The letter from which this is taken was written to urge upon the Government a scheme in which the zealous priest could see nothing impracticable.  He proposed to raise a war-party of thirty-eight hundred Indians, eighteen hundred of whom were to be drawn from the Canadian missions, the Five Nations, and the tribes of the Ohio, while the remaining two thousand were to be furnished by the Flatheads, or Choctaws, who were at the same time to be supplied with missionaries.  The united force was first to drive the English from the Ohio, and next attack the Dog Tribe, or Cherokees, who lived near the borders of Virginia, with the people of which they were on friendly terms.  “If,” says Piquet, “the English of Virginia give any help to this last-named tribe,—­which will not fail to happen,—­they [the war-party] will do their utmost against them, through a grudge they bear them by reason of some old quarrels.”  In other words, the missionary hopes to set a host of savages to butchering English settlers in time of peace![34] His wild project never took effect, though the Governor, he says, at first approved it.

[Footnote 34:  Appendix A.]

In the preceding year the “Apostle of the Iroquois,” as he was called, made a journey to muster recruits for his mission, and kept a copious diary on the way.  By accompanying him, one gets a clear view of an important part of the region in dispute between the rival nations.  Six Canadians paddled him up the St. Lawrence, and five Indian converts followed in another canoe.  Emerging from among the Thousand Islands, they stopped at Fort Frontenac, where Kingston now stands.  Once the place was a great resort of Indians; now none were here, for the English post of Oswego, on the other side of the lake, had greater attractions.  Piquet and his company found the pork and bacon very bad, and he complains that “there was not brandy enough in the fort to wash a wound.”  They crossed to a neighboring island, where they were soon visited by the chaplain of the fort, the storekeeper, his wife, and three young ladies, glad of an excursion to relieve the monotony of the garrison.  “My hunters,” says Piquet, “had supplied me with means of giving them a pretty good entertainment.  We drank, with all our hearts, the health of the authorities, temporal and ecclesiastical, to the sound of our musketry, which was very well fired, and delighted the islanders.”  These islanders were a band of Indians who lived here.  Piquet gave them a feast, then discoursed of religion, and at last persuaded them to remove to the new mission.

During eight days he and his party coasted the northern shore of Lake Ontario, with various incidents, such as an encounter between his dog Cerberus and a wolf, to the disadvantage of the latter, and the meeting with “a very fine negro of twenty-two years, a fugitive from Virginia.”  On the twenty-sixth of June they reached the new fort of Toronto, which offered a striking contrast to their last stopping-place.