310 THE SCOURGE OF CANADA. [1693. 



number of more than four hundred warriors ; but, 

 finding the bastions manned and the gates shut, 

 they withdrew discomfited. It was of great im- 

 portance to the French to sunder them from their 

 heathen relatives so completely that reconciliation 

 would be impossible, and it was largely to this 

 end that a grand expedition was prepared against 

 the Mohawk towns. 



All the mission Indians in the colony were in- 

 vited to join it, the Iroquois of the Saut and 

 Mountain, Abenakis from the Chaucliere, Hurons 

 from Lorette, and Algonquins from Three Rivers. 

 A hundred picked soldiers were added, and a large 

 band of Canadians. All told, they mustered six 

 hundred and twenty-five men, under three tried 

 leaders, Mantet, Court emanche, and La Noue. 

 They left Chambly at the end of January, and 

 pushed southward on snow-shoes. Their way was 

 over the ice of Lake Champlain, for more than a 

 century the great thoroughfare of war-parties. 

 They bivouacked in the forest hy squads of twelve 

 or more ; dug away the snow in a circle, covered 

 the bared earth with a bed of spruce boughs, made 

 a fire in the middle, and smoked their pipes around 

 it. Here crouched the Christian savage, muffled 

 in his blanket, his unwashed face still smirched 

 with soot and vermilion, relics of the war-paint he 

 had worn a w r eek before when he danced the war- 

 dance in the square of the mission village ; and 

 here sat the Canadians, hooded like Capuchin 

 monks, but irrepressible iji loquacity, as the blaze 

 of the camp-fire glowed on their hardy visages and 



