256 MASSACHUSETTS ATTACKS QUEBEC. [1690. 



cannon to be fired to call in the troops, crossed the 

 St. Lawrence followed by all the Indians, and en- 

 camped with twelve hundred men at La Prairie to 

 meet the expected attack. He waited in vain. 

 All was quiet, and the Ottawa scouts reported that 

 they could find no enemy. Three days passed. The 

 Indians grew impatient, and wished to go home. 

 Neither English nor Iroquois had shown themselves ; 

 and Frontenac, satisfied that their strength had 

 been exaggerated, left a small force at La Prairie, 

 recrossecl the river, and distributed the troops again 

 among the neighboring parishes to protect the har- 

 vesters. He now gave ample presents to his de- 

 parting allies, whose chiefs he had entertained at 

 his own table, and to whom, says Charlevoix, he 

 bade farewell " with those engaging manners which 

 he knew so well how to assume when he wanted to 

 gain anybody to his interest." Scarcely were they 

 gone, when the distant cannon of La Prairie boomed 

 a sudden alarm. 



The men whom La Plaque had seen near Lake 

 George were a part of the combined force of Con- 

 necticut and New York, destined to attack Mont- 

 real. They had made their way along Wood Creek 

 to the point where it widens into Lake Champlain, 

 and here they had stopped. Disputes between the 

 men of the two colonies, intestine quarrels in the 

 New York militia, who were divided between the 

 two factions engendered by the late revolution, 

 the want of provisions, the want of canoes, and the 

 ravages of small-pox, had ruined an enterprise 

 which had been mismanaged from the first. There 



