At night [he wrote] we embarked in our canoes, and, as we were advancing noiselessly onward, we encountered a party of Iroquois at the point of a cape which juts into the lake on the west side. It was on the twenty-ninth of the month and about ten o'clock at night. They, as well as we, began to shout, seizing our arms. We withdrew to the water, and the Iroquois paddled to the shore, arranged their canoes, and began to hew down trees with villainous-looking axes and fortified themselves very securely. Our party kept their canoes alongside of the other, tied to poles, so as not to run adrift, in order to fight all together if need be. When everything was arranged they sent two canoes to know if their enemies wished to fight. They answered that they desired nothing else but that there was not then light enough to distinguish each other and that they would fight at sunrise. This was agreed to. On both sides the night was spent in dancing, singing, mingled with insults and taunts. Thus they sang, danced, and insulted each other until daybreak. My companions and I were concealed in separate canoes belonging to the savage Montagnoes. After being equipped with light armour, each of us took an arquebus and went ashore. I saw the enemy leaving their barricade. They were about two hundred men, strong and robust, who were coming toward us with a gravity and assurance that greatly pleased me, led on by three chiefs. Ours were marching in similar order, and told me that those who bore the three lofty plumes were chiefs and that I must do all I could. The moment we landed they began to run toward the enemy, who stood firm and had not yet perceived my companions who went into the bush with some savages. Ours commenced calling me with a loud voice, opening the way for me and placing me at their head, about twenty paces in advance, until I was about thirty paces from the enemy. The moment they saw me they halted, gazing at me and I at them. When I saw them preparing to shoot at us, I raised my arquebus, and aiming directly at one of the chiefs, two of them fell to the ground by this shot, and one of their companions received a wound of which he died afterwards. I had put four balls into my arquebus. Ours, on witnessing a shot so favourable to them, set up such tremendous shouts that thunder could not have been heard, and yet there was no lack of arrows on the one side or the other. The Iroquois were greatly astonished at seeing two men killed so instantaneously, notwithstanding that they were provided with arrow-proof armour woven of cotton thread and wood. This frightened them very much.
Champlain.
Whilst I was unloading, one of my companions fired a shot which so astonished them anew, seeing their chiefs slain, that they lost courage, took to flight, and abandoned the field and their fort, hiding in the depths of the forest, whither pursuing them I killed some others. Our savages also killed several of them and took ten or twelve of them prisoners. The rest carried off the wounded. These were promptly treated.
After having gained this victory, our party amused themselves plundering Indian corn and meal from the enemy, and also their arms which they had thrown away the better to run. And having feasted, danced, and sung, we returned three hours afterwards with the prisoners.[17]
No victory could have been so costly as this; indeed, one is led to wonder whether any battle in America ever cost more lives than this; for one hundred and fifty years and forty-five days, or until the fall of Quebec and New France, this strongest of Indian nations remembered Champlain, and was the implacable enemy of the French; and, what was of singular ill-fortune, these very Iroquois, in addition to holding the key of the West in their grasp, lay exactly between the French and their English rivals at the point of nearest and most vital contact. After the Ticonderoga victory an Iroquois prisoner, previous to being burned at the stake, chanted a song; wrote the humane Champlain, "the song was sad to hear." For a century and a half sad songs were sung by descendants of those Algonquin and French victors who listened in the wavering light of that cruel fire to the song of the captive from the land of Long Houses below the Lakes! True, the Iroquois and the French were not continually at war through this long series of years; and French blandishments had their effect, sometimes, even on their immemorial foe, especially at the Seneca end of the Long House, nearest Niagara.
Six years later, in 1615, Champlain set out on his most important tour of western discovery, largely for the purpose of fulfilling a promise made to one of his lieutenants on the upper Ottawa to assist him in the continual quarrel between the Hurons to the northward and the Iroquois. Here again is forced upon our attention one of the most important sequences of the battle of Lake Champlain. The two routes to the Great Lakes of Montreal were by the St. Lawrence River and by the Ottawa River. Either route the voyage was long and difficult, but by the Ottawa the voyageur came into the "back door" of the Lakes, Georgian Bay, by a taxing portage route; while, once stemming the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario was gained and, with the Niagara portage accomplished the traveller was afloat on Lake Erie beyond which the waterway lay fair and clear to the remotest corner of Superior. But the St. Lawrence led into the Iroquois frontier, and the Ottawa to the country of the French allies, the Hurons. The result was that, to a great extent, French movement followed the northerly course; no one could bring this out more clearly than Hinsdale and those whom he quotes:
[The Iroquois] turned the Frenchmen aside from the St. Lawrence and the Lower Lakes to the Ottawa and Nipissing; they ruined the fur trade "which was the life-blood of New France"; they "made all her early years a misery and a terror"; they retarded the growth of Absolutism until Liberty was equal to the final struggle; and they influence our national history to this day, since "populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought, would have remained a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the way of that majestic experiment of which America is the field."[18]
Two insignificant historical facts illustrate this power exerted on westward movement from Canada: Lake Erie was not discovered until half a century after Lake Superior, in fact was practically unknown even for fifty years after Detroit was founded in 1701.