With all his tact, Champlain had committed one act of indiscretion, the effects of which were left as an ill-fated legacy to the little colony which he otherwise nursed so well. Seeking to please his Algonquian neighbors upon the St. Lawrence, and at the time eager to explore the country, the commandant, with two of his men-at-arms, accompanied (1609) one of their frequent war-parties against the confederated Iroquois, who lived, for the most part, in New York state and northeastern Pennsylvania. Meeting a hostile band of two hundred and fifty warriors near where Fort Ticonderoga was afterward constructed, Champlain and his white attendants easily routed the enemy by means of firearms, with which the interior savages were as yet unacquainted.[21] His success in this direction was, through the unfortunate importunity of his allies, repeated in 1610; but five years later, when he invaded the Iroquois cantonments in the company of a large body of Huron, whose country to the east of Lake Huron he had been visiting that summer, the tribesmen to the southeast of Lake Ontario were found to have lost much of their fear for white men’s weapons, and the invaders retreated in some disorder. [Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S ATTACK ON AN IROQUOIS FORT (From an old print)] The results were highly disastrous both to the Huron and the French. The former were year by year mercilessly harried by the bloodthirsty Iroquois, until in 1649 they were driven from their homes, and in the frenzy of fear fled first to the islands of Lake Huron, then to Mackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, finally to the southern shores of Lake Superior, and deep within the dark pine forests of northern Wisconsin. In the destruction of Huronia, several Jesuit missionaries suffered torture and death. As for the squalid little French settlements at Three Rivers, Quebec, and Tadoussac, they soon felt the wrath of the Iroquois, who were the fiercest and best-trained fighters among the savages of North America. Almost annually the war-parties of this dread foe raided the lands of the king, not infrequently appearing in force before the sharp-pointed palisades of New France, over which were waged bloody battles for supremacy. Fortunately logs could turn back a primitive enemy unarmed with cannon; but not infrequently outlying parties of Frenchmen had sorry experiences with the stealthy foe, of whose approach through the tangled forest they had no warning. Champlain’s closing years were much saddened by these merciless assaults which he had unwittingly invited; in the decade after his death the operations of his successors were largely hampered thereby. Montreal, founded by religious enthusiasts in 1642, during its earliest years served as a buffer colony, in the direction of the avenging tribesmen, and supped to the dregs the cup of border turmoil.