missionary, Father Daniel, meeting his fate while ministering to the dying. The next place to fall was St. Ignace; then St.Louis was attacked. Here Fathers Jean de Brébœuf and Gabriel Lalement, refusing to leave their helpless flocks, were made prisoners and put to the most cruel tortures. Brébœuf’s nails were torn from his fingers, his body hacked with knives, red hot hatchets hung round his neck, his gums seared, and finally his heart cut out, no word or token of pain escaping from his lips. His tortures lasted four hours. Lalement, so delicate, sensitive, and frail, was tortured for seventeen hours before his sufferings were ended in death. St. Marie was the next object of attack. It was manfully defended by a few Frenchmen and Hurons, and after a fierce conflict the Iroquois retreated.
The Huron missions were destroyed, and the people were scattered. An effort to transfer the missions to Isle St. Joseph or Christian Island, near Collingwood, and gather the terror-stricken Hurons together again, ended the following spring in another dreadful massacre on the mainland, by the Iroquois, where the Hurons had come in search of food for their starving families. Ten thousand Hurons had perished, a few came to Quebec with the missionaries, the rest were scattered far and wide among other tribes in the north, east and west. The once powerful, brave and intelligent Hurons, as a nation, ceased to exist; and with them perished the principal fruits of the Jesuit Missions.
3. Growth of New France.—Let us now return to what was going on in the colony, during this period of Indian strife and bloodshed. The Company of One Hundred Associates did not carry out what it had promised to do; very few settlers were brought out by it, and its attention was almost entirely taken up with the trade in furs. It sent out scarcely one thousand colonists, much less the six thousand it had promised. The population grew very slowly, so slowly that in 1662, it had less then two thousand souls. But a great interest was taken in the spiritual welfare of the colony, and out of this interest came the founding of Montreal as a mission, in 1642, by a number of devoted men and women, who came from France for that purpose. Here, the little band prayed and fought, for the Iroquois lay in wait, night and day, right under the guns of the rude fort to kill and scalp the unwary.
