if the Five Nations wished to live.  A great council was then held at which the English, by invitation, were represented, while the French interest found its spokesman in a Christian Iroquois named Cut Nose.  Any chance of success was destroyed by the implacable enmity of the Senecas, who remembered the attempt of the French to check their raids upon the Illinois and the invasion of their own country by Denonville.  Cannehoot, a Seneca chieftain, rose and stated that the tribes of Michilimackinac were ready to join the English and the Iroquois for the destruction of New France; and the assembly decided to enter this triple alliance.  Frontenac’s envoys returned to Quebec alive, but with nothing to show for their pains.  A later effort by Frontenac was even less successful.  The Iroquois, it was clear, could not be brought back to friendship by fair words.

War to the knife being inevitable, Frontenac promptly took steps to confirm his position with the hitherto friendly savages of the Ottawa and the Great Lakes.  When Cannehoot had said that the tribes of Michilimackinac were ready to turn against the French, he was not drawing wholly upon his imagination.  This statement was confirmed by the report of Nicolas Perrot, who knew the Indians of the West as no one else knew them—­save perhaps Du Lhut and Carheil. [Footnote:  Etienne de Carheil was the most active of the Jesuit missionaries in Canada during the period of Frontenac.  After fifteen years among the Iroquois at Cayuga (1668-83) he returned for three years to Quebec.  He was then sent to Michilimackinac, Where he remained another fifteen years.  Shortly after the founding of Detroit (1701) he gave up life in the forest.  Despite the great hardships which he endured, he lived to be ninety-three.  None of the missionaries was more strongly opposed to the brandy trade.]

The French were now playing a desperate game in the vast region beyond Lake Erie, which they had been the first of Europeans to explore.  The Ottawas and the Hurons, while alike the hereditary foes of the Iroquois, were filled with mutual jealousy which must be composed.  The successes of the Iroquois in their raids on the French settlements must be explained and minimized.  ‘The Rat’ Kondiaronk, the cleverest of the western chieftains, must be conciliated.  And to compass all these ends, Perrot found his reliance in the word that Frontenac had returned and would lead his children against the common foe.  Meanwhile, the Iroquois had their own advocates among the more timid and suspicious members of these western tribes.  During the winter of 1689-90 the French and the Iroquois had about an even chance of winning the Indians who centred at Michilimackinac.  But the odds were against the French to this extent—­they were working against a time limit.  Unless Frontenac could quickly show evidence of strength, the tribes of the West would range with the Iroquois.