In 1646 Father Jogues was killed in the Long House, and though in 1647 eighteen priests were at work in the eleven missions in the West (most of them in the Huron country), the Iroquois carried the war to their very altars, the mission of St. Joseph being destroyed and the Hurons, blasted as a nation, scattered to the four winds of heaven. In 1656 Mohawks even descended upon fugitive Hurons hovering about Quebec under the very guns of Fort St. Louis; it is interesting to compare these far-eastwardly onslaughts with the simultaneous far-eastern progress of the French explorers, for, as the Mohawks were falling upon Quebec those adventurous pioneers, Radisson and Grossilliers, were (it is now believed) on the point of discovering the Mississippi River, which they probably did in 1659. The plan of a grand Iroquois campaign against Canada in 1660 probably had its part in the awakening of the monarchy at home to the real state of affairs in America; if New France was to be more than a myth something must now be done or the entire European population of the St. Lawrence--not yet numbering more than two thousand souls--might be swept away as were the Hurons. The energy of Louis's famous minister, Colbert, is now in evidence as Marquis de Tracy, special envoy, appeared on the scene, as the population of Canada doubled in a score of months, the Richilieu was manned with forts and an army of thirteen hundred men invaded the Iroquois country and secured a comparatively lasting peace. A new era dawned, renewed spirit enthused the explorer, missionary, _coureur-de-bois_, and soldier. In 1669 the boldest man after Champlain, as Frontenac was the most chivalrous, La Salle, crossed Lake Ontario and in the two following years probably discovered and followed the Ohio, if not the Mississippi itself. In 1671 the noblest soldier of the cross in early American annals, Marquette, founded St. Ignace, and, two years later, in company with Joliet, found and descended the "Missipi." Simultaneously, as if to end once for all fear of Iroquois opposition, Frontenac erected the fort named for himself near the present site of Kingston, Canada. But French activity proved a little too successful, for it not only awed the Iroquois but alarmed the English, who had taken New York from the Dutch nine years before. La Salle was in France during 1677, where he received letters-patent concerning forts to be built south and west, in which direction "it would seem a passage to Mexico can be discovered," while Father Hennepin, soon to be the great discoverer's companion and mouthpiece, was among the Senecas near the Niagara frontier gaining a useful fund of information for the grand campaign of empire founding that La Salle had planned with Fort Frontenac as his base of supplies. [Footnote 16: _Canada_, p. 72, Story of the Nations Series.] [Footnote 17: A very excellent account of the battle of Lake Champlain is found in _The St. Lawrence River_, Ch. vi., by George Waldo Browne.]