The
parishes of L'Ange Gardien, Chateau Richer, and St. Joachim were wasted
with fire and sword. Night after night the garrison of Quebec could see
the light of burning houses as far down as the mountain of Cape
Tourmente. Near St. Joachim there was a severe skirmish, followed by
atrocious cruelties. Captain Alexander Montgomery, of the forty-third
regiment, who commanded the detachment, and who has been most unjustly
confounded with the revolutionary general, Richard Montgomery, ordered
the prisoners to be shot in cold blood, to the indignation of his own
officers.[753] Robineau de Portneuf, cure of St. Joachim, placed himself
at the head of thirty parishioners and took possession of a large stone
house in the adjacent parish of Chateau Richer, where for a time he held
the English at bay. At length he and his followers were drawn out into
ambush, where they were surrounded and killed; and, being disguised as
Indians, the rangers scalped them all.[754]
[Footnote 753: Fraser _Journal_. Fraser was an officer under Montgomery,
of whom he speaks with anger and disgust.]
[Footnote 754: Knox, II. 32. Most of the contemporary journals mention
the incident.]
Most of the French writers of the time mention these barbarities without
much comment, while Vaudreuil loudly denounces them. Yet he himself was
answerable for atrocities incomparably worse, and on a far larger scale.
He had turned loose his savages, red and white, along a frontier of six
hundred miles, to waste, burn, and murder at will.
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