Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/843

Rh of French repute. Frontenac was facing the wreck of his former work. His Fort Frontenac, which had protected his trading and exploring parties to the West, which had been commanded by the great La Salle, was demolished at the bidding of the English and the Iroquois. Niagara also had been abandoned, to their joy. Frontenac's Canada of 1682 was almost in ruins, and he was forced to wait before undertaking its rehabilitation for the conclusion of the wild-beast war which colony waged against colony—a war in which the French themselves turned savages, wore the dress of savages, burned Iroquois captives, and permitted their Indian allies to commit still greater cruelties upon enemies, who died in awful but suppressed agonies, singing their death-songs as the flames mounted to their lips.

The splendid energy of Frontenac seemed not to have abated in the least. He bore his burden of seventy years as if age had not made any inroad upon his strength. The little border war against the English had checked the latter's lucrative fur trade with the Western tribes who had been so nearly thrown into the arms of the Iroquois. In the midsummer of 1690 their canoes sailed down Lakes Erie and Ontario to Montreal with such loads of skins as the Canadian traders had not seen for many years. Speaking of the Indians, "There were fully five hundred of them," says Parkman, "Hurons, Ottawas, Ojibways, Pottawatamies, Crees, and Nipissings." They came with a hundred and ten canoes loaded with beaver-skins worth nearly a hundred thousand crowns. Soon after La Durantaye arrived from Michilimackinac, now Mackinaw in Michigan, with fifty-five more canoes. These were manned by French traders. The rejoicing was great. Canada was reviving. This great gathering of Indians and traders followed close upon the heels of the murders and burnings and treacheries at Schenectady, Salmon Falls, Pemaquid, and Casco Bay. But the tide was to turn. Phips had captured Port Royal in the spring, and was to appear before Quebec in October. Now, however, all was rejoicing, for the French domination seemed established, and the French influence had spread beyond the western point of Lake Superior, where Du Lhut had established himself, and south to the country of the Miamis and of the Illinois where Joliet and Pere Marquette had voyaged, and where La Salle and Tonti had planted the arms and the flag of France, having made the Indians the friends of their country only to renew against them the fierce hostility of the Iroquois. Frontenac's policy appeared to prevail, and at a council of these visiting traders, savage Indians and savage coureurs des bois, the old soldier, seizing a hatchet and brandishing it