news that modern trappers
designate as "the moccasin telegram." "Moccasin telegram" now carried
news of the coming army to the Iroquois villages, and the alarm ran like
wildfire from Mohawk to Onondaga and from Onondaga to Seneca. When the
French army struck up the Mohawk River, and to beat of drum charged in
full fury out of the rain-dripping forests across the stubble fields to
attack the first palisaded village, they found it desolate, deserted,
silent as the dead, though winter stores crammed the abandoned houses and
wildest confusion showed that the warriors had fled in panic. So it was
with the next village and the next. The Iroquois had stampeded in blind
flight, and the only show of opposition was a wild whoop here and there
from ambush. De Tracy took possession of the land for France, planted a
cross, and ordered the villages set on fire. For a time, at least, peace
was assured with the Iroquois.

Who first discovered the Province of Ontario? Before Champlain had
ascended the Ottawa, or the Jesuits established their missions south of
Lake Huron, young men sent out as wood rovers had canoed up the Ottawa
and gone westward to the land of the Sweet Water Seas. Was it Vignau,
the romancer, or Nicolet, the coureur de bois, or the boy Etienne Brule,
who first saw what has been called the Garden of Canada, the rolling
meadows and wooded hills that lie wedged in between the Upper and the
Lower of the Great Lakes? Tradition says it was Brule; but however that
may be, little was known of what is now Ontario except in the region of
the old Jesuit missions around Georgian Bay. It was not even known that
Michigan and Huron were _two_ lakes. The Sulpicians of Montreal had a
mission at the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario, and the south shore of the
lake, where it touched on Iroquois territory, was known to the Jesuits;
but from Quinte Bay to Detroit--a distance equal to that from New York to
Chicago, or London to Italy--was an unknown world.

{128} But to return to the explorations which Jean Talon, the Intendant,
had set in motion--

When Dollier de Casson, the soldier who had become Sulpician priest,
returned from the campaign against the Iroquois, he had been sent as a
missionary to the Nipissing Country. There he heard among the Indians of
a shorter route to the Great River of the West--the Mississippi--than by
the Ottawa and Sault Ste. Marie. The Indians told him if he would ascend
the St. Lawrence to Lak