The conclusion to which Frontenac had come at this time was that the raising of large levies of men and organizing formal campaigns against so agile and elusive an enemy as the Iroquois was not a wise policy. He states so distinctly in a letter to Pontchartrain, dated in October 1692. Such expeditions, he says, "make great noise and do little harm"; he believes in "small detachments frequently renewed." There are some people, he continues, who think differently, and are always urging the Indians to entreat him to attempt something on a large scale. Who these are does not appear, but Frontenac says: "I put them off and endeavour to amuse them by always giving them hopes that I shall grant their desire." Possibly Callieres was the moving spirit. Strange to say, it was only three months after writing thus that Frontenac gave his sanction to an expedition of the very kind that he had objected to. According to Champigny, indeed, he not only sanctioned but ordered it. The campaign in question, like that undertaken by Courcelles twenty-seven years before, was a midwinter one. The force raised consisted of six hundred and twenty-five men, comprising over three hundred of the most active young men of the country, one hundred picked soldiers, and about two hundred Indians, chiefly mission Iroquois of the Saut and the Mountain, but partly Hurons, Algonquins, and Abenaquis from Three Rivers and the neighbourhood of Quebec. The expedition started from Laprairie on the 25th January 1693, spent a night at Chambly, and then pushed on for Lake Champlain, their destination being the country of the Mohawks, for some time past their most troublesome enemies. Some hunting was done by the Indians on the way, and it was not till the 16th of February that they arrived within sight of the first of the Mohawk forts. There was another fort less than a mile distant. Both were attacked and captured simultaneously. There were only five defenders, we are told, in the first and still fewer in the second. There was a more important fort, however, about eight miles further away. This was taken by surprise at night, though not without a skirmish in which one man was killed on the French side, while some twenty or thirty of the Mohawks were slaughtered; the rest, to the number of over three hundred, two-thirds being women and children, surrendered.