being at the time in a hot quarrel with the governor, he
soon after sent a communication of his own to Versailles, in which he
declares that the war against the Outagamies was only a pretext of
Beauharnois for spending the King's money, and enriching himself by
buying up all the furs of the countries traversed by the army.[346]

Whatever the motives of the expedition, it left Montreal in June, under
the Sieur de Lignery, followed the rugged old route of the Ottawa, and
did not reach Michilimackinac till after midsummer. Thence, in a
flotilla of birch canoes carrying about a thousand Indians and five
hundred French, the party set out for the fort at the head of Green
Bay.[347] Here they caught one Outagamie warrior and three Winnebagoes,
whom the Indian allies tortured to death. Then they paddled their canoes
up Fox River, reached a Winnebago village on the twenty-fourth of
August, followed the channel of the stream, a ribbon of lazy water
twisting in a vague, perplexing way through the broad marsh of wild rice
and flags, till they saw the chief village of the Outagamies on a tract
of rising ground a little above the level of the bog.[348] It consisted
of bark wigwams, without palisades or defences of any kind. Its only
inmates were three squaws and one old man. These were all seized, and,
to the horror of Pere Crespel, the chaplain, were given to the Indian
allies, who kept the women as slaves, and burned the old man at a slow
fire.[349] Then, after burning the village and destroying the crop of
maize, peas, beans, and squashes that surrounded it, the whole party
returned to Michilimackinac.[350]

The expedition was not a success. Lignery had hoped to surprise the
enemy; but the alert and nimble savages had escaped him. Beauharnois
makes the best of the miscarriage, and writes that "the army did good
work;" but says a few weeks later that something must be done to cure
the contempt which the western allies of the French have conceived for
them "since the last affair."[351]

Two years after Lignery's expedition, there was another attempt to
humble the Outagamies. Late in the autumn of 1730 young Coulon de
Villiers, who twenty-four years later defeated Washington at Fort
Necessity, appeared at Quebec with news that the Sieur de Villiers, his
father, who commanded the post on the St. Joseph, had struck the
Outagamies a deadly blow and killed two hundred of their warriors,
besides six hundred of their women and children.