The battle has lasted a minute, but the Iroquois never will forget it. More intense their hate of the Algonquins; and it is the beginning of their implacable enmity to the French: an enmity which is to increase as time goes on, and which will make them the allies of the English through the great struggle which is to take place between France and England—between two races, two languages, two religions, and two civilizations—for supremacy upon this continent.
Seven years passed. Champlain had been back to France, and had returned. He was still thinking of the great empire France would one day control in the Western World. He made his way with a dozen Frenchmen up the Ottawa, past Lake Nippising, to Lake Huron, then turned south to Lake Ontario, sailed along the eastern shore with a great war party of Hurons, to attack their old enemies—the Senecas, tribe of the Iroquois.
It was October. The woods were bright with crimson and magenta hues. The Iroquois had planted corn and pumpkins, and were gathering the harvest when the Hurons burst upon them. They fled to their fortified town on the shore of Lake Canandaigua. It was inclosed by trunks of trees thirty feet high set in the ground. There was a gallery on which they could stand and fire or throw stones upon their assailants.
The Iroquois were the terror of every tribe east of the Mississippi. If Champlain could but conquer them, he would make the power of France felt to the Gulf of Mexico.
All night long the Hurons worked, building a tower of timber upon which the Frenchmen could stand, and pick off with their guns those inside the walls.
Two hundred warriors, with shouts and yells, amid a volley of arrows, drag the tower into position. The Iroquois swarm upon the walls, and the fight begins—the Frenchmen firing from the top of the tower, the Iroquois sending back arrows.
The Hurons light torches, and run up to the palisade with armfuls of dry sticks, and set them on fire; but the Iroquois run with calabashes of water, mount the gallery, and extinguish the flames. Each warrior yells at the top of his voice. They are crazed with excitement. For every whoop of the Hurons, the Iroquois give an angry yell of defiance. Arrows and stones fly. The Iroquois drop one by one before the unseen thunder-bolts from the men in the tower, but seventeen warriors go down before the arrows of the Iroquois. An arrow wounds Champlain in one knee, another pierces his leg. For three hours the fight goes on, when the Hurons, crest-fallen and disheartened, retreat to their camp. They linger five days, and then retire to their canoes, carrying Champlain on a litter all the way to Lake Ontario. The Iroquois steal upon them in their retreat, letting fly volleys of arrows, and yelling like hyenas over the defeat of the Hurons. They have discovered that the white men with their guns, after all, are not invincible.