Four days later another alarm aroused the fort. About two hours after midnight, a band of forty Iroquois attacked the brewery and some of the houses. Two of these, belonging to Urbain Tessier _dit_ Lavigne and Michel Chauvin, they burned, and the brewery would have been reduced to ashes if the guard of four men within, had not repulsed their attack with vigour and put them to flight.
On the 18th of June, on a Sunday morning, a party of four, probably returning to their newly constructed houses from the church in the fort, was surprised between the fort and Point St. Charles by a large body of Iroquois. These four ran to a hut used as a kind of watch house or redoubt, overlooking a quantity of felled timber, where they were quickly joined by Urbain Tessier and, resolving to sell their lives dearly, they kept up a lively fusillade on the enemy.
The noise attracted de Maisonneuve in camp and he sent a relief party under Charles Le Moyne with such success that the Iroquois were put to flight, leaving behind them twenty-five to thirty men dead on the field, independently of those who were taken prisoners. On the French side only four were wounded, although one of them, Léonard Lucault _dit_ Barbot, died two days afterwards, being buried in the cemetery. Belmont, in his "Histoire du Canada," mentions another among the dead, but the parish register only mentions one.
Thus, amid such daily hostilities, was life insecurely led by the settlers, since it was not safe to venture even a few yards from their houses without pistol, musket or sword.
Jeanne Mance, in a memoir to be found among the archives of the seminary at Quebec, tells how the governor now obliged all the colonists to leave their newly constructed houses and retire with their families to the safety of the fort. She herself was forced to leave the hospital. Maisonneuve turned this into a military outpost to guard the isolated redoubts scattered here and there in the field and to protect the workmen, by placing in it a squad of soldiers. He had two pieces of cannon taken there and swivel guns for the windows of the granaries, and he had loopholes cut into the walls of the building all around, even in the chapel which served as an artillery armoury.