iroquois. Father Daniel, arrayed
in the vestments of his vocation, was among the first to fall a victim
to the furious savages, who instantly cast his body into the flames of
his burning chapel,--a fitting pyre for the brave soldier of the Cross.
St. Ignace, St. Louis, and other missions were attacked early in the
following year. Fathers Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were
tortured and murdered at St. Ignace. From village after village the
shrieks of helpless women and men and children, tied to stakes in
burning houses, ascended to a seemingly pitiless Heaven. Many persons
were tortured on the spot, but as many or more reserved for the sport
of the Iroquois villages. Father Brebeuf was bound to a stake, and
around his neck was thrown a necklace of red-hot tomahawks. They cut
off his lower lip, and thrust a heated iron rod down his throat. It
was doubtless their delight to force a groan or complaint from this
stalwart priest, whose towering and noble figure had always been the
admiration of the Canadian Indians, but both he and Lalemant, a
relatively feeble man, showed themselves as brave as the most
courageous Indian warriors under similar conditions.

When a party from Ste. Marie came a few days later to the ruins of St.
Ignace, they found the {143} tortured bodies of the dead missionaries
on the ground, and carried them to the mission house, where they were
buried in sacred earth. The skull of the generous, whole-souled
Brebeuf is still to be seen within a silver bust in the Hotel Dieu of
Quebec. Father Gamier was killed at the mission of St. Jean (Etarita),
in the raids which the Iroquois made at a later time on the Tobacco
Nation, the kindred of the Hurons. Father Chabanel, who was on his way
from St. Jean to Ste. Marie, was never heard of, and it is generally
believed that he was treacherously killed and robbed by a Huron.

The Hurons were still numerous despite the losses they had
suffered--counting even then more families than the Five Nations--but
as they looked on the smoking ruins of their villages and thought of
the undying hatred which had followed them for so many years they lost
all courage and decided to scatter and seek new homes elsewhere.
Father Ragueneau, the superior of the Jesuits, after consultation with
the Fathers and Frenchmen at Ste. Marie, some fifty per