carried
off twenty-three prisoners and killed two women and four children,
whose scalps they bore away.

(4). Still further light is thrown upon this transaction by some notes
appended to the names of certain Acadians, who had served as officers
of militia in Acadia, and who were living in 1767 at Cherbourg. We
learn that the Sieur Joseph Bellefontaine had once owned a large tract
of land on the River St. John, near St. Anne's, and that he was
appointed Major of the militia on the river by order of the Marquis de
la Galissonniere, April 10, 1749, and always performed his duties with
fidelity until made a prisoner by the enemy. At the time of the
mid-winter raid on St. Anne's he had the misery of seeing one of his
daughters with three of her children massacred before his eyes by the
English, who desired by this act of cruelty and the fear of similar
treatment to compel him to take their side. On his refusal he barely
escaped a like fate by his flight into the woods, carrying with him
two other children of the same daughter. The young mother so
ruthlessly slain was Nastasie Bellefontaine, wife of Eustache Pare.
The other victims of this tragedy of the wilderness were the wife and
child of Michel Bellefontaine--a son of Joseph Bellefontaine. This
poor fellow had the anguish of beholding his wife and boy murdered
before his eyes on his refusal to side with the English.

The village of St. Anne's was left in a state of desolation. Moses
Perley says that when the advance party of the Maugerville colony
arrived at St. Anne's Point in 1762, they found the whole of what is
now the Town plat of Fredericton cleared for about ten rods back from
the bank and they saw the ruins of a very considerable settlement. The
houses had been burned and the cultivated land was fast relapsing into
a wilderness state. Nevertheless the early English settlers reaped
some advantage from the improvements made by the Acadians, for we
learn from Charles Morris' description of the river in 1768, that at
the site of the old French settlement at St. Anne's Point there was
about five hundred acres of cleared upland in English grass from
whence the inhabitants of Maugerville got the chief part of their Hay
for their Stock. "They inform me," says Mr. Morris, "that it produces
about a load and a half to an acre." He adds, "The French Houses are
all burnt and destroyed."

An interesting incident connected with the French occupation was
related many years