66

DE LA BARRE’s EXPEDITION TO HUNGRY BAY.

and the Deputy of the Onontague Iroquois, it is easy to infer that these people are inclined to followthe object of their enterprize, which is to destroy all the Nations in alliance with us, the one after theother, whilst they keep us in uncertainty and with folded arms; so that, after having deprived us ofthe entire fur trade which they wish alone to carry on with the English and Dutch established atManate and Orange, they may attack us isolated, and ruin the Colony in obliging it to contract itselfand abandon all the separate settlements, and thus arrest the cultivation of the soil which cannotbear grain nor be cultivated as meadow except in quarters where it is of good quality.

As he is not informed in the short time since his arrival from France , of the state of these tribesand of the Colony, he requests them to acquaint him with all they know of these things in order thathe may inform his Majesty thereof, and represent to him the necessities of this Colony, for the pur-pose as well of averting this war as for terminating and finishing it advantageously should it benecessary to wage it; Whereupon the Meeting after being informed by the Rev d Jesuit fathers ofwhat had passed during five years among the Iroquois Nations , whence they had recently arrived, andby M. Dollier of what occurred for some years at Montreal , remained unanimously and all of oneaccord, that the English have omitted nothing for four years to induce the Iroquois , either by thegreat number of presents which they made them or by the cheapness with which they gave themprovisions and especially guns, powder and lead, to declare war against us, and which the Iroquois have been two or three times ready to undertake; But having reflected that, should they attack usbefore they had ruined in fact the allied nations, their neighbours, these would rally and, unitingtogether, would fall on them and destroy their villages whilst occupied against us, they judged itwiser to defer and amuse us whilst they were attacking those Nations , and having commenced, withthat view, to attack the Illinois last year, they had so great an advantage over them that besides threeor four hundred killed, they took nin e hundred of them prisoners, so that marching this year witha corps of twelve hundred men, well armed and good warriors, there was no doubt but they wouldexterminate them altogether and attack, on their return, the Miamis and the Kiskakous and by theirdefeat render themselves masters of Missilimackina and the lakes Herie and Huron, the Bay desPuans and thereby deprive us of all the trade drawn from that country by destroying, at the sametime, all the Christian Missions established among those nations; and therefore it became necessaryto make a last effort to prevent them ruining those Nations as they had formerly the Algonquins , theAndastez, the Loups (Mohegans), the Abenaquis and others, the remains of whom we have at thesettlements of Sillery, Laurette, Lake Champlain and others scattered among us. That to accomplishthat object, the state of the Colony was to be considered, and the means to be most usefully adoptedagainst the enemy; that as to the Colony we could bring together a thousand good men, bearing armsand accustomed to manage canoes like the Iroquois , but when drawn from their settlements, it mustbe considered that the cultivation of the soil would be arrested during the whole period of their ab-sence, and that it is necessary, before making them march, to have supplies of provisions necessaryin places distant from the settlements, so as to support them in the enemy’s country a time sufficientlylong to effectually ^destroy that Nation, and to act no more by them as had been done seventeen yearsago, making them partially afraid without weakening them. That we have advantages now whichwe had not then; the French accustomed to the Woods, acquainted with all the roads through them,and the road to Fort Frontenac open to fall in forty hours on the Senecas, the strongest of the fiveIroquois Nations , since they alone can furnish fifteen hundred warriors, well armed; that there mustbe provisions at Fort Frontenac, three or four vessels to load them and embark five hundred menon Lake Ontario , whilst five hundred others would go in Canoes and post themselves on the Senecashore ; but this expedition cannot succeed unless by His Majesty’s aid with a small body of two orthree^hundred soldiers to serve as a garrison for Forts Frontenac and La Galette,to escort provisionsand keep thejhead of the country guarded and furnished whilst the interior would be deprived of itsgood soldiers; a hundred or a hundred and fifty hired men, to be distributed among the settlements