enthusiasm, they turned each upon their enemies, like madmen. But,
unable to take them alive with their overpowering numbers, the Iroquois
shot them down mercilessly, to fall upon the camp enclosure already
heaped up high with their own dead.
[Illustration: DOLLARD'S EXPLOIT AT THE LONG SAULT, MAY, 1660
(By Henri Julien)]
At last not one of the defenders was standing and quickly the
revengeful Iroquois searched among the bodies to see if any Christian
lived and could be reserved for torture later. Three others were found
on the point of death. These they shortly consigned to the flames
but a fourth they took prisoner and reserved for cruel refinements
later. Among those fallen were Anontaha, the Huron, and Mitiwemeg, the
Algonquin, with his three faithful companions. As to the treacherous
Hurons, they did not keep their word to them as they promised, but
sent them to their Iroquois villages to be afterwards burned alive to
satisfy their baulked revenge at their rough handling by the heroic
seventeen.
Some five, however, escaped and it was through one of them Louis, "a
good Christian but a poor soldier"--that the first news was brought at
last to Montreal, on June 3d, that so many of the enemy had been killed
within and without the fort that the bodies served to make a path to
ascend the palisades and pass over into the fort. Gradually the news
was confirmed by others arriving, and the truth was sifted from the
conflicting accounts of these cowards, whose stories strove to shield
their shameful desertion of their friends.
Shortly after the disaster the fur trader, Radisson, passed down the
Long Sault after a brush with the Iroquois. He visited the palisaded
fort and saw the gaping wounds in the stockade burnt by the assailants
and saw the scalps of the Indians still flaunting from the pickets. In
the neighbourhood there was not a tree, he remarks, that was not shot
with bullets. "It was terrible," he says, "for we came there eight days
after the defeat." Not until he reached Montreal did he learn of the
full significance of what he had seen.
The dearly bought victory made the Iroquois shy for a time of engaging
with the French, for if, they said, but seventeen could hold out so
long in a paltry palisaded picket against such odds, and with such
great loss to their assailants, it would be better to leave them alone
in their own houses and settlements. Thus the tide of war was checked.
The threatened extermination of the whites was averted. Quebec and
Three Rivers breathed again. It was the voluntary sacrifice of the
picked flowers of the Montreal youth, that found its Thermopylae at the
Long Sault, and thus saved Canada!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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