nd hate of these
formidable bands, who, in the strength of their fivefold league, spread
havoc and desolation through all the surrounding wilds. It was the
aim of Champlain, as of his successors, to persuade the threatened and
endangered hordes to live at peace with each other, and to form against
the common foe a virtual league, of which the French colony would be the
heart and the head, and which would continually widen with the widening
area of discovery. With French soldiers to fight their battles, French
priests to baptize them, and French traders to supply their increasing
wants, their dependence would be complete. They would become assured
tributaries to the growth of New France. It was a triple alliance of
soldier, priest, and trader. The soldier might be a roving knight, and
the priest a martyr and a saint; but both alike were subserving the
interests of that commerce which formed the only solid basis of the
colony. The scheme of English colonization made no account of the Indian
tribes. In the scheme of French colonization they were all in all.

In one point the plan was fatally defective, since it involved the
deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but
ill understood,--the fiercest, boldest, most politic, and most ambitious
savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth.

The chiefs and warriors met in council,--Algonquins of the Ottawa, and
Hurons from the borders of the great Fresh-Water Sea. Champlain promised
to join them with all the men at his command, while they, on their part,
were to muster without delay twenty-five hundred warriors for an inroad
into the country of the Iroquois. He descended at once to Quebec for
needful preparation; but when, after a short delay, he returned to
Montreal, he found, to his chagrin, a solitude. The wild concourse had
vanished; nothing remained but the skeleton poles of their huts, the
smoke of their fires, and the refuse of their encampments. Impatient at
his delay, they had set out for their villages, and with them had gone
Father Joseph le Caron.

Twelve Frenchmen, well armed, had attended him. Summer was at its
height, and as his canoe stole along the bosom of the glassy river, and
he gazed about him on the tawny multitude whose fragile craft covered
the water like swarms of gliding insects, he thought, perhaps, of his
whitewashed cell in the convent of Brouage, of his book, his table, his
rosary, and all the narrow routine