Again the missionary enthusiasm was excited; the very bishop of Quebec himself was eager to undertake the enterprise; but the decision being by lot, René Mesnard, late missionary among the Cayugus, was chosen. He was already advanced in years, and experienced in missionary service. “I go,” said he, “trusting in Providence, who feeds the little birds of the desert and clothes the wild flowers of the forest.” “In three or four months,” wrote he to a friend, “you may add me to the memento of deaths.” In the autumn he reached the southern shore of Lake Superior, and the following year, being on his way to the Bay of Chegoimegon, on the western extremity of that great lake, he lost his way in the forest and never more was seen; his cassock and breviary being kept for long years afterwards as amulets among the Sioux. Again the Mohawks made war on the French, and Montreal was in danger; the abandonment of the country was even thought of and might have been carried out, but that Colbert, the minister of the young Louis XIV., who had just come to the throne, estimating at its true value the commercial relationship of France with the Canadian colony, was the means of its being transferred to a new West India company, the original company of New France having resigned its rights to the sovereign. Under this new management, “a royal regiment, under the indefatigable Tracy as viceroy, was sent over for its defence; Courcelles, a veteran soldier, was appointed governor, and Talon, a man of business and integrity, as royal representative in civil affairs. Every omen was favourable, save the conquest of New Netherlands by the English, which took place at this time, and which circumstance, in a quarter of a century, made the hunting-fields of the Iroquois the battle-grounds of these two European rivals.” Under the better prospects which the change of administration introduced into New France, Father Allouez, nothing daunted by the cruel fate of Gareau and Mesnard, set out on a mission to the remote west. His journey commenced in August, 1665, and early in September he entered the great lake, reverenced by the Indians as a divinity, “and sailing along the lofty banks and pictured rocks of its southern shore, passed beyond the Bay of Keweena, obtaining knowledge of those copper mines known immemorially to the Indians, and for which that region is now celebrated, and so arrived at Chegoimegon, where landing, he celebrated mass and inscribing the cross on a lofty tree of the forest, claimed the country for the Christian king of France.”