Piquet had chosen his site with great skill. His activity was
admirable. His first stockade was burned by Indian incendiaries; but it
rose quickly from its ashes, and within a year or two the mission of La
Presentation had a fort of palisades flanked with blockhouses, a chapel,
a storehouse, a barn, a stable, ovens, a saw-mill, broad fields of corn
and beans, and three villages of Iroquois, containing, in all,
forty-nine bark lodges, each holding three or four families, more or
less converted to the Faith; and, as time went on, this number
increased. The Governor had sent a squad of soldiers to man the fort,
and five small cannon to mount upon it. The place was as safe for the
new proselytes as it was convenient and agreeable. The Pennsylvanian
interpreter, Conrad Weiser, was told at Onondaga, the Iroquois capital,
that Piquet had made a hundred converts from that place alone; and that,
"having clothed them all in very fine clothes, laced with silver and
gold, he took them down and presented them to the French Governor at
Montreal, who received them very kindly, and made them large
presents."[31]
[Footnote 29: I once saw a contemporary portrait of him at the mission
of Two Mountains, where he had been stationed.]
[Footnote 30: _Rouille a la Jonquiere_, 1749. The Intendant Bigot gave
him money and provisions. _N.Y. Col. Docs., X_. 204.]
[Footnote 31: _Journal of Conrad Weiser,_ 1750.
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