In July, 1648, the mission station of St. Joseph, fifteen miles from St. Marie, was utterly destroyed, the priest in charge was shot dead, and 700 prisoners were carried off. In the following year 1,200 warriors of the Five Nations swept like a torrent through the Huron cantons, fifteen native towns were attacked, ravaged, and burnt, and the brave priest, De Breboeuf, was tortured and slain. Other devoted missionaries shared his fate; the shepherds were slaughtered, and the survivors of the flock were scattered abroad. For the Hurons made little or no attempt to defend themselves; fear came upon them and trouble; they fell down, and there was none to help them. The fort at St. Marie stood, for even the Iroquois hesitated to attack armed walls; but its purpose {89} was gone with the slaughter and dispersion of the Huron clans. The priests who still lived abandoned it, and spent a miserable winter with a crowd of Indian fugitives on a neighbouring island in Lake Huron. There too they built a fort; but famine and the Iroquois followed them, and in 1650 they left the country, taking with them to Quebec some 300 Huron converts. The refugees were settled on the Isle of Orleans; yet even there, five or six years later, they were attacked by the Iroquois, and at length they found a secure abiding-place at Lorette, near the banks of the river St. Charles. The rest of their kinsfolk were scattered abroad. Some were incorporated in the Five Nations. Others, driven from point to point, were found in after years at the northern end of Lake Michigan or at Detroit, and, under the new name of Wyandots, played some part in later Canadian history; but the Huron nation was blotted out, the Huron country became a desert, and the light which had shone brightly for a few years in the far-off land was put out for ever. [Sidenote: _Weakness of the French in Canada._]