CHAPTER 10

1642–65

THEY NAMED THEIR FORT PERILOUS.

The first summer passed in peace. Although chosen for their combat experience, brave men, in meadows that, decades earlier, had been Iroquois cornfields, admired the dulcet tones of warblers and wrote poetic letters home. They thanked God for bequeathing such a warm, tranquil garden for their endeavours. The Iroquois had not yet discovered their presence, although accounts from other districts concerning the atrocities of war reached their ears, gumming the hearts of even the most valiant. Outside their stockade composed of flimsy palings, wandering Huron and Algonquin encamped. The French fed them, and spoke of their Lord, and Jeanne Mance tended to the sick or injured among them. Whenever the men applied the paint of battle and went off, she and the other women at Fort Perilous cared for the Indian children and guarded the women the warriors left behind.

To the south, the Dutch had established Fort Orange, where they urged the Iroquois to assail the Indians of the northern woodlands and confiscate their harvests of furs.

Guns, the Dutch offered. More guns for more furs.

“We need guns, our brothers!” the embattled Huron decreed to the French.

The Algonquin pressed the same position. “We bring beaver pelts to trade for harquebusiers.”

At Fort Perilous, no one was suffering from an interest in pelts. They were a religious sect. The colony existed through the generosity of the pious in France, and it survived through a fledging effort to grow food, hunt animals and fish. Their sole devotion remained to convert the Indian soul. Not money, nor fur.

“Will you save the souls from the bones of our dead brothers,” inquired a Huron chief, “after the Iroquois kill us? We need guns, our brothers.”

As their first winter befell them at Perilous, a crisis ensued.

They had constructed their fortification at the apex of the mighty St. Lawrence and tawdry St. Pierre rivers. A December thaw and an ice dam caused the waters to rise. The moat at the foot of the palisades had filled, and the powder magazine was now in jeopardy. Food supplies would be imperilled next. Should the waters continue to rise unabated, the settlement would be swept away in the deluge, and those who escaped abandoned to the desperate cold soon to return. Those frail few would be left without protection, food or weapons, without contact and bereft of hope. Each man, woman and child would die—huddled, stiffened lumps upon a frozen earth. If the most resilient among them miraculously survived, in their misery depleted, they’d have their scalps razed come spring, upon being discovered by the Iroquois.

The leader of the French, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, a soldier of considerable battle experience, had but one last defence to save Fort Perilous.

He fell upon his knees in prayer.

Between his clasped palms he clenched the Cartier Dagger, its blade pointed to the earth, the diamond-and-gold grip upright to the pale winter sun. In the intensity of his prayer, Maisonneuve felt his hands fuse with the knife, his life’s blood radiate with its history. Cartier, Champlain, Brulé … these remarkable, if impious, men stirred his blood with their own.

“If the waters recede,” Maisonneuve vowed, “as God is my witness, I will carry a cross to the top of the mountain and erect it there, to forever stand as testament to our Lord’s majesty and grace.”

On Christmas Day, the waters receded. The colony was saved.

The cross Maisonneuve constructed was large and heavy, and through the forest, over rocks and ice, through the snows of winter, to the brink of exhaustion, he carried it upon his back. Upon a crest of the mountain, he erected it to stand as testament above the island of Montreal forevermore. To the cross, under guard, the women and men would go to pray for long hours. No matter what other labours might compel them, or that Iroquois might await in ambush to kill them, they would put aside such material matters to renew their spiritual zeal.

Winter found its slow way to spring, spring raced quickly to summer, and they endured, that first year, before they were discovered.

A year after their arrival, the colonists were betrayed.

A Huron war party led Iroquois to the settlement.

Five Frenchmen bowed their backs in fields outside the walls of Fort Perilous, fighting back the ravages of weeds among their patches of paltry vegetables. They were attuned to a choir of birdsong when unseen Iroquois emitted war cries from both sides of the clearing. They looked up. Then they stood. They neglected to run. Indians bounded upon them, leaping high through the grass, stamping through the lettuce and carrots, tomahawks raised, knives glinting in the sunlight, and the three French who finally ran were quickly snared, their throats slit, the tops of their heads sheared off. A man who remained frozen in his fright was scalped while he remained upright, and he was still on his feet as they pulled him away. The one man who attempted to reach his weapon was snapped up from the ground a foot from his destination, and he was also scalped alive. Like the other, he survived, and was hauled into the dark woods within earshot of the fort, where he and his companion were lashed upright to stakes.

The Iroquois feasted with their Huron brothers that night. They told stories and danced in the pale light of the moon in the smoke of twin fires that burned the feet and blackened the calves of the two French. They tossed sticks upon the fire to keep it smouldering, but not too hot, and as the French cried out in their agony and dismay, the Indians, content in their victory, slept.

In the dark of night, while the moon descended below cloud, as the French mewed in their anguish upon hot coals, only Iroquois warriors awoke, to butcher their Huron informants in their sleep, leaving only one Huron child alive.

Then they ripped the skins from the chests of the French, severed their penises and tore off their testicles, and stoked the fires to make them truly blaze. While they heard the final screams of their captives, they sang and danced in the chorus of their spree and washed themselves in the blood of their eviscerated Huron enemies. The bodies of the white men slid down the stakes as they were consumed by flame, and as their heads fell into the coals and the nostrils, ears and mouths burned orange and blue, fire licked through the sockets of the eyes, staring out upon the festivities.

They roasted the Huron child captured alive, and at the rising of the sun, they ate him.

Inside Fort Perilous, men and women held their children as their bodies shook. Maisonneuve fell again upon his knees. Jeanne Mance, his loyal aid, had already been upon her own knees for hours, and remained there until the distant screaming, and the dancing and the singing, ceased. She arose as the sun achieved its zenith, to deal with the burial of the dead, Huron and French alike.

As one, the people grieved.

Maisonneuve brought out a carpenter and soldier from France, Louis d’Ailleboust, who undertook to rebuild the fortifications. Fort Perilous was bolstered to become seemingly impenetrable, using earth-filled bastions. The Iroquois had attempted a full-scale attack on a fort at the mouth of the Richelieu River, and there three hundred warriors had been forced to retreat, so they had learned the power of the French fort and returned to a tactic where they waited for white people to wander outside the safety of their walls.

D’Ailleboust became not only the builder of the fort, but the community’s architect. He constructed the hospital outside the walls of Fort Perilous, and included strong fortifications in his plans. Attacked, his ramparts withstood the first test, as Lambert Closse, with his sixteen men, held off two hundred Iroquois. Arrows rained from the sky, tomahawks turned end over end through the air and harquebusiers fired from the woods, yet with each return volley only Iroquois lay fallen. Jeanne Mance, within her hospital throughout the battle, ministered to those French who were ill with fevers, and to a Huron brought to her after being mauled by a bear, but no wounded.

As safe as the forts proved to be, life continued outside the walls. Crops were planted, worked and harvested. Trees were felled, the wood cut. Rabbit and deer and quail were hunted, the carcasses trimmed and dragged back to the fort. Fish were caught in nets and drawn from the river, and hung to dry in the hot summer sun. Pilgrimages to the cross remained another necessity. Nothing was accomplished without great hazard.

Jean Bédard and his wife, Catherine Mercier, created the largest of the new farms. A good soaking rain was followed by a bright sunny day, and they were happily tending their precious field as Iroquois descended. The man was struck down in combat, the woman carried off and scalped alive. An Iroquois, hideous in his war paint, bared his teeth at her and she cried and turned her head away. He laughed at her fright, then lunged and cut off her nose. Another warrior sliced off her ears. A third chopped off her breasts, and under the light of the moon, while she still breathed and screamed, they burned her alive as her flesh blackened and her screams sang in their ears until her blood boiled and burst from her skin.

“Maisonneuve!” men cried out in their rage. Lambert Closse, the hero of the battle against the attack on the hospital, was unrelenting in pressing his opinion. “Maisonneuve! Sir! Listen to us! Our knees are bleeding! We cannot crawl on them another inch!”

“What would you have me do, Lambert? Kill us all?”

“Sir! We cannot be cowards! The Iroquois will kill us all, one by one, if we don’t fight back!”

Initially, Maisonneuve was adamant. “The forest is their home. We have no ability in the woods, where they outnumber us. Inside the fort, we are safe. Alive, we can persevere. Dead, we are good to no one. Reduce our numbers much further and we won’t be able to defend the fort. Do you want to die and leave the women and children to the mercy of our enemies?”

His arguments could not sustain his people for long. The men wanted to attack. They challenged his courage and derided the choices he made. Men murmured amongst themselves, and even the women discussed the possibility that Maisonneuve lacked courage, until finally he relented. He was a solider. He would demonstrate that he was a soldier, for otherwise his leadership would end.

He led a war party outside the walls.

In the woods close to the fort, the fight was swift and furious. Six French were promptly dead with arrows through their gullets and eyes and tomahawks splitting their skulls, the wounds from harquebusiers the Dutch had sold to the Iroquois evident on their bloody chests. A fallback was called. Maisonneuve covered the retreat himself and suffered a fierce stabbing, yet fought on. The Iroquois chief sought him out and attacked, howling like a wolf as he bore down upon him. Maisonneuve fired one pistol, which did not discharge, and the chief’s tomahawk was raised to crush his skull when the second pistol fired and the warrior, surprised by death, gasped and fell still. The French executed their retreat, firing behind them as they fled, and as the Iroquois came upon their dead chief they lost interest in the pursuit.

Inside the walls of Fort Perilous, the French lost interest in further forays.

“Paul, in their own way,” Jeanne Mance attested, “the people are right.”

They were speaking in Maisonneuve’s small hut as cooler air and the evening light entered through a series of windows that had been cut tall and narrow in case, one day, he had to fire a harquebusier from inside the stockade. Exhaustion seeped through the soldier’s veins, for he had spent the day clearing more land and hauling timber back to the fort. The attrition caused by the Iroquois wars required that each man at Fort Perilous perform a variety of tasks, and the leader’s position did not make him exempt. On the contrary, he felt it necessary to outwork everyone else, and did so despite not being fully recovered from his chest wound and the subsequent loss of blood.

Maisonneuve could not mount a spirited defence, although he tried. “Iroquois fight a war of attrition. They pick us off one by one. We must hunker down inside our walls.”

Jeanne Mance had brought her knitting, a sure sign that she planned to stay awhile. “I agree. We cannot attack the Iroquois. Yet the men are also correct. We cannot hide behind our walls, only to die when we step outside the gate to fetch a carrot!”

She was right, of course, as usual. “What do you propose?”

“Our purpose is to convert the savages. Their purpose is to kill us before we do. They are more likely to succeed than we are. We must change their purpose, and to do that we must first change ours.”

Such words spoken by a woman of her rare piety left Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, perplexed. “How?” he asked.

“Become useful to the Huron. To do that, we must be permitted to trade with them. We must barter for their furs as well as their souls. That will make us useful to the king, who cares not a whit for their souls, and that may encourage him to send soldiers to Fort Perilous.” Her knitting needles flashed in her hands, and it was difficult for Maisonneuve to ascertain where her primary attention lay: in their conversation, or with the nascent scarf. “You, Paul, must persuade the governor on these matters.”

How to do so would be the more difficult affair, but now that she had outlined the necessary trajectory, he supposed that something could be accomplished in that regard. At the very least, negotiations ought to begin.

Maisonneuve grew annoyed by a nearby dog barking. With a soldier’s instinct, he looked up towards the sound, and checked that his harquebusier stood in its allotted slot. In sympathy, other dogs within Fort Perilous took up the bray, which he ignored even as the racket irritated him.

“Iroquois raiders,” he said. “These small bands. They come here with a lust for blood. Somehow they must be taught that to attack us on a whim is folly. If they want to attack us, they must do so on our terms, in large numbers. In that situation, we will be able to defend ourselves from within the stockade.”

“The military aspect I leave to you.”

“Why is that dog incessantly barking?” he snapped.

Jeanne Mance glanced up from her knitting, listened and observed her friend closely. Understanding that he was weary, frayed from the aggravations and trauma of recent days, she quietly returned to her primary point, to make sure that he understood its necessity. “Montmagny’s army must serve Montreal as well as Quebec, but that will not occur unless we become important to the commercial enterprise of New France.”

A knock resounded sharply upon the door. Maisonneuve stood and crossed the short distance to raise the latch. Before him stood a presence he did not recognize—a shock, given his everyday association with all those living within the fort. He had grown estranged from the notion that someone from abroad might someday visit. The young man before him merely smiled from under his broad-brimmed black hat, with its rounded top, and extended his hand. Behind him, a dog yapped and growled.

Then the visitor turned grave. “You’ve been wounded!”

“My God!” Maisonneuve gasped, backing into the room. “We’ve met! I know you!”

“You do not know me, sir, but we have met. What a memory!”

“You’re Father Lalemant’s nephew! Your name, sir, I’ve forgotten.”

“Father Gabriel Lalemant. We spoke only briefly, before you embarked.”

Maisonneuve ushered him in, then stepped around him and departed the house himself, even before he had introduced one guest to another.

“Lad!” Maisonneuve cried out. “That darn dog!”

“Sorry, sir,” a youth exclaimed.

“What’s his name?”

“Pilote, sir. She’s a bitch, sir. Please don’t shoot her, sir.”

“Shoot her? Why would I shoot her? If she barks at strangers—or the arrival of a priest from France—then she will also bark at Iroquois, don’t you think? Pilote! Come here!”

He had rubbed the snout of this mutt before, but taken only a nominal interest. “Are you prepared to defend us as we perform our chores?” he asked her.

A few citizens paused to take in what they were seeing.

“Friends! Bring your dogs and puppies to this place! Bring anything that makes noise like a bell when struck and bring great lengths of twine! The Iroquois will not sneak up on us again! Not without sounding alarms and raising the hackles of Pilote and her good friends! See to it now!”

He returned inside, where he warmly embraced his guest. “Father! Father. Your sweet arrival gives us cause to be hopeful! Why are you here?”

“Your wound, Paul.”

“It’s nothing. I am in Jeanne’s care, and God’s.” Discovering his manners, which in the New World had suffered somewhat, he introduced his guests to one another. Still somewhat shocked, he asked Lalemant once more, “Why in the name of God are you here?”

“To die, of course,” Father Lalemant laughed. He seated himself, and mopped perspiration from his brow. “Perhaps before I do, I can be of service. Don’t look at me like that! I’m of clear mind. With this enterprise underway, and the encouragement of my uncle, I understood that I could not live my life in a quiet village parish in France. I want to live and die here, in the New World.”

“You’ve chosen well, Father,” Jeanne Mance attested quietly. “Many men are dying here.”

The priest laughed, expressing the full joy of a man at peace with himself. “Then I have come to the right place! Paul, what did I hear you call this hamlet of mud and sticks?”

“The fort is named Perilous. Within the fort, we call this place Ville-Marie.”

“‘City of Mary’? City! I have visited cathedrals that had more priests than you have people, and you call this a city?”

“We know it will rise here, Father. One day.”

They talked that evening, the three of them, and it was good for the hosts to speak of what they had accomplished to an outsider, for they could see in his eyes and hear in his words a wonder expressed for their triumphs. Through the visitor’s perspective, they understood that they had progressed. Together, by candlelight, the three imagined a new political shape for their community. Father Lalemant believed, as he took to his pallet upon Maisonneuve’s floor, that he had been guided here by the hand of God. Maisonneuve required an adept political advisor, which happened to be his particular bailiwick, and why his uncle had, rather than encouraged, commanded him to travel here.

In the waning summer months, Pilote became the new heroine of the community, leaping high above the grass in a barking rage at her first sniff of Iroquois, then dashing back at the call of her youthful master as the men prepared their harquebusiers and the women retreated to the fort. Next, they’d hear the clatter in the woods as Iroquois struck the settlers’ trip lines, and as the warriors emerged from the trees, whooping and in a fury, they were met by sustained volleys of gunfire. Repeatedly, the small raiding parties were chased off, as occurred the very day that Father Gabriel Lalemant and Maisonneuve were travelling down the river to negotiate for their economic and military salvation with Montmagny, the governor of Quebec.

He dreamed of his uncle’s bees. They flitted among a selvage of wildflowers at the edge of the clearing as his Lord stepped down to greet him, extending a comforting hand and the radiant touch of ecstasy.

Father Gabriel Lalemant proved to be exceptionally adept as a political emissary, a busy bee himself. Not all actions were accomplished smoothly, nor did they gain a desired effect. In the creation of a new society, no one could lay claim to the expertise that anticipated every problem. Yet Lalemant carried influence among the Huron, who thought well of him because they thought well of his uncle before him, who had cared for their fathers and mothers in times of need. The younger priest earned their respect and learned to speak their language well. Whenever the governor frustrated the aspirations of Ville-Marie, Father Gabriel murmured in an offhand manner that the fur trade might suffer as a consequence, that the Company of One Hundred Associates who held a monopoly over furs might soon be driven to bankruptcy.

Thinking out loud in this way, he pondered the result if the Huron should decide to dispatch their furs south to the Dutch at Fort Orange, and enter into a treaty with the Iroquois. Given that their association with the French did little for them except to get them killed, the development could readily be imagined. Lalemant did not issue threats. He did not suggest that he might himself cause these dire predictions to come true. He merely postulated various scenarios and allowed Montmagny to infer the consequences. He was fortunate. He was unaware that the company was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and so did not grasp the fullness of the fear his words caused Montmagny and the businessmen of Quebec. Those in power understood that any prolonged disruption to the flow of beaver pelts would conclude the French experience in the New World.

Father Gabriel Lalemant gazed across the meadow where his uncle had been tortured before him and where so many Indians had gathered. Fires flared in the distance. The beating of the drums had commenced behind him, and in his fatigue he looked to the skies and felt the warmth of the sun upon his brow. In gazing across time, he had many triumphs to consider, and many difficulties also, some of which had proven insurmountable.

The Jesuit influence among the Indians became an advantage the priest pressed to alter political and economic conventions. New France would come to be ruled by a Superior Council of three men: Maisonneuve, who would be given the title of governor of Montreal; Father Lalemant himself; and the governor of Quebec, Montmagny. The Community of Habitants was formed, a commercial enterprise charged with rescuing the fur trade. The new company would pay a levy to the senior firm for each fur sold, fund the garrison at Ville-Marie and undertake the maintenance of the Jesuit priests there. In exchange, the enterprise received a trading monopoly extending west from the St. Lawrence River. At the same time, in France, Dauversière forged an agreement with the Community of Habitants so that Ville-Marie would be allowed a trading store, a move that promised to make the nascent city a commercial centre. The future of the besieged band seemed bright.

Within a year of the new alliance taking effect, Ville-Marie’s future appeared grim again. The new company was interested only in drawing money out as quickly as possible, neglecting the communities it pretended to serve, and everywhere the Iroquois had intensified their raids. The Huron began to buckle under relentless attacks. The number of furs they delivered in 1646 was sharply depleted from previous seasons, and in 1647 that supply dried up entirely. Profits for the Community of Habitants vanished. Lalemant and Maisonneuve took action again, and this time their petitions reached the table of the Royal Council in France. Three commissioners were named to straighten out the affairs in New France, and Lalemant and Maisonneuve, upon hearing the news, grinned like children at Christmas. That night, they drank French brandy, for each of the three commissioners selected turned out to be, secretly, members of the Society of Our Lady of Montreal, their very own group, and with that stroke of a quill, power in the region shifted away from Quebec and Montmagny to Ville-Marie and Maisonneuve.

In the clear air, a small rogue cloud blotted the sun. Father Lalemant was grateful for the respite. He felt cooler, and closed his eyes, and prayed. He considered many things.

Perhaps his most crucial advice came later. Maisonneuve used his new power and the influence of friends in France to retire Montmagny. He was then asked to be governor of all New France himself, which seemed to be a great blessing, an advantage, yet his friend and advisor Lalemant shook his head no. The priest’s position was reinforced by Jeanne Mance, who adamantly said no. The offer was a ploy. Should he accept, his energies would be diverted elsewhere, his responsibilities would become more widespread, and eventually his power, seemingly enhanced, would be depleted as he sought to satisfy diverse demands. Maisonneuve accepted his friends’ counsel and turned down the position, but managed to have the builder and architect of Fort Perilous and Ville-Marie, his friend Louis d’Ailleboust, made governor instead. At the same time, he had the commissioners address the shortcomings of the Community of Habitants, which led to yet another division of powers. Under the new regime, he was removed from the Superior Council, which was not a concern, given that he had already installed his man in the top post.

Father Lalemant made one more critical suggestion that altered the future of the colony. He developed a network of volunteers, men for whom he revived the name coureurs de bois, runners of the woods. These wild men of the forest would continue to develop the skills necessary to live and fight in the wilderness, and they would become close to the Indians, following in the footsteps of Étienne Brulé. Such men would give the French an advantage over the Dutch, and the English, too, whose communities were growing dramatically around Boston and Manhattan. The Dutch stayed in their forts, and the English were not active in the fur trade, except as merchants. As well, these bold, young men would be attached to particular villages—and Lalemant would ensure that many made Ville-Marie their home—bringing back furs to be sold through the merchants in their home communities. As well, he envisioned these coureurs de bois travelling farther into the continent, to the west, north and south, to claim ever-greater expanses for the king.

The wise and experienced priest, now thirty-eight years old, reflected upon these matters in the long minutes he had before his captors returned their attentions to him and sliced out his tongue and clawed his nipples off his chest. His testicles were torn away after that and force-fed to Huron captives, men he had converted. In his agony, he may have screamed, but he believed only that he called out to his God and Lord for mercy and forgiveness as blood filled his mouth, throat and lungs. From the hillock where he stood lashed to a stake, he could see the fires where whole villages lay pillaged and burning, and his heart swelled with the anguish of their demise. He moaned for all the Huron people. Voiceless now, he called to God to forgive the Iroquois even as they stoked the fire that scorched his feet and ankles.

Slowly, the flames scaled his legs. His loss of blood helped him fall into a stupor. He would awaken to his own body raging against him, and he cried out, yet made no sound. Angels descended from a cloud, and he was dreaming of bees, flitting among the trim flowers outside his uncle’s home in France and also amid the wildflowers of the Huron lands. His heart burst with a new passion, with love and a deep longing as Father Gabriel Lalemant was stripped clean of his body.

In the fall of 1650, one Father Paul Ragueneau and a handful of Huron survivors passed through Ville-Marie by canoe, paddling downriver to the greater security of Quebec. Maisonneuve brought Ragueneau into his hut, where he fed him beans and pork and bread, and they sat together, with Jeanne Mance also in attendance, listening. He told them of Father Brébeuf’s martyrdom, and Father Lalemant’s, then detailed the more devastating news. He counselled, “In this place, you are about sixty Frenchmen, twenty Huron, a few Algonquin and two of our Fathers.”

Maisonneuve nodded. The correct number of French was fifty-nine.

“Thirty thousand Huron have been massacred, or captured and brought into slavery, or routed,” he reported. “Corpses darken fields as far as an eagle’s eye can see. Villages have been razed, the fires without end. Huron children were cooked on spits, their parents delivered to hideous deaths. Paul, our Fathers were subjected to unspeakable cruelties. How will you, a band of sixty, hold out when thirty thousand Huron could not? Thirty … thousand. For the love of God, save yourselves. For the time of your martyrdom will be ordained according to the pleasure of the Iroquois.”

They fell to a silence, grieving over the news. Only when the stove fire dimmed and the evening cooled did Jeanne Mance speak, wrapping her shawl around her. “Forgive me, Father,” she said, her voice grave, “but the hour of our deaths will be chosen by God, not by Iroquois.”

The guest did not argue against her point of view, but he wondered if he had not fully transcribed the horror he had witnessed. Some moments later, though, her voice resumed in the candlelight.

“What have we done?” she inquired, a question Father Ragueneau felt was not asked of him, but rather was directed inwardly, to herself. “We came here to convert the Indians, and now the Huron have been massacred and we are at war with the Iroquois.”

The weight of her words fell upon the shoulders of Maisonneuve.

That night, Jeanne Mance gathered the people of Ville-Marie together before the communal altar and asked that they pray the whole night through. Thousands of souls had flown to heaven, and they were to ask the Heavenly Father to receive His Huron children. They would also light candles for the souls of Father Brébeuf and Father Lalemant, trusted friends of their community who had been martyred.

The men and women of Ville-Marie looked to one another, and held one another, and wept, for the lives of those who had been lost and for the tribulation of that hour. Never had a time been so perilous. “We shall carry on,” Jeanne Mance declared simply, and she knelt before the altar. Maisonneuve knelt beside her, and in his hands upraised the Cartier Dagger as a symbol of their perseverance, their resilience and their good hope.

The men and women of Fort Perilous prayed, their fervour ignited all the more by the prospect of annihilation.

The restoration of the mountain cross remained on a list of projects for the community at Ville-Marie, but practical matters had a habit of taking precedence. Devotees still made the trek up the mountainside to pray where the cross had been erected before the Iroquois had committed their desecration, toppling it and gouging it with their axes and partially burning it before the fire was doused by a downpour. Maisonneuve had not arranged to meet Jeanne Mance there—nevertheless they chanced upon one another at the sacred spot. Each had come with an escort of three armed men in case of attack.

“I’ve been thinking,” Maisonneuve admitted.

“Have you?”

“Of the matter we’ve discussed.”

“It bears hard thought. And prayer.”

Winter, as seen in the leaden sky, was imminent. The leaves were down, the breeze cool and brisk. The waterfowl had departed. Following the first fall of snow, this pilgrimage would become more difficult.

“I’ve decided,” Maisonneuve said.

“Yes?” Jeanne Mance knew the import of this decision. If he chose to execute their plan, he would be gone awhile, and the survival of the colony would rest in her hands. If he decided to stay, she’d be spared that considerable burden, yet they would be obliged to persevere on hope alone, without any real expectations.

“I’m returning to France,” Maisonneuve revealed.

Although the idea had begun with her, moving it towards reality was difficult to bear. Already strained, in her frailty, from the hike up the mountain, Jeanne Mance partially seated herself upon a boulder, absorbing the news. “It must be done,” she said. “We cannot go it alone.”

Over time, he had come to agree with her. Although the idea of crossing the Atlantic at this difficult time in the colony’s life filled him with foreboding, they desperately needed new and skilled recruits, men who could use a gun but also an axe or a hoe, women who could plant corn one day and weave garments the next. A few of their people had died or been killed, and others had fled home. In any case, they needed to do much more than merely recoup their losses. The time had come to either dramatically expand or perish.

“There’s a problem about costs. Right now, I don’t have the money to travel to France and recruit new settlers. It’ll take time and persuasion.”

Clearly, he was broaching the issue to see if she could propose a solution. In her usual efficient manner, she had long anticipated the question and had devised a financial scheme.

“The hospital fund has money. Madame de Bullion set aside the original donation when we first arrived, for our expansion. I have corresponded with her. She is in complete agreement. We have no need to enlarge the hospital at this time, so the money can be put to another use. In order to secure it, I have proposed that we offer land to the hospital to hold the loan, until such time as the funds can be reimbursed.”

“How much?”

“Twenty thousand livres.”

That would be sufficient, and Maisonneuve took heart. “Let’s do that, then. We’ll let the citizens know the plan.”

“The financing remains our compact,” Jeanne Mance corrected him. “Madame de Bullion insists that her generosity remain a secret.”

Maisonneuve often chose to work this way. “Agreed,” he declared.

“When do you go?” she asked.

“A ship is at Quebec right now. If my paddlers are in good form, I can make it before departure.”

“I see.” She lowered her head. This was sounding quite real. “Well, then.”

Maisonneuve took a deep breath. He looked over the countryside from the mountain’s aerie. The St. Lawrence, never bothered, plodded on. In the distance, south, the lumbering hills from which the Iroquois faithfully emerged were smudged by cloud. “Jeanne. Something else requires our agreement. I am leaving with the expectation of finding one hundred new settlers. Should I fail, I shall not return. I will only send word. You must promise me, on your honour under God, on your oath, that if I cannot find one hundred new men and women, you will dissolve Ville-Marie and return everyone, including yourself, to France.”

There it was.

While they had often debated the colony’s survival, never had matters come down to a simple premise: we cross this line, or we accept our failure. The next few years would be arduous, the risk of being annihilated ever-present. With the Huron nation decimated, the prospects for the fur trade were abysmal, and with the Iroquois likely to be on the warpath, the risks in gathering a harvest were extreme. Life would be strenuous, and, with their commander gone, precarious. Two prospects were nagging her. Maisonneuve might fail. He might not be able to persuade enough daring souls to travel across the ocean to a land of hardship and harrowing terror. Or he might succeed, and return, only to find his beloved village razed to the ground, each of its citizens charred on a stake or, God willing, buried.

“If you hear that we have been destroyed,” she told him, “then you, too, must abandon the mission. At least I will know, as I turn into flames, that my death will have spared those who have not yet arrived a similar fate.”

“You will vow to come home, should I fail?” he pressed her again.

“Home?” she asked. “This is home. But I shall do as you say. If you are unable to provide us with a minimum of one hundred new citizens, then I shall abolish the community here and return us all to France.”

For that one moment, they stepped away from their solitary lives. Jeanne Mance stretched her hand forward, and Maisonneuve clasped it, not to shake it in any formal way, but to hold her palm and entwine their fingers, a momentous act of intimacy neither would forget. Then he signalled to their guards, and cautiously the group made its way down the rocky mountainside.

The years proved unbearably hard while Maisonneuve tramped through France, trying to recruit immigrants. The Iroquois, having vanquished the Huron, travelled the St. Lawrence River, marauding at will. Excursions beyond the walls of Fort Perilous became rare for the residents there. Confined, they danced to fiddlers’ tunes and sang the music they’d learned in France. And they began to sing new songs, too. They prayed and worked hard and maintained their weapons in fighting trim. Young boys were taught to shoot before they could handle a gardening implement, and young girls, if allowed beyond the gates at all, carried extra gunpowder upon their backs in case a prolonged fight ensued before they made it back.

Along the river, no man stepped from his door without a rifle, pistols, knives and a sword, and, if he could help it, he never walked alone. A mother sent the dogs out first and armed her children as point guards before she dared hang a laundry. Jeanne Mance would only walk from Fort Perilous to her hospital, now called Hôtel-Dieu, the Hospital of God, with dogs and a heavily armed escort, and she was prepared to stay at the hospital for weeks on end if Iroquois harried the path home.

The struggle was greater than merely surviving. They also needed to make the colony viable. That role fell to the coureurs de bois, and in particular to Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre-Esprit Radisson.

“Des Gros,” as he had become known, had arrived in New France in 1641, at twenty-three. For the next five years he worked as a servant among the Jesuits, travelling with them deep into the Huron territories. In 1647 he married, and in 1653, already a widower, he married again. His second bride was a half-sister to Radisson, a young man who begged to join him in the quest for furs. Radisson had never been to the Great Lakes, but his enthusiasm and evident experience—as a youth, he had been captured and enslaved by the Iroquois—impressed the somewhat older man, and he brought him along.

This was a dangerous time to canoe the waterways. Yet Des Gros spoke Iroquois, Huron and Algonquin and had heard from conversations among the Indians of the existence of tribes further north and west. Such news validated the risk. These distant tribes, who had yet to encounter the white man and lived far beyond the territorial incursions of the Iroquois, could supply the French with a greater abundance of furs than anyone had imagined possible.

His ambition, then, was to lead an expedition deeper into the continent’s wilderness. Huron who had arrived at Trois-Rivières told of an immense fur cache along the banks of a great salt bay. With that information, Des Gros travelled to Boston and induced merchants there to finance an excursion north by ship, for he believed that he could sail down into the saltwater bay from the Atlantic to secure the furs. The project interested the Boston English, as it would give them access to the northern half of the continent denied them by the French. The trip failed, ice choked the vessel off from its route, but the Frenchman did not surrender his ambition. Des Gros waited for the right circumstance to try again.

In 1654, Maisonneuve returned.

At Fort Perilous, the people were jubilant. Not only did he bring with him a hundred new recruits, he returned with one hundred and fifty-four! Bakers and a brewer, a cooper and a coppersmith, three millers and a pastry chef, a shoemaker, a few weavers and masons. He brought a stonecutter and a nail maker, drain makers and stove makers, carpenters and joiners, a saw maker and a hatter, a cutler and a pair of rifle makers, a road-builder, a blacksmith to shoe horses—and he brought horses!—and gardeners and even sixty plain tillers of the soil. He even brought along a few more priests. Every one of them was prepared to fire a weapon, and each man stood well armed and eager.

The population had suddenly more than doubled. In the exultation of those days, men and women quickly married, and Jeanne Mance prepared herself to begin delivering babies. They had a community! Life! Hope and aspiration! They had good work to do. Dangers persisted, yet they could begin to believe that their defences just might prove adequate.

Also, now, Marguerite Bourgeoys lived among them. In the thirty-three-year-old recruit, Jeanne Mance instantly discovered a sure and devoted friend, while the colony discovered a schoolmistress who would never waver from an undertaking. She began teaching Indian children in the hospital and French children wherever she could find them hiding inside the fort. Before long, she was building a schoolhouse, and in due course she would become the mother superior of the Congregation of Notre Dame de Ville-Marie. Saintly and determined, she created projects and saw them through to conclusion, taking the pressure off Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance and giving the colony much of its stability and drive.

And Marguerite Bourgeoys found the energy and time to do what others had let slip. She reconstructed the cross upon the mountain. Pilgrimages there soon became frequent. To climb the mountain, kneel at the cross and pray and return alive indicated that the cause was not lost, that the project on the island of Montreal persevered.

Suddenly, good fortune nestled among the trees. In the following few years, the Iroquois became distracted by their natural enemies to the south, the Mohican and Andaste tribes. These tribes fretted over the massacre of the Huron and did not want the same fate to befall them, so they chose to engage the battle early and on their own terms. This gave the French a few years that were remarkably peaceful, and in 1656, when Groseilliers and Radisson canoed from the great saltwater bay after an absence of twenty-five months, they arrived unimpeded with fifty canoes heavily laden with furs. In the ensuing days, both men grew furious when they were not properly paid for their endeavours, yet aside from that poor bargain the colony felt rich again, for it seemed that nothing could stop them now.

Only Maisonneuve, the old soldier, seemed to understand that he still had a war to fight, that the absence of the Iroquois did not mean they’d never return. Indeed, a few years later, after they had annihilated their enemies to the south, they turned their aspirations north once more, as though this was the confrontation they desired the most, as though they were itching to get on with slaughtering the French again. As they returned to the valley of the great river, they appeared to be in a particularly bloodthirsty mood.

As the few good years ended, Maisonneuve could only reflect upon the glory of those days in wonder. The times had not been bereft of an assortment of challenges, which seemed no more than nuisances now. The Sulpicians, the new order formed by Jean-Jacques Olier, entered into rancorous political disputes with the Jesuits, and there had been times when the governor of the Montrealers wanted to throw up his hands and ask God to smite them all. The conflict had flared up first in France, and only when the issues were solved there could the two sides come together in New France and manage a tacit peace. Eventually, they did, and Maisonneuve shook his head, dismayed by all the puffery and upset. Priests!

Yet, in forging an alliance, the orders of priests had also manoeuvred to maintain and increase their power in the New World. Governors in Quebec were coming and going, and that vacuum of experienced political leadership was happily filled by knowledgeable Jesuits and Sulpicians. Spiritually, materially and politically, they had a better grasp of life in the cold, cruel north than did courtiers dispatched from France.

Once the Iroquois wars were blazing again, such issues seemed vaguely comical in comparison, and once again the pressure was mounting on Maisonneuve to act. The economy again lay in peril, entirely dependent on the coureurs de bois making it through from the north and from more distant travels west, as well as on farmers planting a crop in spring and harvesting it during Indian summer—that window of warm fall weather when the crops were ready and the Iroquois chose to raid. Again Maisonneuve determined that hunkering behind a stout stockade was the best defence, and again he had young men, a different generation this time, anxious to burst outside the walls to fight.

In April of that year, 1660, Maisonneuve was informed of a secret plan, and while he was initially enraged to have his authority usurped by a pack of restless young men, their approach began to simmer in his head. Garrison soldiers devised an idea to venture onto the Ottawa River right at the time—after the breakup of the river’s ice—when the fur traders were likely to return. The soldiers would ambush Iroquois raiding parties before they could intercept the fur traders. Everyone knew that Groseilliers and Radisson had travelled deep into the Cree lands. They had not returned the previous spring, so they could easily be dead. The colony believed—the residents prayed—that their travels had been so distant, and that their canoes were now so heavily laden, that their return had required an additional year. This would be the spring of their return, all hoped, and the prospect became a great longing among the people of Fort Perilous. Yet the youthful soldiers were right: the Iroquois would surely be waiting for the coureurs de bois along the Ottawa River. Intercept the Iroquois before they intercepted the fur traders—in this way, the pelts might be brought safely through to market.

The plan was audacious enough that it might just work.

Maisonneuve secretly summoned the leader of the group. He did not advise Jeanne Mance or Marguerite Bourgeoys of the meeting, knowing they’d counsel against it. The youths were inexperienced, yet brave and determined. Under the current regime, Maisonneuve no longer possessed the authority to sanction such a raid, so he cautioned the young man standing nervously before him, Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, that their meeting was confidential. If anyone ever asked him about it, the governor would deny that it had taken place or that he had any knowledge of the plan.

“Plan, sir?” the twenty-five year-old responded.

“History will never hear of this conversation.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t insult me, Adam. This is a very small community and I’ve been here since you were a child. I know what goes on within these walls. You’re planning to ambush the Iroquois.”

“Sir,” Dollard des Ormeaux said. He felt foolish to have been caught, and expected a sour punishment—a demotion at the very least, and perhaps a few weeks confined to his barracks on depleted rations. Instead, Maisonneuve rose up and crossed the small room to a bureau, where he opened a drawer. He pulled out a wooden case, which he brought back to the table. He sat across from the young soldier with the blondish hair and whiffs of cheek fuzz.

He opened the case.

Inside shone the Cartier Dagger.

“This knife was given to me by Cardinal Richelieu,” Maisonneuve informed him, “and handed to him by the king of France. The instrument brings good fortune. When I went to France to find new recruits, I brought along the knife, both for its own security and to help secure the success of my endeavours. As you can see, it contains diamonds and gold. More importantly—and you must understand, young man, I am speaking symbolically—the knife, through God’s grace, grants to the man who possesses it the trust of God and the divine strength of the French people.”

“Yes, sir,” young Adam Dollard des Ormeaux whispered, in awe.

“And I, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, lend this dagger to you, Adam, as you undertake your mission.”

“But, sir. I cannot be worthy.” The lad was genuinely aghast. The ceremony felt akin to being knighted, when only a moment ago he expected to be discredited.

Maisonneuve remained severe in his expression and deportment. “I’m sure that Étienne Brulé felt exactly the same way when he was granted the care of the knife as he travelled through Indian lands. He returned it to Champlain safe and sound. If you do not return, and the dagger appears in an Indian’s hands, we will know your killer. But it is more important that you go with my blessing, and that you go with the spirit of the French people, and with God.”

Solemnly, Dollard accepted the weapon into his care.

“Now you must keep it hidden. Your mission must always remain secret. Understand that I will not take credit for your achievement when you succeed. I may even be obliged to publicly rebuke you. Similarly, should you fail, or not return, I will confess no prior knowledge of your intentions. To do so would imperil my position here, and if my position is compromised, the fate of this community will also be challenged. So, officially, for the sake of Ville-Marie, I know nothing of your plans. Perhaps in your old age, after I am long gone, you can state otherwise—that is up to you. For now, you will reveal to no one that I endorse your actions. Neither shall I for all time. Do I have your sworn oath on this matter?”

“You do, sir.”

“Then Godspeed, Adam. Return the knife safely to me. May our Lord be with you always. I have arranged for forty Huron to join you. You will meet them at the rapids where the Ottawa joins the St. Lawrence, and they will carry on with you and fight beside you from there.”

The young Adam Dollard des Ormeaux was overwhelmed. His plan had been accepted, reinforcements provided, and he had effectively been knighted. Departing, he was exultant, and eager, as only an impetuous youth can be, for battle.

Alone in his small cabin that night, Maisonneuve prayed fervently. He knew that he was sending a pack of naïve youths off to fight vicious, highly skilled warriors. He also knew that something had had to be done to protect the settlement’s trading routes. Perhaps this wild scheme might actually work, although success would undoubtedly require God’s grace and the intercession of the saints.

He also prayed for forgiveness, should time prove that he had just dispatched sixteen reckless young men to their deaths.

A pious man’s prayers might have been more earnest that night had he been forewarned that two hundred Iroquois were amassing to attack the canoes coming down the Ottawa River towards Montreal. More passionate still had he gleaned that a second gathering of Iroquois, five hundred strong, was paddling down the Richelieu River from Lake Champlain, intent on joining the first group and burn the entire seed crop before it was put into the ground at Fort Perilous. An assault on the stout fort would be futile, but to deny the colony any hope of growing food that year would cause the wretched white people to starve inside their walls. Come winter, anyone who might linger on would face a stern reality, that the sustaining commerce of the region—food from the soil and furs off the backs of animals—had both been ruined for a season. The Iroquois were confident in their plan. In a year’s time, they believed, or even less, no white person would be living on the island of Montreal. After that, they would concentrate their attacks further north, until all the French were either dead or driven out to sea.

Had the Iroquois known that a mere sixteen soldiers were paddling to intersect their forces, they might have danced and sang and readied themselves, for to have so few French pitted against so many Iroquois in a forest battle would create a great competition for their scalps. As they did not know that the soldiers were there—any more than the young French knew that they would be fighting two hundred Iroquois in the woods, any more than Maisonneuve knew that a formidable contingent of Iroquois advanced on his colony, intent on its final ruination—the Iroquois paddled on in anticipation of encountering the fur traders Groseilliers and Radisson. They wanted those men dead, for they had penetrated the Cree territory. At the same time, Des Gros and Radisson paddled south and east, satisfied with their one hundred canoes heavy with furs, the largest cache in history, but also leery of the dangers ahead. The garrison lads paddled on as well, with apparent glee, for the time had come in their lives to assume the mantle of heroes, and they were not able to yet appreciate what might be required of them.

All three forces—Iroquois, young soldiers with forty Huron, and seasoned coureurs de bois—threatened to converge.

They were not trained Indian-fighters. They were trained only to defend their garrison. And so, coming upon the rapids at Long Sault, the garrison soldiers commenced constructing a fort. The Huron worked beside them, although they were soon bickering, distrustful of the plan. The young fighters had found a convenient semicircle of boulders, which they used to form the skeletal frame of a fortification. They cut trees and set them across the gaps in multiple layers, lashing it all together and packing the gaps with stones and sand. Dollard’s plan was to use the fort as a place to return at night after he and the others spent the days searching the river for Indians. As well, coureurs de bois would have to portage across this beach, where the waters were too treacherous for a canoe, and certainly one laden with valuable furs. That aspect made the area a critical one to defend, for Iroquois might appreciate the portage as an ideal neck to attack.

The concept of daily scouting trips never materialized. Having spent two days building their defences, they planned to depart at dawn. In the morning, the French and the Huron had no sooner carried their canoes to clear water and dropped them onto the river than they were hauling them out again and hurrying back to their stronghold. Iroquois had turned the bend in the river ahead, and the French had sighted five canoes. They positioned their own fourteen canoes atop the fort to use as cover from arrows.

The pals were excited. They had the Iroquois where they wanted them. This should be a good battle. They could defend their position, for they had ample food and gunshot, as Maisonneuve had secretly augmented what they’d been able to stow. He had also surprised the lads with additional rifles. Inside their low ramparts, the French adventurers and the Huron loaded their weapons and waited.

The five Iroquois canoes slumped onto the sandy beach. The water ahead was too treacherous, and the next portion of the journey would have to be on foot. “Keep down. Stay hidden. They don’t know we’re here. Wait until they’re so close you can’t miss, then kill them. We need them close, so the ones who don’t die on the first volley will die on the second.”

The Iroquois, though, seemed in no hurry to continue their progress, and inside the makeshift fort, the soldiers grew agitated.

“What are they waiting for?” one lad demanded of another.

“We were wrong,” Adam Dollard des Ormeaux said. “They know we’re here.”

“Then what are they waiting for?” the same soldier asked.

“Their friends,” the leader replied, for he spotted another six canoes.

The garrison soldiers, inexperienced with any fight in the open, stared out upon the water. “All right. Eleven canoes. That’s all right. We have our fort.”

“It’s a good fort.”

Another eight canoes appeared. The French said nothing. Then four more. They remained silent. Then canoes appeared to be coming around the bend without end, and Dollard carefully counted fifty-two.

For twenty minutes, no one spoke a word. Then their leader said, “There’s more of them than I thought.”

“Maybe they don’t see us,” a twenty-year-old replied.

“We’re going to die here,” his friend said. Words that were not fearful so much as a statement of what he assumed to be fact.

Adam Dollard des Ormeaux nodded. “I will die with my hair on. What they do to my scalp after I’m dead, that’s their business. But nobody’s taking me alive.”

They knew the gruesome stories. Of scalping, of men having their limbs removed and, legless and armless, made to drink their own blood. Each soldier feared his fate, but no one was remotely willing to choose surrender over death. They feared surrender more.

“We’re French,” Dollard declared. “Look.” From inside his coat, he took out the Cartier Dagger. “With this, we will fight with the spirit of the French people and the power of God.”

“Where’d you get that?”

He had sworn never to tell. But he did not believe that anyone here would survive to reveal his indiscretion. “Maisonneuve,” the youth said.

“Maisonneuve knows we’re here?”

“Where do you think we got the extra knives and swords and guns? Who else gave us the Huron? He told me that the future of New France depends upon us.” He was their leader now, and had suddenly to assume that role. A simple lie couldn’t hurt, he figured, not when it might remedy their fright.

“The knife will see us through,” a youth with a thick growth of beard said. “We’ll beat them back.”

“The longer we hold out,” Dollard declared, for the cloak of leadership fit him well and he was rising to the task at hand, “the closer the fur traders will come. Sooner or later, they will reinforce us. Radisson. Groseilliers. They will help us rout the Iroquois.”

That seemed plausible, and the lads were encouraged.

“Look,” one of their number said.

More canoes. Would they never end? Dollard ceased his counting and checked his rifles to make certain they were ready to fire. His friends faithfully followed his example, as did the Huron, who readied their rifles and tested the moose hair on their bows.

Then, when they were ready, most of the Huron fled.

Leaving the young men and four loyal Huron to stand alone.

Twenty, now, against more than two hundred.

The Iroquois moved through the woods to gain position on the rubble of rocks where the white fighters had hunkered down. They allowed the French access to the river, as it would be easy to pick them off if they crossed the beach, and the rapids were no refuge for any man. From the security of the woods, they unleashed a rain of arrows, then stopped to listen. They did not hear the moans of the wounded in their death throes. Hundreds of arrows appeared to be stuck in the air, as though the circle of rocks had a roof. This puzzled the chief who had been given responsibility to conduct the attack.

The Frenchmen looked up. Their canoes had been pierced countless times by arrowheads, but none of their number had suffered a wound. One whooped, and the remaining Huron started to join in, but Dollard hushed them.

“Why can’t I give a yell?” the soldier complained. “The Iroquois yell. They’re always yelling.”

“They don’t know how many we are. Yelling lets them count us. So don’t yell.”

Dollard was not experienced, although he had fought in defence of the fort alongside Lambert Closse, the bravest of the officers. He had blindly fired into the woods as the dogs howled in warning, but he had never waged a battle, having only assisted in retreats.

From here, there could be no retreat.

“The time may come,” Dollard added, “when only one of us is left alive, but the Iroquois won’t know that because they won’t know how many we are.”

The others nodded, understanding.

In the trees that lined the beach, the Iroquois leader was unsure of his next move. Not so many French could fit behind the rocks, but he needed to do more than win this battle—he needed to protect his forces. The greater battles lay upon this waterway when the fur traders arrived, and ahead at the island of Montreal. He was confused by this contingent, fearing a trap. Why would the French send out a war party unless they had greater plans than this?

Donaagatai, the young war chief, ordered that rifles be fired at the cairn, and for seven minutes the Iroquois guns barked across the beach along the riverbank, chasing ducks into the air in contemptuous flight. Then the guns fell silent, and the Iroquois listened.

No man moaned.

“Everybody all right?” Adam Dollard des Ormeaux inquired.

“What fools. Do they think they can shoot through rock?”

“Maybe they were hoping we’d stick our heads up.”

A few of them laughed nervously.

“They just wanted to see if we would fire back,” Dollard said.

“When do we?”

“When they’re easy to kill,” the leader said, and around the rock embankment the young men nodded their consent.

Then one of their number announced, “Here they come.”

They did not begin with the usual war whoops, but came silently, running at great speed across the sand and stones. As the young men put their heads up, they were protected from arrows fired from the trees. They pulled their canoes forward to better cover their heads and opened fire. The four Huron released their arrows, also, then fired their guns. Iroquois fell. They still came running, and now their cries seemed demonic to the Catholic youth, and fierce and invincible, and each soldier continued to fire his rifle, then grab another and fire again and again. They reloaded, and while one lad did so, another fired, and they met the Iroquois onslaught with deadly force. Only a few warriors flew up and over their rock-and-tree walls, and landing, they did not fall upon Frenchmen, as they had hoped, or upon Huron, their second choice, but upon upturned canoes. They’d slip off the canoes awkwardly, a foot coming down first, only to be pierced with a sword. Or an arm would dangle down, soon stabbed, or they’d slide down headfirst so that they’d land at the lads’ feet, where they were quickly slaughtered, a Huron knife slitting their throats.

The Iroquois retreated, and the French shot at them some more.

“Don’t shout!” Dollard warned when they were done, although his own heart was pounding in his chest as loudly and chaotically as any Iroquois war whoop.

From the forest, Donaagatai stared across the battlefield.

The makeshift guard post remained eerily quiet. What strange white man’s war was this? Across the short stretch of beach, he counted eleven Iroquois dead, but he had seen men go over the walls of the fort never to return again. Fourteen dead, then, by his count. Of the wounded, two more would have to be killed, and one or two more might prefer to take their own lives. Ten more might recover, but they would not fight again that day. What was the meaning of this? How was it possible? Why did these French not attack or run as any French, or Huron, would do? Their confidence must surely derive from a more elaborate plan. Were his warriors being led into a trap?

Valiant fighters, the Iroquois were also superb strategists in the conduct of battle. No chief wanted to lose lives, and no warrior wanted to die by surprise. The Iroquois kept looking at one another, and talking to one another, unable to comprehend what had transpired here. How could this odd defence be defeated without further losses?

One of the wounded talked to his war chief. “They squat down. They shoot. Their canoes stand over their heads, so our arrows do not kill them.”

These French were smart, Donaagatai surmised. He organized a party to prepare twenty torches. Thrown into the fortress, they might burn the canoes or ignite their powder supplies. If the French wanted to fight the Indians from small forts, they could only do so with great powder supplies.

The French were readying themselves for combat when the torches began to land over their heads. They tilted the canoes up and let the torches fall harmlessly at their feet, then created a collection of them and, from the rear, began to toss them back into the woods. As Donaagatai saw ten, then twenty, torches hurl back at them from the rocks, he shouted in a fury, for nothing he directed had turned out well.

One torch landed an arm’s length from his head.

The Iroquois took pride in their organization. They were a confederacy of six nations, and in a future epoch, as yet unimagined, Benjamin Franklin would borrow from their constitution to formulate his own for a country to be called the United States of America. Even in the chaos of war, they followed sophisticated strategies, and during the winter months they worked out solutions to logistical problems concerning supply movements and attack coordination. They were now confronted with a battle they had not anticipated—they had been alone in instigating attacks for decades—and they were stymied as to how to proceed. The warriors looked to their leaders to devise an appropriate response.

For the next foray, the Iroquois made it appear they were attacking from the woods again, but in the heat of battle they slipped dozens of warriors around to the water side and crept up from there. Unseen to them, Dollard des Ormeaux had assigned his youngest and smallest fighter to creep between rocks and keep an eye peeled on their rear. When he saw what was happening and communicated the word back to his leader, five soldiers carried a canoe over their heads for protection and moved to the rear of their fort, where they fired at will upon the exposed Iroquois.

This was the final defeat for Donaagatai as war chief. He was a younger man and was removed from his position by an older one. The war chief who replaced him, Nomotigneega, advised that they wait until dark to stage the next skirmish.

Dollard des Ormeaux, expecting as much, planned his countermove.

To pass the time, the French slept, or cut branches from the trees that lined their fort and fashioned their tips to use as spears. They had seen the way the Iroquois had hurled themselves over the boulders. The next time they did that, they would be impaled. The lads were in full battle attitude now, learning skills quickly, and each one reminded the other that they would die with their hair on or they would not die. When they looked out around them, they viewed the lumps of dead Iroquois. Hard to grasp that they had done all that killing themselves. And still they were quiet, revealing nothing to their enemies.

The moon concealed behind scudding clouds, the Indians crept forward, inching towards the beach ramparts. They were surprised when, from their left and their right, warriors suddenly came running, upsetting their careful strategy of stealth, and they were further surprised when those runners swiped at them with swords, killing a few and causing others to cry out with their sudden afflictions. These four who had betrayed them carried on to the fort and were welcomed there, for they were not Iroquois at all, but French, sent out beforehand in the dark to hide in the bushes, and suddenly the ramparts were lit with the explosion of rifle shot and the Indians cried out upon the ground and bled. Many died, and those who saw that they were trapped arose to attack the fort and swiftly died on their feet.

When the Iroquois retreated, they were incredulous. They bemoaned their failure and raged against one another, and against the French, who fought without being seen and killed without suffering similar tribulation.

Nomotigneega assessed his situation. Down to a hundred and sixty men, he guessed his enemy had fifty or sixty, probably seventy, hidden behind the barricades. He still outnumbered his foe by about three to one. Nevertheless, their trouble here would not be well received in the Iroquois nations. Their Mohawk brothers would rail against them if they accepted defeat now. Honour was at stake. They had to fight this battle and they had to win. As a precaution, the white-haired war chief summoned a runner and told him to carry the news to the Iroquois who were coming up the Richelieu River that their brothers on the Ottawa were engaged in a fierce battle and might not be able to join them in the conquest of the place the French sometimes called Ville-Marie, although on the old maps it was known as Montreal. The runner took four paddlers with him and headed off downstream. Next, the war chief brought his warriors together. He reminded them that the Iroquois would hold them in contempt if they did not win this battle. If they lost here, the French would fight the Iroquois in this way more and more. He told them that the people of the Iroquois depended upon them to vanquish these French. They had fought with courage, but now the time had come to be victorious.

A great cry rose up among the men.

The French fighters heard it.

“They’re coming,” one lad said.

“Soon,” agreed another.

“We’ll be ready,” said a third.

Dollard spoke last. “We’ll die with our hair on,” he said.

That morning, they did not die. They fought hard. The Iroquois tried to kill them from the safety of the tree line, firing arrows and spears and shot. Occasionally, even a tomahawk came sailing through the air. The Iroquois had reverted to their favourite tactic, a war of attrition, and the garrison boys knew then that they’d have to endure days of battle. They began to suffer their first casualties, but even the wounded fought on.

At all hours of the day, at all times of night, the attacks came. Sometimes, the skirmishes were meant to upset their sleep, while at other times they were full-on assaults. The Iroquois were rolling boulders closer to the fort, allowing them to aim their arrows and fire their Dutch rifles from closer range. The French were exhausted, scared and rationing food, and still they fought on and continued to kill Iroquois.

They suffered their first death.

A youth named Claude took an arrow through a lung, and for an hour he squirmed in anguish. They cooled his brow, but his torment only increased the closer he came to death. Lads wept at the moment that he expired, then resumed their places behind rocks.

The next day brought another death. A soldier put his head up and was shot through the temple.

Two days later, a third comrade fell. They didn’t know how. Six of them were sitting around their little campfire eating a ration of beans when he suddenly gagged and moaned, blood streaming from his neck. In four hours, he was gone. Somehow, a stray chunk of metal shot had ricocheted through an imperceptible channel in their defences. That bad luck demoralized everyone.

Seven days had passed. Exhausted, deprived and injured, the French awaited the final assault. They knew it was coming. They had tried to preserve their shot, but not much was left. Where were the coureurs de bois? Radisson and Groseilliers would be voyaging with seasoned Indian fighters and Huron and Cree loyal to them. Every day must be bringing them closer, but could they not arrive sooner? Perhaps they were not coming at all, and their battle was not only hopeless but without purpose as well.

The next full raid also came at dawn. Dollard repeated the phrase that had energized them and become their secret battle cry.

“We’ll die with our hair on!” he shouted, as the next fight commenced.

The other riflemen shouted back, “Hair on!”

The refrain rang along the ramparts.

“Hair on!”

“We’ll die with our hair on!”

They did, that day—all but one. In the dawn’s false light, the attack was ferocious and sustained and unrelenting. Iroquois died in numbers, but the soldiers could not load their rifles quickly enough, and the fort was overrun. Iroquois vaulting the ramparts impaled themselves on the makeshift spears, but the next men to come over landed safely upon their bodies, and with their flailing tomahawks and slashing knives and superior numbers, they battled the twelve remaining French and four Huron, and one by one the sixteen fell.

Adam Dollard des Ormeaux was not the last to die, but he fought as fiercely as any, his sword ripping through the flesh of the Iroquois around him even as his hunting knife repelled the hands and knives of others. He died with his hair intact, a tomahawk shattering his breastbone and blasting his heart apart. Only after he fell was his hair removed by the Iroquois he had wounded.

The youngest among them hid amid a clutch of boulders and stabbed at the hands reaching in to grab him. Finally, an Indian stuck a rifle into his cubbyhole and shot him through the rectum. Wriggling in his great torment, he was pulled from his lair and was the only one among them to be scalped alive, the knife itching across the top of his head, his spirit rising in the torment of his ordeal, before he fell silent, his skull cracked open by a tomahawk, the last to die.

As light came up over the trees, Iroquois whooped and cried out in the glory of their victory, yet only for a few moments. Someone noticed the eyes and expression of Nomotigneega. He was looking around at the Iroquois dead, lumped like driftwood and castaway boulders upon the beach. A stunning array of Iroquois lay dead, including Donaagatai, a skilled fighter who had commenced the battle as the war chief and had been one of the most promising young leaders. Inside the fort, Iroquois formed a floor of dead, their lives lost in hand-to-hand combat. Everyone still alive looked around them and went quiet. Each man saw the same sight. So many of their brothers dead, or beseeching to be killed, delivered from their agonies. Even those who remained standing began to notice, as the fury of war eased in their bloodstreams, that they also bled.

The Iroquois gazed around the pile of rocks and trees that had formed the fort. The white men who lay dead were so few. They looked like sleeping adolescents, but with bloodied heads. The chief kept looking and looking, trying to understand this. He could not believe that he could count only sixteen. Sixteen young men and four Huron had killed scores of warriors.

Inland, they found a cavern they could hurl their dead down. They covered the grave with stones and tree limbs to protect the bodies from the humiliation of animals. They let the French lie where they had fallen, for the carrion. Then they paddled on and veered onto a tributary south, homeward bound, for they’d done enough fighting for a season.

The sun rose and set and rose again, and Groseilliers and Radisson and their substantial party of coureurs de bois and Indians passed by. They came across the dead Frenchmen. They did not see the masses of Indian dead, but noticed the blood upon the stones. They did not know what the lads had been doing in that place, what they could have been thinking.

“Idiots,” Radisson murmured.

“Maybe,” Des Gros acknowledged. “But if they weren’t lying here, dead, we’d be fighting Iroquois now. We’d be lying here dead soon enough.”

They had to move on as a delay could imperil their lives. A party from Ville-Marie could be sent back later, with priests, to either bury the dead or transport the bodies home to the colony. They had no room in their canoes for brave dead young men and no time to bury them. Instead, they adjusted the bodies into respectful rows upon the ground and covered their heads to preserve their dignity awhile.

Over their bodies, Groseilliers would stammer a prayer remembered from his days as a Jesuit servant.

Radisson overturned the body of Adam Dollard des Ormeaux to drag it away. He discovered, under the lad’s belly, the Cartier Dagger. He recognized it, for he had seen it in the hands of Maisonneuve, though he had never been allowed to touch the artifact. He wondered what circumstance had brought the knife here, if these few weren’t merely thieves. But no, they had fought too hard to be thieves. They had not been hacked up, a sign of their vanquishers’ respect. He tucked the knife inside his deerskin jacket and dragged the fallen hero off.

The contingent of one hundred canoes then completed its portage and paddled safely on towards Fort Perilous.

Farther away, a runner located his Iroquois friends on the Richelieu River. He told of a great battle that would still be raging. During his trip, the fight had only grown in the mind of the runner, and the story he told was one of dreadful conditions and stark surprise. Hearing these facts, the chief decided to countermand the attack on Montreal, for he feared that their foray had been revealed, that an ambush awaited him as well, and he returned his forces to Lake Champlain.

Through misfortune, then accident, folly and bravery, the colony once again was spared.

Passing by Ville-Marie, the coureurs de bois were celebrated for their return and for the astonishing array of furs they were carrying. Then they told their sad news. Missing the young soldiers, the colonists had prepared themselves for such a report, yet they were much aggrieved. Maisonneuve pressed Radisson to tell him what he had seen, and the young man repeatedly told a tale of courage and much blood upon the stones. The Iroquois, Groseilliers had emphasized, were no longer on the river, and for that he believed they had the dead Frenchmen to thank.

Radisson kept the Cartier Dagger to himself. He intended to return it, but only if he and his partner were properly paid for their furs. If they were robbed blind, like the last time, he would keep the knife as his reward.

At Quebec, the sounds of one hundred cannon greeted the arrival of the hundred canoes, a grand sight. The people cheered, and a ship on the verge of returning empty to France delayed its departure. The sale in furs was brisk, and the woodsmen expected a handsome payout. They were enjoying a well-deserved beer in a local tavern, waiting for the final negotiation, when the new governor arrived with armed guards and asked to speak to Groseilliers.

Pierre de Voyer d’Argenson congratulated him on his success, and spoke of the significant contribution he’d made to New France.

“Thank you, Your Excellency.”

“Nevertheless, Groseilliers, you did not seek permission to embark upon this expedition. You were trapping without a license. Sir, you are under arrest.”

Radisson had to be restrained by friends as his partner was dragged off. After the shock, he was less surprised when he learned that his furs had been seized and his compensation established as a pittance. The moment Des Gros was released months later, the two men commenced plotting their next expedition. Within the plan, they embedded the seeds of their revenge.

As Maisonneuve journeyed to a meeting with the bishop of Quebec, Laval, ostensibly to be introduced to the newly arrived lieutenant-governor of New France, the Marquis de Tracy, he felt trepidatious. The politics had changed once more, as New France had become a royal province. The news had been welcomed, for now the full participation of the mother country would come to the aid of the struggling communities. This required a further consolidation of power, and the bishop seemed to be holding sway over the new men in charge. Yet Laval and the others were being persistently thwarted in their ambition by the popularity and power of Maisonneuve. Those at Ville-Marie seemed to rule themselves with a sense of divine autonomy, as though to inflict a decision upon them demanded the consent of Maisonneuve, the pope, the king and God Himself. The trinity formed by the pope, the king, and God he could do nothing about, but Maisonneuve was a problem Bishop Laval might presume to master, and now he believed he had found the occasion.

Laval spoke to him over brandy. “In 1652, you travelled back to France.”

Maisonneuve nodded, remembering those days. The conversation with the new authority was going well, he thought. The new man, Tracy, was keen to understand the colony’s history. Laval and Maisonneuve were filling him in. “Desperate years. We needed fresh and able recruits or we might have succumbed.”

“An ambitious undertaking. How did you finance that journey, I wonder?” Laval inquired.

An innocent question. “More than a dozen years ago now, Your Excellency.”

“Ah,” the bishop remarked, “may I refresh your brandy?”

Maisonneuve smiled, although he was suddenly feeling leery. His senses were alert as he held out his glass for a refill.

After he had poured the glass and returned to his seat, Laval eyed him closely. “You took twenty thousand livres from the hospital purse, did you not? I’ve checked the records. Why deny it?”

Maisonneuve finally deduced that the conversation was a trap. He looked first at Tracy, to gauge his reaction, and deduced that the man had been expecting the question. “Your Grace, Madame de Bullion created the fund. Jeanne Mance and myself entered into an agreement to borrow the money against the promise of land. She approved the transaction.”

“Paul,” Laval said, although they did not know one another well enough for him to address his guest by his Christian name, “you embezzled twenty thousand livres for your own purposes, for your enrichment, so that you could spend two years indulging yourself back in France. I understand. A life of hardship here. What could it hurt to eat and drink lavishly and comport yourself with the ladies?”

“Meanwhile,” Tracy added, “the colony at Montreal struggled on in near-starvation. Now that I am lieutenant-governor of New France, it is my duty to call you to account.”

“This is preposterous!” Maisonneuve forgot himself and jumped to his feet. “Madame de Bullion will attest to the agreement! As will Jeanne Mance! We did not keep records because our benefactor insisted on anonymity—”

“Enough with these false stories!” Tracy stormed back at him, while Bishop Laval sipped his brandy. “You stole the money. You ought to confess for the sake of your own immortal soul! In any case, pending the judgment of God, the people shall be informed and you shall be removed from office. I have explained the circumstances to the king and he agrees. You are to be recalled to France.”

“I will not go!”

“You are a subject of your king, sir. You will follow his commands!”

The two men glared at one another.

“Or do I command my guards to ship you back in chains?” Tracy asked him.

“You pompous ass!” Maisonneuve declared. He’d been outmanoeuvred for the moment. “I’ll go to France. But I will clear my name. And I will return.”

He did not know that of these three vows, he’d manage only the first—that he would die, still trying to clear his name, in a country he now despised, dreaming of his island home on the St. Lawrence among the trees and the Iroquois.

“A ship departs in three days for St. Malo,” Laval informed him. “You shall be a passenger on it. I bid you adieu. I wish you a bon voyage, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve.”

Three days. He would never see Montreal again.