He was awarded a land grant on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River on 29 October 1672 in a seigneury called Verchères and thereafter continued to increase his landholdings.

One Iroquois caught up to her and grabbed her by her kerchief which she quickly released, then Madeleine ran into the fort shouting, "Aux armes!

Madeleine fired a musket and encouraged the people to make as much noise as possible so that the Iroquois would think there were many soldiers defending the fort.

The Iroquois had hoped a surprise attack would easily take over the fort, so for a moment, they retreated into the bushes with their prisoners.

[4] Madeleine managed Verchères until her marriage in September 1706 to Pierre-Thomas Tarieu de La Pérade, who was a lieutenant in the regular troops of New France.

The complex land titles led to numerous lawsuits over the course of her life, and Madeleine sailed to France at least three times to represent herself and her husband in court.

The earliest is a letter Madeleine wrote to the Comtesse de Maurepas 15 October 1699,[2] in which she gives her story in a petition for a pension.

[7] In 1730 Gervais Levebre, a priest against whom Madeleine had initiated a legal process, was recorded stating, "God fears neither hero nor heroine", which suggests her story was well known by that time.

In her first account, Madeleine describes how she escaped from an Iroquois by leaving her scarf in his hands and then replacing her headdress with a soldier's helmet.

[10] The 1730 lawsuit was over the priest Levebre's calling Madeleine a "whore", which may suggest notions of free sexuality the public had of women who assumed such a traditionally male role as that of a warrior.

[8] Many writers took pains to ensure that, after the siege, Madeleine returned fully to her traditional feminine role and demeanor.

[11] Comparisons have been drawn between Madeleine and Joan of Arc—both unmarried teenagers who dressed as males—and to Jeanne Hachette, who led the defense of Beauvais.

Parallels have also been seen with Madeleine's contemporary Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, the hero of the Battle of Long Sault during the Beaver Wars.

[12] In the wake of the Conscription Crisis of 1917, Marie-Victorin Kirouac wrote a play, Peuple sans histoire ("A people without history", 1918).

To rally support for the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, Arthur Doughty's account of 1916 makes parallels between the Germans in World War I and the Iroquois who stood in the way of "the advance of European civilization".

Other efforts led to the federal government donating $25,000, and the wife of the mayor of Verchères unveiled the statue in a ceremony on 20 September 1913.