They came, these savages, now first owning the strength of the invading white men, from all the far and unknown corners of the Western wilderness.  They came afoot, and with little trains of dogs, in single canoes, in little groups and growing flotillas and vast fleets of canoes, pushing on and on, down stream, following the tide of the furs down this pathway of more than a thousand miles.  The Iroquois, for once mindful of a promise, came in a compact fleet, a hundred canoes strong, and they stalked about the island for days, naked, stark, gigantic, contemptuous of white and red men, of friend and foe alike.  The scattered Algonquins, whose villages had been razed by these same savage warriors, came down by scores out of the Northern woods, along little, unknown streams, and over paths with which none but themselves were acquainted.  From the North, group joined group, and village added itself to village, until a vast body of people had assembled, whose numbers would have been hard to estimate, and who proved difficult enough to accommodate.  Yet from the farther West, adding their numbers to those already gathered, came the fleets of the driven Hurons, and the Ojibways, and the Miamis, and the Outagamies, and the Ottawas, the Menominies and the Mascoutins—­even the Illini, late objects of the wrath of the Five Nations.  The whole Western wilderness poured forth its savage population, till all the shores of the St. Lawrence seemed one vast aboriginal encampment.  These massed at the rendezvous about the puny settlement of Montreal in such numbers that, in comparison, the white population seemed insignificant.  Then, had there been a Pontiac or a Tecumseh, had there been one leader of the tribes able to teach the strength of unity, the white settlements of upper America had indeed been utterly destroyed.  Naught but ancient tribal jealousies held the savages apart.

With these tribesmen were many prisoners, captives taken in raids all along the thin and straggling frontier; farmers and artisans, peasants and soldiers, women raped from the farms of the Richelieu censitaires, and wood-rangers now grown savage as their captors and loth to leave the wild life into which they had so naturally grown.  It was the first reflex of the wave, and even now the bits of flotsam and jetsam of wild life were fain to cling to the Western shore whither they had been carried by the advancing flood.  This was the meeting of the ebb with the sea that sent it forward, the meeting of civilized and savage; and strange enough was the nature of those confluent tides.  Whether the red men were yielding to civilization, or the whites all turning savage—­this question might well have arisen to an observer of this tremendous spectacle.  The wigwams of the different tribes and clans and families were grouped apart, scattered along all the narrow shore back of the great hill, and over the Convent gardens; and among these stalked the native French, clad in coarse cloth of blue, with gaudy belt and buckskins, and cap of fur and moccasins of hide, mingling fraternally with their tufted and bepainted visitors, as well as with those rangers, both envied and hated, the savage coureurs de bois of the far Northern fur trade; men bearded, silent, stern, clad in breech-clout and leggings like any savage, as silent, as stoical, as hardy on the trail as on the narrow thwart of the canoe.