In 1647 there was no communication between Ste Marie and Quebec. Owing to the danger from Iroquois along the route, the annual canoe-fleet did not go down, although a small party of Hurons, it seems, went as far as Ville Marie. The necessities of the mission were, however, urgent, and in the spring of the following year Father Bressani set out with a strong contingent of two hundred and fifty Huron warriors, fully half of whom were Christians. No sooner had this expedition begun its descent of the Ottawa than an Iroquois war-party, which had wintered near Lake Nipissing, stole southward through the forests towards Huronia.
Contarea had been destroyed. The dangerous position of St Jean-Baptiste, situated near the site of Cahiague on Lake Simcoe, whence Champlain had set out against the Iroquois in 1615, had led the Jesuits to abandon it. St Joseph or Teanaostaiae, with about two thousand inhabitants, was therefore the frontier town on the south-east of Huronia. Father Daniel, in charge of this station, had just returned from his annual eight-day retreat at Ste Marie. For four years he had laboured in this mission; and, though his flock had been a stiff-necked one, his work had brought its reward. On the 4th of July his little chapel was crowded for the celebration of early Mass, and as he gazed at the congregation of his converts his spirit rejoiced within him. He had just finished the service, when shrill through the morning air rang the cry: 'The Iroquois! The Iroquois!' Rushing out he saw the foe already hacking at the palisades and many of the defenders falling beneath a storm of arrows and bullets. His first thought for his flock, he hurried back into the chapel, beseeching them to save themselves. They pressed about him, praying for baptism and for absolution; and, as they held to him appealing hands, he dipped his handkerchief in the font and baptized the crowd by aspersion. Then he boldly strode to the door of his chapel and faced the enemy. For a moment the savage fiends hesitated before the stern-eyed priest standing in his vestments, protecting, as it seemed, the flock that cowered behind him; but only for a moment. Yelling defiance at the white medicine-man, they directed their weapons against him; and this dauntless soldier of the Cross received the crown of martyrdom which he had prayed might be his. His slayers fell upon his body, stripped it of clothing, mutilated it, and cast it into the now flaming chapel, a fitting funeral pyre for the first martyr of the Huron mission. The entire village was given to the flames, and the smoke of the burning cabins and palisades rolled over the forest. A small village not far away, on the trail to Ossossane, shared the same fate. The slaughter glutted the ferocity of the Iroquois for the time being; and, with some seven hundred prisoners, they stole back to their villages south of Lake Ontario.
After this calamity the pall of a great fear hung over the Hurons. Paralysed and inert, the warriors took no steps to defend the country against the Iroquois peril. In spite of the exhortations of the Jesuits, they lay idle in their wigwams or hunted in the forest, dejectedly awaiting their doom.
An Iroquois war-party twelve hundred strong spent the winter of 1648-49 on the upper Ottawa; and as the snows began to melt under the thaws of spring these insatiable slayers of men directed their steps towards Huronia. The frontier village on the east was now St Ignace, on the west of the Sturgeon river, about seven miles from Ste Marie. It was strongly fortified and formed a part of a mission of the same name, under the care of Brebeuf and Father Gabriel Lalemant, a nephew of Jerome Lalemant. About a league distant, midway to Ste Marie, stood St Louis, another town of the mission, where the two fathers lived. On the 16th of March the inhabitants of St Ignace had no thought of impending disaster. The Iroquois might be on the war-path, but they would not come while yet ice held the rivers and snow lay in the forests. But that morning, just as the horizon began to glow with the first colours of the dawn, the sleeping Hurons woke to the sound of the dreaded war-whoop. The Iroquois devils had breached the walls. Three Hurons escaped, dashed along the forest trail to St Louis, roused the village, and then fled for Ste Marie, followed by the women and children and those too feeble to fight. There were in St Louis only about eighty warriors, but, not knowing the strength of the invaders, they determined to fight. The Hurons begged Brebeuf and Lalemant to fly to Ste Marie; but they refused to stir. In the hour of danger and death they must remain with their flock, to sustain the warriors in the battle and to give the last rites of the Church to the wounded and dying.
Having made short work of St Ignace, the Iroquois came battering at the walls of St Louis before sunrise. The Hurons resisted stubbornly; but the assailants outnumbered them ten to one, and soon hacked a way through the palisades and captured all the defenders remaining alive, among them Brebeuf and Lalemant.
The Iroquois bound Brebeuf and Lalemant and led them back to St Ignace, beating them as they went. There they stripped the two priests and tied them to stakes. Brebeuf knew that his hour had come. Him the savages made the special object of their diabolical cruelty. And, standing at the stake amid his yelling tormentors, he bequeathed to the world an example of fortitude sublime, unsurpassed, and unsurpassable. Neither by look nor cry nor movement did he give sign of the agony he was suffering. To the reviling and abuse of the fiends he replied with words warning them of the judgment to come. They poured boiling water on his head in derision of baptism; they hung red-hot axes about his naked shoulders; they made a belt of pitch and resin and placed it about his body and set it on fire. By every conceivable means the red devils strove to force him to cry for mercy. But not a sound of pain could they wring from him. At last, after four hours of this torture, a chief cut out his heart, and the noble servant of God quitted the scene of his earthly labours.
Lalemant, a man of gentle, refined character, as delicate as Brebeuf was robust, also endured the torture. But the savages administered it to him with a refinement of cruelty, and kept him alive for fourteen hours. Then at last he, too, entered into his rest.
Ten years before Brebeuf had made a vow to Christ: 'Never to shrink from martyrdom if, in Your mercy, You deem me worthy of so great a privilege. Henceforth, I will never avoid any opportunity that presents itself of dying for You, but will accept martyrdom with delight, provided that, by so doing, I can add to Your glory. From this day, my Lord Jesus Christ, I cheerfully yield unto You my life, with the hope that You will grant me the grace to die for You, since You have deigned to die for me. Grant me, O Lord, so to live, that You may deem me worthy to die a martyr's death Thus my Lord, I take Your chalice, and call upon Your name. Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!' How nobly this vow was kept.