the governor’s part this was a serious tactical error.  He could hardly expect that a monarch who was doing his best to crush out the last vestige of representative government in France would welcome its establishment and encouragement by one of his own officials in the New World.  But Mezy did not live to obey the recall which speedily came from the King as the outcome of this indiscretion.  In the spring of 1665 he was taken ill and died at Quebec.  “He went to rest among the paupers,” says Parkman, “and the priests, serenely triumphant, sang requiems over his grave.”

But discord within its borders was not the colony’s only trouble during these years.  The scourge of the Iroquois was again upon the land.  During the years 1663 and 1664 bands of Mohawks and Oneidas raided the regions of the Richelieu and penetrated to the settlement at Three Rivers.  These petites guerres were making things intolerable for the colonists, and the King was urged to send out a force of troops large enough to crush the bothersome savages once for all.  This plea met with a ready response, and in June, 1665, Prouville de Tracy with two hundred officers and men of the Regiment de Carignan-Salieres disembarked at Quebec.  The remaining companies of the regiment, making a force almost a thousand strong, arrived a little later.  The people were now sure that deliverance was at hand, and the whole colony was in a frenzy of joy.

Following the arrival of the troops came Courcelle, the new governor, and Jean Talon, who was to take the post of intendant.  These were gala days in New France; the whole colony had caught the spirit of the new imperialism.  The banners and the trumpets, the scarlet cloaks and the perukes, the glittering profusion of gold lace and feathers, the clanking of swords and muskets, transformed Quebec in a season from a wilderness village to a Versailles in miniature.  But there was little time for dress parades and affairs of ceremony.  Tracy had come to give the Iroquois their coup de grace, and the work must be done quickly.  The King could not afford to have a thousand soldiers of the grand army eating their heads off through the long months of a Canadian winter.

The work of getting the expedition ready, therefore, was pushed rapidly ahead.  Snowshoes were provided for the regiment, provisions and supplies were gathered, and in January, 1666, the expedition started up the frozen Richelieu, traversed Lake Champlain, and moved across to the headwaters of the Hudson.  It was a spectacle new to the northern wilderness of America, this glittering and picturesque cavalcade of regulars flanked by troops of militiamen and bands of fur-clothed Indians moving on its errand of destruction along the frozen rivers.  But the French regular troops were not habituated to long marches on snowshoes in the dead of winter; and they made progress so slowly that the Dutch settlers of the region had time to warn the Mohawks of the approach of the expedition.