The Iroquois were tricked but not disarmed. Beside themselves with rage
at the thought that so many victims about to be sacrificed to their
hatred had escaped their blows, and desiring to end once for all the
feud with their enemies, the Onondagas, they persuaded the other nations
to join them in a rush upon Quebec. They succeeded easily, and twelve
hundred savage warriors assembled at Cleft Rock, on the outskirts of
Montreal, and exposed the colony to the most terrible danger which it
had yet experienced.

This was indeed a great peril; the dwellings above Quebec were without
defence, and separated so far from each other that they stretched out
nearly two leagues. But providentially the plan of these terrible foes
was made known to the inhabitants of the town through an Iroquois
prisoner. Immediately the most feverish activity was exerted in
preparations for defence; the country houses and those of the Lower Town
were abandoned, and the inhabitants took refuge in the palace, in the
fort, with the Ursulines, or with the Jesuits; redoubts were raised,
loop-holes bored and patrols established. At Ville-Marie no fewer
precautions were taken; the governor surrounded a mill which he had
erected in 1658, by a palisade, a ditch, and four bastions well
entrenched. It stood on a height of the St. Louis Hill, and, called at
first the Mill on the Hill, it became later the citadel of Montreal.
Anxiety still prevailed everywhere, but God, who knows how to raise up,
in the very moment of despair, the instruments which He uses in His
infinite wisdom to protect the countries dear to His heart, that same
God who gave to France the heroic Joan of Arc, produced for Canada an
unexpected defender. Dollard and sixteen brave Montrealers were to offer
themselves as victims to save the colony. Their devotion, which
surpasses all that history shows of splendid daring, proves the
exaltation of the souls of those early colonists.