It is related that as the savages paddled away from the Lachine shore, they called out: "Onontio, you deceived us; now we have deceived you." The last days of Onontio, in his official capacity at least, were at hand. The king had decided early in the year that he was not the man to support a falling state or rescue an imperilled community, and had offered the position again to Count Frontenac notwithstanding the many troubles that had marked that gallant soldier's former tenure of office. Evidently, with all his faults of temper, he had at least impressed himself on the king as a man who could be relied on in the hour of danger. Denonville's last act was one which strikingly illustrated the condition of feebleness and dejection into which he had fallen. Dongan and the Iroquois had demanded the abandonment of Fort Frontenac. Denonville now determined that this was the only course to follow, and accordingly sent orders to the garrison to blow up the walls, destroy the stores, and make the best of their way to Montreal.
[Footnote 27: _New York Colonial Documents_, vol. ix. p. 268. See also "Transactions between England and France, relating to Hudson's Bay, 1687," in _Canadian Archives_, 1883, p. 173.]
[Footnote 28: Clément, _Vie de Colbert_, p. 456.]
[Footnote 29: "In dealing with indigenous races," observes M. Lorin, "governors were sometimes obliged to sacrifice a few victims to the ferocity of savages; and it was not on the eve of a campaign that it would have been wise to exhibit towards the Iroquois a humanity that would have been mistaken for weakness."--_Comte de Frontenac_, p. 333. We may certainly agree that it would have been difficult for those who had captured peaceful and unsuspecting natives for the horrible régime of the galleys to adopt a high humanitarian tone in reproving the cruelties of their Indian confederates and converts.]
[Footnote 30: _New York Colonial Documents_, vol. ix. p. 389.]
[Footnote 31: See his _Lake St. Louis, Old and New_.]
[Footnote 32: Both as regards the number of the slain and the details of the massacre Charlevoix simply repeats the statements made by Frontenac in a despatch dated the 15th November 1689, one month after his return to Canada, and after several days spent at the scene of the disaster and at Montreal. It is he who speaks of the "_enlèvement de cent vingt personnes après un massacre de deux cents brûlés, rôtis vifs, mangés, et les enfans arrachés du ventre de leurs mères_." The tendency in furnishing information to the French government was always to exaggerate the havoc wrought by the Indians. At the time Frontenac wrote this despatch he was not aware of the further massacre at La Chesnaye, the news of which only reached him on the 17th of November.]