The opening years of the new administration were marked by one of the greatest of forest tragedies, the destruction of the Hurons.  In 1648 a party of Iroquois warriors made their way across Lake Ontario and overland to the Huron country, where they destroyed one large village.  Emboldened by this success, a much larger body of the tribesmen returned in the year following and completed their bloody work.  A dozen or more Huron settlements were attacked and laid waste with wanton slaughter.  Two Jesuit priests, Lalemant and Brebeuf, who were laboring among the Hurons, were taken and burned at the stake after suffering atrocious tortures.  The remnants of the tribe were scattered:  a few found shelter on the islands of the Georgian Bay, while others took refuge with the French and were given a tract of land at Sillery, near Quebec.  To the French colony the extirpation of the Hurons came as a severe blow.  It weakened their prestige in the west, it cut off a lucrative source of fur supply, and it involved the loss of faithful allies.

More ominous still, the Iroquois by the success of their forays into the Huron country endangered the French settlement at Montreal.  Glorying in their prowess, these warriors now boasted that they would leave the Frenchmen no peace but in their graves.  And they proceeded to make good their threatenings.  Bands of confederates spread themselves about the region near Montreal, pouncing lynx-like from the forest upon any who ventured outside the immediate boundaries of the settlement.  For a time the people were in despair, but the colony soon gained a breathing space, not by its own efforts, but from a diversion of Iroquois enmity to other quarters.

About 1652 the confederated tribes undertook their famous expedition against the Eries, whose country lay along the south shore of the lake which bears their name, and this enterprise for the time absorbed the bulk of the Iroquois energy.  The next governor of New France, De Lauzon, regarded the moment as opportune for peace negotiations, on the hypothesis that the idea of waging only one war at a time might appeal to the Five Nations as sound policy.  A mission was accordingly sent to the Iroquois, headed by the Jesuit missionary Le Moyne, and for a time it seemed as if arrangements for a lasting peace might be made.  But there was no sincerity in the Iroquois professions.  Their real interest lay in peaceful relations with the Dutch and the English; the French were their logical enemies; and when the Iroquois had finished with the Eries their insolence quickly showed itself once more.

The next few years therefore found the colony again in desperate straits.  In its entire population there were not more than five hundred men capable of taking the field, nor were there firearms for all of these.  The Iroquois confederacy could muster at least three times that number; they were now obtaining firearms in plenty from the Dutch at Albany; and they could concentrate their whole assault upon the French settlement at Montreal.  Had the Iroquois known the barest elements of siege operations, the colony must have come to a speedy and disastrous end.  As the outcome proved, however, they were unwise enough to divide their strength and to dissipate their energies in isolated raids, so that Montreal came safely through the gloomy years of 1658 and 1659.