of the skill with which the red man could get out of the way in the face of danger.  By moving too slowly after he had set out overland towards the Seneca villages, he gave the enemy time to place themselves out of his reach.  So he burned their villages and destroyed large areas of growing corn.  After more than a week had been spent in laying waste the land, Denonville and his expedition retired slowly to Cataraqui.  Leaving part of his force there, the governor went westward to Niagara, where he rebuilt in more substantial fashion La Salle’s old fort at that point and placed it in charge of a garrison.  The coureurs-de-bois then continued on their way to Michilimackinac while Denonville returned to Montreal.

The expedition of 1687 had not been a fiasco like that of 1685, but neither was it in any real way a success.  It angered the whole Iroquois confederacy without, having sufficiently impressed the Indians with the punitive power of the French.  Denonville had stirred up the nest without destroying the hornets.  It was all too soon the Indians’ turn to show what they could do as ravagers of unprotected villages; within a year after the French expedition had returned, the Iroquois bands were raiding the territory of the French to the very outskirts of Montreal itself.  The route to the west was barred; the fort at Niagara had to be abandoned; Cataraqui was cut off from succor and ultimately had to be destroyed by its garrison; not a single canoe-load of furs came down from the lakes during the entire summer.  The merchants were facing ruin, and the whole colony was beginning to tremble for its very existence.  The seven years since Frontenac left the land had indeed been a lurid interval.

It was at this juncture that tidings of the colony’s dire distress were hurried to the King, and the Grand Monarch moved with rare good sense.  He promptly sent for that grim old veteran whom he had recalled in anger seven years before.  In all the realm Frontenac was the one man who could be depended upon to restore the prestige of France along the great trade routes.

The Great Onontio, as Frontenac was known to the Indians, reached the St. Lawrence in the late autumn of 1689, just as the colony was about to pass through its darkest hours.  Quebec greeted him as a Redemptor Patriae; its people, in the words of La Hontan, were as Jews welcoming the Messiah.  Nor was their enthusiasm without good cause, for in a few years Frontenac demonstrated his ability to put the colony on its feet once more.  He settled its internal broils, opened the channels of trade, restored the forts, repulsed the English, and brought the Iroquois to terms.