[Illustration: DOLLARD'S EXPLOIT AT THE LONG SAULT, MAY, 1660
At last not one of the defenders was standing and quickly the revengeful Iroquois searched among the bodies to see if any Christian lived and could be reserved for torture later. Three others were found on the point of death. These they shortly consigned to the flames but a fourth they took prisoner and reserved for cruel refinements later. Among those fallen were Anontaha, the Huron, and Mitiwemeg, the Algonquin, with his three faithful companions. As to the treacherous Hurons, they did not keep their word to them as they promised, but sent them to their Iroquois villages to be afterwards burned alive to satisfy their baulked revenge at their rough handling by the heroic seventeen.
Some five, however, escaped and it was through one of them Louis, "a good Christian but a poor soldier"--that the first news was brought at last to Montreal, on June 3d, that so many of the enemy had been killed within and without the fort that the bodies served to make a path to ascend the palisades and pass over into the fort. Gradually the news was confirmed by others arriving, and the truth was sifted from the conflicting accounts of these cowards, whose stories strove to shield their shameful desertion of their friends.
Shortly after the disaster the fur trader, Radisson, passed down the Long Sault after a brush with the Iroquois. He visited the palisaded fort and saw the gaping wounds in the stockade burnt by the assailants and saw the scalps of the Indians still flaunting from the pickets. In the neighbourhood there was not a tree, he remarks, that was not shot with bullets. "It was terrible," he says, "for we came there eight days after the defeat." Not until he reached Montreal did he learn of the full significance of what he had seen.
The dearly bought victory made the Iroquois shy for a time of engaging with the French, for if, they said, but seventeen could hold out so long in a paltry palisaded picket against such odds, and with such great loss to their assailants, it would be better to leave them alone in their own houses and settlements. Thus the tide of war was checked. The threatened extermination of the whites was averted. Quebec and Three Rivers breathed again. It was the voluntary sacrifice of the picked flowers of the Montreal youth, that found its Thermopylae at the Long Sault, and thus saved Canada!
