Four days later another alarm aroused the fort. About two hours after
midnight, a band of forty Iroquois attacked the brewery and some of the
houses. Two of these, belonging to Urbain Tessier _dit_ Lavigne and
Michel Chauvin, they burned, and the brewery would have been reduced to
ashes if the guard of four men within, had not repulsed their attack
with vigour and put them to flight.
On the 18th of June, on a Sunday morning, a party of four, probably
returning to their newly constructed houses from the church in the
fort, was surprised between the fort and Point St. Charles by a large
body of Iroquois. These four ran to a hut used as a kind of watch house
or redoubt, overlooking a quantity of felled timber, where they were
quickly joined by Urbain Tessier and, resolving to sell their lives
dearly, they kept up a lively fusillade on the enemy.
The noise attracted de Maisonneuve in camp and he sent a relief party
under Charles Le Moyne with such success that the Iroquois were put
to flight, leaving behind them twenty-five to thirty men dead on the
field, independently of those who were taken prisoners. On the French
side only four were wounded, although one of them, Léonard Lucault
_dit_ Barbot, died two days afterwards, being buried in the cemetery.
Belmont, in his "Histoire du Canada," mentions another among the dead,
but the parish register only mentions one.
Thus, amid such daily hostilities, was life insecurely led by the
settlers, since it was not safe to venture even a few yards from their
houses without pistol, musket or sword.
Jeanne Mance, in a memoir to be found among the archives of the
seminary at Quebec, tells how the governor now obliged all the
colonists to leave their newly constructed houses and retire with their
families to the safety of the fort. She herself was forced to leave the
hospital. Maisonneuve turned this into a military outpost to guard the
isolated redoubts scattered here and there in the field and to protect
the workmen, by placing in it a squad of soldiers. He had two pieces of
cannon taken there and swivel guns for the windows of the granaries,
and he had loopholes cut into the walls of the building all around,
even in the chapel which served as an artillery armoury.
In this way the hospital became a fortress for four years and a half.
On July 26th the wisdom of Maisonneuve's arrangement was evident.
Marguerite Bourgeoys is responsible for the story. On this day 200
Iroquois had concealed themselves in a trench originally built as a
defence for the hospital, and which, descending from a height nearby,
close to the place where St. Jean Baptiste street is today, crossed the
site of St. Paul street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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