eye will sometimes cow an Indian as well
as a lion, and Frontenac's mien was imperious. In his life in court and
camp he had learned how to command.

The English in New York had professed to be brothers to the Iroquois and
had called them by that name. This title of equality, however, Frontenac
would not yield. Kings speak of "my people"; Frontenac spoke to the
Indians not as his brothers but as his children and as children of the
great King whom he served. He was their father, their protector, the
disposer and controller of mighty reserves of power, who loved and cared
for those putting their trust in him. He could unbend to play with their
children and give presents to their squaws. At times he seemed patient,
gentle, and forgiving. At times, too, he swaggered and boasted in terms
which the event did not always justify.

La Potherie, a cultivated Frenchman in Canada during Frontenac's regime,
describes an amazing scene at Montreal, which seems to show that,
whether Frontenac recognized the title or not, he had qualities which
made him the real brother of the savages. In 1690 Huron and other Indian
allies of the French had come from the far interior to trade and also to
consider the eternal question of checking the Iroquois. At the council,
which began with grave decorum, a Huron orator begged the French to make
no terms with the Iroquois. Frontenac answered in the high tone which he
could so well assume. He would fight them until they should humbly crave
peace; he would make with them no treaty except in concert with his
Indian allies, whom he would never fail in fatherly care. To impress the
council by the reality of his oneness with the Indians, Frontenac now
seized a tomahawk and brandished it in the air shouting at the same time
the Indian war-song. The whole assembly, French and Indians, joined in
a wild orgy of war passion, and the old man of seventy, fresh from the
court of Louis XIV, led in the war-dance, yelled with the Indians their
savage war-whoops, danced round the circle of the council, and showed
himself in spirit a brother of the wildest of them. This was good
diplomacy. The savages swore to make war to the end under his lead. Many
a frontier outrage, many a village attacked in the dead of night and
burned, amidst bloody massacre of its few toil-worn settlers, was to be
the result of that strange mingling of Europe with wild America.

Frontenac's task was to make war on the English and their Iroquois