M. d’Argenson, then governor, did not approve of the retreat of the captain; this advanced bulwark protected the whole colony, and he thought that the French should have held out to the last man.  This selfish opinion was disavowed by the great majority; the real courage of a leader does not consist in having all his comrades massacred to no purpose, but in saving by his calm intrepidity the largest possible number of soldiers for his country.

The Iroquois were tricked but not disarmed.  Beside themselves with rage at the thought that so many victims about to be sacrificed to their hatred had escaped their blows, and desiring to end once for all the feud with their enemies, the Onondagas, they persuaded the other nations to join them in a rush upon Quebec.  They succeeded easily, and twelve hundred savage warriors assembled at Cleft Rock, on the outskirts of Montreal, and exposed the colony to the most terrible danger which it had yet experienced.

This was indeed a great peril; the dwellings above Quebec were without defence, and separated so far from each other that they stretched out nearly two leagues.  But providentially the plan of these terrible foes was made known to the inhabitants of the town through an Iroquois prisoner.  Immediately the most feverish activity was exerted in preparations for defence; the country houses and those of the Lower Town were abandoned, and the inhabitants took refuge in the palace, in the fort, with the Ursulines, or with the Jesuits; redoubts were raised, loop-holes bored and patrols established.  At Ville-Marie no fewer precautions were taken; the governor surrounded a mill which he had erected in 1658, by a palisade, a ditch, and four bastions well entrenched.  It stood on a height of the St. Louis Hill, and, called at first the Mill on the Hill, it became later the citadel of Montreal.  Anxiety still prevailed everywhere, but God, who knows how to raise up, in the very moment of despair, the instruments which He uses in His infinite wisdom to protect the countries dear to His heart, that same God who gave to France the heroic Joan of Arc, produced for Canada an unexpected defender.  Dollard and sixteen brave Montrealers were to offer themselves as victims to save the colony.  Their devotion, which surpasses all that history shows of splendid daring, proves the exaltation of the souls of those early colonists.

One morning in the month of July, 1660, Dollard, accompanied by sixteen valiant comrades, presented himself at the altar of the church in Montreal; these Christian heroes came to ask the God of the strong to bless the resolve which they had taken to go and sacrifice themselves for their brothers.  Immediately after mass, tearing themselves from the embraces of their relatives, they set out, and after a long and toilsome march arrived at the foot of the Long Rapid, on the left bank of the Ottawa; the exact point where they stopped is probably Greece’s Point, five or