The work which the regiment had been sent out to do was soon begun.  The undertaking was more difficult than had been anticipated, and two expeditions were needed to accomplish it; but the Iroquois were thoroughly chastened, and by the close of 1666 the colony once more breathed easily.  How long, however, would it be permitted to do so?  Would not the departure of the regiment be a signal to the Mohawks that they might once again raid the colony’s borders with impunity?  Talon thought that it would, hence he hastened to devise a plan whereby the Carignans might be kept permanently in Canada.  To hold them there as a regular garrison was out of the question; it would cost too much to maintain six hundred men in idleness.  So the intendant proposed to the king that the regiment should be disbanded at Quebec, and that all its members should be given inducements to make their homes in the colony.

Once more the king assented.  He agreed that the officers of the regiment should be offered seigneuries, and provided with funds to make a start in improving them.  For the rank and file who should prove willing to take lands within the seigneuries of the officers the king consented to provide a year’s subsistence and a liberal grant in money.  The terms proved attractive to some of the officers and to most of the men.  Accordingly, arrangements were at once made for getting them established on their new estates.  Just how many permanent settlers were added to the colonial population in this way is not easy to ascertain; but about twenty-five officers (chiefly captains and lieutenants) together with nearly four hundred men volunteered to stay.  Most of the non-commissioned officers and men showed themselves to be made of good stuff; their days were long in the land, and their descendants by the thousand still possess the valley of the Richelieu.  But the officers, good soldiers though they were, proved to be rather faint-hearted pioneers.  The task of beating swords into ploughshares was not altogether to their tastes.  Hence it was that many of them got into debt, mortgaged their seigneuries to Quebec or Montreal merchants, soon lost their lands, and finally drifted back to France.

When Talon arranged to have the Carignans disbanded in Canada he decided that they should be given lands in that section of the colony where they would be most useful in guarding New France at its most vulnerable point.  This weakest point was the region along the Richelieu between Lake Champlain and the St Lawrence.  By way of this route would surely come any English expedition sent against New France, and this likewise was the portal through which the Mohawks had already come on their errands of massacre.  If Canada was to be safe, this region must become the colony’s mailed fist, ready to strike in repulse at an instant’s notice.  All this the intendant saw very plainly, and he was wise in his generation.  Later events amply proved his foresight.  The Richelieu highway was actually used by the men of New England on various subsequent expeditions against Canada, and it was the line of Mohawk incursion so long as the power of this proud redskin clan remained unbroken.  At no time during the French period was this region made entirely secure; but Talon’s plan made the Richelieu route much more difficult for the colony’s foes, both white and red, than it otherwise would have been.