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Exploits such as Dollard's checked the Iroquois, but only a great accession of force to the colonists could subdue them. Fortunately help was at hand. The rulers of France had at last both the will and the power to aid. The young king, Louis XIV, and his great minister, Colbert, were for the moment keenly alive to the possibilities of colonial strength. The Hundred Associates, the trading company which for a generation had misruled New France, lost its charter, and in 1663 the colony came virtually under the king's direct control. Jean Talon, intendant or business manager of the colony, came out to play Colbert's part on the smaller stage. Soldiers and settlers streamed in for a decade, and the Marquis de Tracy, at the head of large French and Canadian forces, laid waste the Iroquois country and brought peace for a score of years.

One of the soldiers in Tracy's crack force, the regiment of Carignan-Salières, raised by the Prince de Carignan in Savoy, tried and hardened in campaigns against the Turk, and brought to Canada under Sieur de Salières, was François Cottineau, dit Champlaurier, the first of the Laurier name in Canada. François Cottineau was born in 1641 at St.-Cloud, near Rochefoucauld, in what was then the province of Angoumois and is now the department of Charente, son, as the records say, of Jean Cottineau, vine-grower, and Jeanne Dupuy. In that day, when family names were still in the making, doubtless some ancestral field of lauriers or oleanders had given a sept of the Cottineaus the additional surname which in time was to become their only one.