ntment a council was created, to consist of the governor of the
colony, the bishop or the superior of the Jesuits, and the governor of
Montreal. Henceforth this body was to be responsible for the making
of all general regulations. It is commonly called the Old Council to
distinguish it from the Sovereign Council by which it was supplanted
in 1663.

The opening years of the new administration were marked by one of the
greatest of forest tragedies, the destruction of the Hurons. In 1648
a party of Iroquois warriors made their way across Lake Ontario and
overland to the Huron country, where they destroyed one large village.
Emboldened by this success, a much larger body of the tribesmen
returned in the year following and completed their bloody work. A
dozen or more Huron settlements were attacked and laid waste with
wanton slaughter. Two Jesuit priests, Lalemant and Brebeuf, who were
laboring among the Hurons, were taken and burned at the stake
after suffering atrocious tortures. The remnants of the tribe were
scattered: a few found shelter on the islands of the Georgian Bay,
while others took refuge with the French and were given a tract of
land at Sillery, near Quebec. To the French colony the extirpation of
the Hurons came as a severe blow. It weakened their prestige in the
west, it cut off a lucrative source of fur supply, and it involved the
loss of faithful allies.

More ominous still, the Iroquois by the success of their forays into
the Huron country endangered the French settlement at Montreal.
Glorying in their prowess, these warriors now boasted that they would
leave the Frenchmen no peace but in their graves. And they proceeded
to make good their threatenings. Bands of confederates spread
themselves about the region near Montreal, pouncing lynx-like from the
forest upon any who ventured outside the immediate boundaries of the
settlement. For a time the people were in despair, but the colony soon
gained a breathing space, not by its own efforts, but from a diversion
of Iroquois enmity to other quarters.

About 1652 the confederated tribes undertook their famous expedition
against the Eries, whose country lay along the south shore of the lake
which bears their name, and this enterprise for the time absorbed
the bulk of the Iroquois energy. The next governor of New France, De
Lauzon, regarded the moment as opportune for peace negotiations, on
the hypothesis that the idea of waging only one war at a time might
a