In 1647 there was no communication between Ste Marie and Quebec.  Owing to the danger from Iroquois along the route, the annual canoe-fleet did not go down, although a small party of Hurons, it seems, went as far as Ville Marie.  The necessities of the mission were, however, urgent, and in the spring of the following year Father Bressani set out with a strong contingent of two hundred and fifty Huron warriors, fully half of whom were Christians.  No sooner had this expedition begun its descent of the Ottawa than an Iroquois war-party, which had wintered near Lake Nipissing, stole southward through the forests towards Huronia.

Contarea had been destroyed.  The dangerous position of St Jean-Baptiste, situated near the site of Cahiague on Lake Simcoe, whence Champlain had set out against the Iroquois in 1615, had led the Jesuits to abandon it.  St Joseph or Teanaostaiae, with about two thousand inhabitants, was therefore the frontier town on the south-east of Huronia.  Father Daniel, in charge of this station, had just returned from his annual eight-day retreat at Ste Marie.  For four years he had laboured in this mission; and, though his flock had been a stiff-necked one, his work had brought its reward.  On the 4th of July his little chapel was crowded for the celebration of early Mass, and as he gazed at the congregation of his converts his spirit rejoiced within him.  He had just finished the service, when shrill through the morning air rang the cry:  ‘The Iroquois!  The Iroquois!’ Rushing out he saw the foe already hacking at the palisades and many of the defenders falling beneath a storm of arrows and bullets.  His first thought for his flock, he hurried back into the chapel, beseeching them to save themselves.  They pressed about him, praying for baptism and for absolution; and, as they held to him appealing hands, he dipped his handkerchief in the font and baptized the crowd by aspersion.  Then he boldly strode to the door of his chapel and faced the enemy.  For a moment the savage fiends hesitated before the stern-eyed priest standing in his vestments, protecting, as it seemed, the flock that cowered behind him; but only for a moment.  Yelling defiance at the white medicine-man, they directed their weapons against him; and this dauntless soldier of the Cross received the crown of martyrdom which he had prayed might be his.  His slayers fell upon his body, stripped it of clothing, mutilated it, and cast it into the now flaming chapel, a fitting funeral pyre for the first martyr of the Huron mission.  The entire village was given to the flames, and the smoke of the burning cabins and palisades rolled over the forest.  A small village not far away, on the trail to Ossossane, shared the same fate.  The slaughter glutted the ferocity of the Iroquois for the time being; and, with some seven hundred prisoners, they stole back to their villages south of Lake Ontario.

After this calamity the pall of a great fear hung over the Hurons.  Paralysed and inert, the warriors took no steps to defend the country against the Iroquois peril.  In spite of the exhortations of the Jesuits, they lay idle in their wigwams or hunted in the forest, dejectedly awaiting their doom.