Like all strong men Frontenac made many enemies. He was recalled in 1682, and General La Barre, a man of about sixty, was sent out in his place. La Barre had made a good record in the West Indies, but was entirely unable to handle the difficult problems which met him in New France. In an evil hour for the French, the Iroquois had conquered the southern neighbors with whom they had long waged wars that had occupied much of their time and strength. Now, they were free to turn on the Indian allies of Canada of whose commercial gains through the fur trade with the French they had long been envious. Frontenac before his departure had found the Iroquois unusually arrogant and unruly, although they had come to regard him as the greatest of all “Onontios,” as they named the governors of New France. The Dutch and the English had meanwhile made more or less successful advances to the Iroquois, who now fully realized their own importance from the efforts of both French and English to gain their support. For two years La Barre struggled on, entangling rather than helping the situation. At length an Iroquois chief was murdered in a village of French Indians, and the crisis came. In the early spring of 1684, French canoes were plundered by the Senecas and La Barre felt that he must assert his power, or the Indians would lose their respect for the French. After making great preparations, he started with his soldiers and frontiersmen for the Seneca country by way of the St. Lawrence to Fort Frontenac and thence across Lake Ontario. The opposing current of the river was so strong that frequently the men could make no progress by paddling, but were obliged to tow the canoes or push them along with poles. Every few miles were rapids around which the canoes were transported and through which the flatboats were pulled with the greatest effort. The mosquitoes were “insufferably troublesome,” hovering over the men in such clouds that they could hardly see their way,--so one of the soldiers wrote. At Fort Frontenac, the men fell ill of a malarial fever which killed many and disabled more. La Barre repented more than once of entering upon an expedition that he now saw would be disastrous. Whatever his former warlike purposes, La Barre was now eager for peace. He sent Le Moyne, a veteran interpreter whom the Iroquois called the “Partridge,” to the Onondagas asking them to meet him on the southern side of the lake, twenty miles or so north of Oswego. Le Moyne returned in a few days with the famous Onondaga chief, “Big Mouth”; in French this is “La Grande Gueule,” which the soldiers shortened into “Grangula.” Big Mouth had recently been conferring with the English, whose arbitrary demands had offended his pride; he was now in a haughty mood that boded ill for the French.