The murder of Jogues was the signal for another Indian war; and for a time the French missionaries and laymen alike were absorbed in the primary duty of the defense of their own lives and of those dear to them. Through all the tumult and confusion which ensued, however, the geographical student may, by eager searching, trace the continuous opening up of new districts, and on the blank map which was spread out before us when we began our narrative, we may dot down the names of many a river and lake almost unconsciously discovered by the white men, in the very height of their struggle.
The storm broke first on the village of St. Joseph, now almost entirely Christianized. The able-bodied members of the community were away at the chase; the women and children fell an easy prey to the Mohawk warriors. Father Daniel, the head of the mission, while administering the last rites of the church to the dying and the dead, fell at last beneath the poisoned arrows of the Iroquois, and was finally dispatched by a blow from a hatchet. Next St. Ignatius and then St. Louis were overpowered, and in the latter our old friend Brébœuf and his companion Sallemand met their death, the first after three, the second after seventeen hours of torture.
From St. Louis, the tide of invasion swept westward to Georgian Bay, where the Hurons had made a feeble effort to rally. Again they were defeated, and in their despair they sent a message by Father Dreuillette, a zealous missionary who had long been at work among the north-west tribes, to New England, with an entreaty for succor. But, as we shall presently see when we return to the colonies on the coast, the energies of the newly-formed federation were all required to meet the necessities of home defense, and no help came to the sufferers in the north. Dreuillette worked his way back by a new route to the St. Lawrence, that was all. Three years of almost constant massacres, in which many a noble death was met, alike by native converts and their teachers, were at last succeeded by a lull. The Iroquois were sated with bloodshed; or, as some of the French authorities tell us, their hearts had been touched by the teaching of some of their prisoners. In any case, peace was made in 1650, and it was scarcely concluded, before a missionary was ready to risk his life by making a fresh effort to convert the men at whose hands his brethren had already suffered so much.
A certain Father Le Moyne, who had been the envoy intrusted by the Hurons with the ratifications of peace, pitched his tent on the Mohawk River, and a little later an Italian priest named Dablon, and a French mis-
