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Updated: June 8, 2025
Piskaret and his followers crouched in the bushes at the point for which the canoes were making, and, as the foremost drew near, each chose his mark, and fired with such good effect that, of seven warriors, all but one were killed. The survivor jumped overboard, and swam for the other canoe, where he was taken in.
Peace seemed to have come to the forests. The Piskaret party might well consider that they had opened the way. The happy priests gave thanks to Heaven that their prayers had been answered, and that the hearts of the Iroquois, the Algonkins and the Hurons were soft to the teachings of Christianity. Now, would the peace last? Yes for twelve months, with the Mohawks alone.
Their teachings were all of peace rather than war between men. Yet each and every one of them was as bold as Piskaret, and to bring about peace would gladly go as far as he, and farther. Now he did not lack followers. In the early spring of 1645, scarce a twelve-month after his famous lone scout, he took with him six other "Christian" Algonkin warriors, again to hunt the Iroquois.
After each promise of good-will he passed out a broad belt of wampum, until the line upon which the belts were hung was sagging with more than fifteen. By these beaded belts the promises were sealed. Piskaret was here. It was necessary for him to give a present that should "wipe out the memory of the Iroquois blood he had shed," and this he did.
He set out alone, on foot, like Piskaret, the Adirondack, had set out in his great adventure against the Iroquois. By night journeys he traveled two hundred miles, living on the parched corn in his pouch, until he was seven days hungry when at last he came to the Arikaree town where the lodge of Wongatap was located.
Simon Piskaret was his full name as recorded in the mission books, for he and others of Allumette Island had been baptised by the priests. But with them this was much a method of getting protection, food and powder from these French; and an old writer of 1647 says that Piskaret was a Christian only by "appearance and policy."
The Indians fired their guns, and screeched in jubilation; one Jean Baptiste, a Christian chief of Sillery, made a speech from the shore; Piskaret replied, standing upright in his canoe; and, to crown the occasion, a squad of soldiers, marching in haste from Quebec, fired a salute of musketry, to the boundless delight of the Indians.
They ranged the fields and forests in vain pursuit of the mysterious enemy, who remained all day in the wood-pile, whence, at midnight, he came forth and repeated his former exploit. On the third night, every family placed its sentinels; and Piskaret, stealthily creeping from lodge to lodge, and reconnoitring each through crevices in the bark, saw watchers everywhere.
The two captives, believing that the hour of torture was near, sang their own songs of defiance. That was a strange sight, to be nearing Sillery. So the good father in charge of Sillery sent a runner to Quebec. He himself, with his assistants, joined the crowd of Algonkins gathered at the river shore. The canoes came on. The scalps and the two prisoners were plain to be seen. Piskaret!
It was in early spring, about the year 1644, that the warrior Piskaret of the Adirondack tribe of the Algonkins set forth alone from the island Allumette in the Ottawa River, Canada, to seek his enemies the Iroquois.
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