Count Frontenac: Makers of Canada, Volume 3LeSueur, William Dawson
History
Count Frontenac: Makers of Canada, Volume 3
LeSueur, William Dawson
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); Frontenac, Louis de Buade, comte de, 1620-1698
In mentioning these incidents, however, we have run ahead by two or
three years of the strict sequence of events. Argenson, the new
governor, arrived on the 11th July 1658. He had hardly been twenty-four
hours at his post before the Iroquois gave him a hint what to expect by
making a raid in the immediate neighbourhood of Quebec. In the following
year the whole country, but particularly Quebec, was thrown into
trepidation over the news that an army composed of twelve hundred
warriors, gathered from the five Iroquois nations, was advancing with
fixed determination to wipe out all the French settlements. It would be
needless to repeat here, even if the limits of a very cursory narrative
permitted it, the glorious feat of arms by which this great danger was
turned aside from the colony. The story of our Canadian Thermopylae is
familiar to every school-boy and school-girl in Canada. Suffice it to
say that the constancy of Dollard and the handful of companions who
perished with him in defending a position they had hastily fortified on
the river Ottawa, directly in the path of the invaders, so disheartened
the latter that they relinquished their enterprise. When so few could
hold so many at bay, what might not be expected when attack should be
made on the fortified posts of Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec? The
abandonment, however, of their larger design did not involve any
discontinuance of their accustomed mode of warfare. We hear of horrible
butcheries committed on settlers in the neighbourhood of Montreal and
even of Quebec; it seemed as if the colony could never get rest from its
tormentors. The new governor was a man of courage and ability, but he
lacked the means of effectually guarding against these treacherous
attacks, while the destitute condition in which he found the colony
filled him with discouragement. Whether general starvation or massacre
was the more imminent danger was sometimes a grave question. Other
difficulties arose. Argenson and Laval, the civil and religious heads of
the state, found themselves at variance on points of ceremony and
precedence; and the bishop, whose self-confidence was unbounded,
undertook to give the governor certain doubtless well-meant admonitions,
which the latter did not take in good part. The governor's health may,
or may not, have been good, but he alleged that he was suffering from
physical infirmities, and asked for his recall. He left for France in
September 1661, his successor, Baron Dubois d'Avaugour, having arrived a
few weeks previously. A remark which he made respecting the head of the
Canadian church, in a letter written a year before his departure, may
perhaps be put on record: "I can say with truth that his zeal on many
occasions bears close resemblance to an extraordinary attachment to his
own opinions, and a strong desire to encroach on the rights and duties
of others."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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