After their departure other Iroquois onslaughts resulted in the death of Jean Valets, at Point St. Charles, on August 14th, of the Sulpician M. Lemaître, and that of Gabriel de Rée with him on August 29th, near St. Gabriel's fortified farmhouse. M. Lemaître was saying his breviary in the fields and acting as a lookout, somewhat apart from the fourteen or fifteen workmen, when he suddenly came across an ambush of sixty Iroquois. Seizing a cutlass and facing the savage crew, he called out to the workers to hurry with their arms. He was now shot by the Iroquois and running towards his friends he dropped down dead. These managed to make their way to the farmhouse but left one man, Gabriel de Rée, dead on the field. The Iroquois cut off the heads of each, and one of them, a Christian renegade, put on the dead priest's soutane, and wearing a shirt over it for a surplice, went stalking around the body in mockery of the Christian burial service. The early memoirs of this event further tell that the head of the murdered priest had spoken after being severed from the body, and that when it had been carried away in a white handkerchief, probably taken from the pockets of his soutane, the features of the dead man became perfectly imprinted upon it. This handkerchief had been seen in the camp by a French prisoner, Lavigne, who tried in vain to obtain possession of it for, recognizing the features of the dead priest, he had learned of his massacre. This story he told to Dollier de Casson, who records it in his "Histoire de Montréal."
Meanwhile the party that had taken Father Le Moyne to Onondaga with the promise of leading back the twenty French prisoners in forty days had not returned, and great fear was entertained at Montreal for their safety. On October 5th, however, nine were brought back by the intercession of the friendly chief named Garacontié, the rest having been kept behind with Father Le Moyne during the coming winter.
On October 25th another disaster occurred in the little island à la Pierre, above St. Helen's Island,[88] whither a party had gone the day before to quarry stone for the new seminary, for up to this the Sulpicians still dwelt in the Hôtel-Dieu. Along with the party, joining them on the second day, was M. Lemaître's successor as "economus;" another Sulpician priest, M. Vignal, who went to supervise the work. Hardly had the party in the first boat, in which was M. Vignal, put foot to land, when they fell into an ambuscade, and M. Vignal was pierced with a sword, along with Sieur de Brigeac, a young soldier of thirty years of age; M. Maisonneuve's private secretary, René Cuillérier, and Jacques Dufresne. M. Vignal was thrown in the enemy's canoes and taken to La Prairie de la Madeleine, facing Montreal. The rest of the French escaped, except Jean Baptiste Moyen, who was left mortally wounded.