o go up the Ottawa with a picked party of
chosen fighters, waylay the Iroquois at the foot of the Long Sault
Rapids, and so prevent the attack on Montreal. Sixteen young men
volunteered to join him. Charles Le Moyne, now acting as interpreter
at Montreal, begged the young heroes to delay till reenforcements could
be obtained: seventeen Frenchmen against five hundred Mohawks meant
certain death; but delay meant risk, and Dollard coveted nothing more
than a death of glory. At the chapel of the Hotel Dieu the young
heroes made what they knew would certainly be their last confession,
bade eternal farewell to friends, and with crushed corn for provisions
set out in canoes for the upper Ottawa. May 1, they came to the foot
of the Long Sault. Here a barricade of logs had been erected in some
skirmish the year before, and here, too, was the usual camping place of
the Iroquois as their canoes came bounding down the swift waters of the
Ottawa. Dollard and his brave boys landed, slung their kettles for the
night meal, and sent scouts upstream to forewarn when the Iroquois
came. The night was passed in prayer. Next day arrived unexpected
reenforcements. Two bands of forty Hurons and four Algonquins, under a
brave Huron convert of the Christian Islands, had asked Maisonneuve's
permission to join Dollard and wreak their pent vengeance on the
Mohawks. Early one morning the scouts reported five Iroquois canoes
coming slowly downstream, and two hundred more warriors behind. There
was not even care to bring a supply of water inside the barricade or
remove kettles from the sticks. Posted in ambush, the young soldiers
fired as soon as the first canoes came within range. This put the rest
of the Iroquois on guard. The whites rushed for the shelter of their
barricade. The Indians dashed to erect a fort of their own. Inside
Dollard's palisades all was activity. Cracks were plastered up with
mud between logs, four marksmen with double stands of arms posted at
each loophole, and a big musketoon leveled straight for the {109}
Iroquois redoubt. The Iroquois rushed out yelling like fiends, and
jumping sideways as they advanced, to avoid becoming targets; but the
scattering fire of the musketoon caught them full abreast and a Seneca
chief fell dead. The Iroquois then broke up Dollard's canoes and tried
to set fire to the logs; but again the musketoon's scattering bullets
mowed a swath of death in the advancing ranks, and for a seco