Everything about The French And Iroquois Wars totally explained
The
French and Iroquois Wars, also called the
Iroquois Wars or the
Beaver Wars, commonly refer to a brutal series of conflicts fought in the mid-
17th century in eastern
North America. The
Iroquois sought to expand their territory and monopolize the
fur trade and the trade between European markets and the tribes of the western
Great Lakes region. The conflict pitted the nations of the Iroquois Confederation, led by the dominant
Mohawk, against the largely
Algonquian-speaking tribes of the
Great Lakes region.
The wars were extremely brutal and are considered one of the bloodiest series of conflicts in the
history of North America. The resultant enlargement of Iroquois territory realigned the tribal geography of North America, destroying several large tribal confederacies—including the
Hurons,
Neutrals,
Eries, and
Susquehannocks—and pushing other eastern tribes west of the
Mississippi River. The
Ohio country and the
Lower Peninsula of Michigan were virtually emptied of Native people, as refugees fled west to escape Iroquois warriors. (This region would be repopulated by these Ohio people not long after, although generally in multi-ethnic indigenous "republics" rather than homogenous, discrete "tribes".)
Both
Algonquian and
Iroquoian societies were greatly disturbed by these wars. The conflict subsided with the loss by the Iroquois of their
Dutch allies in the
New Netherland colony, and with a growing French desire to seek the Iroquois as an ally against
English encroachment. Subsequently, the Iroquois became trading partners with the British, which was a crucial component of later British expansion.
Origins
Written records for the
St. Lawrence valley begin with the voyages of
Jacques Cartier in the 1540s. Cartier tells of encounters with the
St. Lawrence Iroquoians, also known as the Stadaconans or Laurentians, occupying several fortified villages, including
Stadacona and
Hochelaga. Cartier records that the Stadaconans were at war with another tribe known as the
Toudamans who had destroyed one of their forts the previous year, resulting in 200 deaths. Continental wars and politics distracted further French efforts at colonization in the St. Lawrence Valley until the beginning of the
17th century. When the French returned, they were surprised to find that the sites of both Stadacona and Hochelaga were abandoned—completely destroyed by an unknown enemy.
Some historians have attempted to implicate the
Iroquois Confederacy in the destruction of Stadacona and Hochelaga, but there's little evidence to support that claim. Iroquois oral tradition, as recorded in the
Jesuit Relations, speaks of a draining war between the Mohawk Iroquois and an alliance of the Susquehannocks and
Algonquins sometime between 1580 and 1600. Thus, when the French reappeared on the scene in 1601, the St. Lawrence Valley had already witnessed generations of blood-feud-style warfare. Indeed, when
Samuel de Champlain landed at
Tadoussac on the St. Lawrence, he and his small company of French adventurers were almost immediately recruited by the
Montagnais,
Algonquins and Hurons to assist them in attacking their enemies.
Before 1603, Champlain had formed an offensive alliance against the Iroquois. Its rational was commercial, the Canadian Indians were the French source of peltry and the Iroquois interfered with that trade. The first encounter was a battle in 1609 fought on Champlain's initiative. He wrote "I had come with no other intention than to make war". Champlain fought in the company of his Algonquin allies a pitched battle with the Iroquois on the shores of
Lake Champlain. Champlain himself killed three Iroquois chiefs with an
arquebus. In 1610, Champlain and his arquebus-wielding French companions helped the
Algonquins and Hurons defeat a large Iroquois raiding party. In
1615, Champlain joined a Huron raiding party and took part in a siege on an Iroquois town, probably among the
Onondagas. The extended attack ultimately failed, and Champlain was injured in the attempt.
At the time of the conflict, the Iroquois inhabited a region of present-day
New York south of
Lake Ontario and west of the
Hudson River. The Iroquois lands comprised an ethnic island, surrounded on all sides by Algonquian-speaking Nations, including the
Shawnee to the west in the Ohio Country, as well as by
Iroquoian-speaking Huron on the north along the St. Lawrence River, who were not part of the Iroquois Confederation.
In 1628, after the Mohawks defeated the
Mahicans and had established a monopoly of trade with the Dutch at
Fort Orange,
New Netherland, the Iroquois, and in particular the Mohawk, had come to rely on the trade for the purchase of firearms and other European goods. By the 1630s, the Iroquois had become fully armed with European weaponry through their trade with the Dutch, and they began to use their growing expertise with the arquebus to good effect in their continuing wars with the Algonquins, Hurons, and other traditional enemies. The French, meanwhile, had outlawed the trading of firearms to their native allies, though arquebuses were occasionally given as gifts to individuals who converted to
Christianity. Although the initial focus of the Iroquois attacks were their traditional enemies (the Algonquins,
Mahicans,
Montagnais, and Hurons), the alliance of these tribes with the French quickly brought the Iroquois into fierce and bloody conflict with the European colonists themselves.
The introduction of firearms, however, had accelerated the decline of the beaver population such that by 1640 the animal had largely disappeared from the Hudson Valley. Some historians have argued that the wars were accelerated by the growing scarcity of the
beaver in the lands controlled by the Iroquois in the middle 17th century. The center of the fur trade thus shifted northward to the colder regions along the St. Lawrence River, controlled by the Hurons, who were the close trading partners of the French in
New France. The Iroquois, who considered themselves to be the most civilized and advanced people of the region, found themselves displaced in the fur trade by other nations in the region. Threatened by disease and with a declining population, the Iroquois began an aggressive campaign to expand their area of control.
Iroquois attacks in New France
In 1641, the Mohawks traveled to Trois Rivieres in New France to propose peace with the French and their allied tribes and requested that the French set up a trading post in Iroquoia. Governor
Montmagny rejected this proposal because it would imply abandonment of their Huron allies.
The war began in earnest in the early 1640s with Iroquois attacks on frontier
Wyandot villages along the
St. Lawrence River, with the intent of disrupting the Wyandot trade with the French. In 1648, the Dutch authorized the direct sale of guns to the Mohawks rather than through traders, after which four hundred guns were promptly sold. In 1649, the Iroquois launched a devastating attack into the heart of Wyandot territory, destroying several key villages and killing hundreds, if not thousands, amongst whom were the Jesuit missionaries
Jean Brebeuf,
Charles Garnier, and
Gabriel Lallemant—all of whom are considered
martyrs of the
Roman Catholic Church. Following these attacks, the remaining Wyandot dispersed to seek assistance from the
Anishinaabek Confederacy in the Great Lakes, leaving the Oodaawaa Nation
Ottawa to later fill the vacuum in the fur trade with the French. It seems the Iroquois motive for this attack was to remove the Huron's special relationship with New France.
In the early 1650s, the Iroquois began attacking the French. Some of the Iroquois Nations, notably the
Oneida and
Onondaga, had peaceful relations with the French but were under control of the Mohawk, who were the strongest nation in the Confederation and were hostile to the French presence. After a failed peace treaty negotiated by
Chief Canaqueese, Iroquois war parties moved north into New France along the
Lake Champlain and the
Richelieu River, attacking and blockading
Montreal. Typically a raid on an isolated farm or settlement consisted of a war party moving swiftly and silently through the woods, swooping down suddenly, and wielding a
tomahawk and a
scalping knife to attack the inhabitants. In some cases, prisoners were brought back to the Iroquois homelands. In the case of women and children, prisoners were incorporated into the nation.
Although such raids were by no means constant, when they occurred they were terrifying to the inhabitants of New France, and the colonists initially felt helpless to prevent them. Some of the heroes of French-Canadian folk memory are of individuals who stood up to such attacks, such as
Dollard des Ormeaux, who died in May 1660 while resisting an Iroquois raiding force at the
Long Sault at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the
Ottawa Rivers. He succeeded in saving Montreal by his sacrifice. Another such hero was
Madeleine de Verchères, who in 1692 at age 14 led the defense of her family farm against Iroquois attack.
Iroquois expansion in the west
At the same time that the Iroquois were attacking northward, they also began a major expansion to the west along Great Lakes. By 1650, they controlled a region of North America extending from the
Virginia Colony in the south up to the St. Lawrence. In the west, the Iroquois engaged in a wide-ranging campaign of conquest. Led by the
Senecas, Iroquois war parties first destroyed the Attawandaron, or
Neutral Nation, located in southern Ontario. They next annihilated another sizable confederacy known as the Eries or
Nation of the Cat who had occupied the shores of
Lake Erie. Then, they drove the Algonquin-speaking Shawnee out of the Ohio Country and seized control of the
Illinois Country as far west as the Mississippi River.
As a result of Iroquois expansion and war with the Anishinaabek Confederacy, eastern Nations such as the
Lakota were pushed across the Mississippi onto the
Great Plains, adopting the nomadic lifestyle for which they later became well known. Other refugees flooded the Great Lakes area, resulting in a conflict with existing nations in the region. The vast majority of the fighting was between the Anishininaabek Confederacy and the Iroquois Confederacy. One of the last great battles was fought on what is now called
Wasaga Beach.
French counterattack
The tide of war began to turn in the mid 1660s with the arrival of a small contingent of regular troops from France, the brown-uniformed
Carignan-Salières Regiment—the first group of uniformed professional soldiers to set foot on what is today Canadian soil. At the same time, the Dutch allies of the Iroquois lost control of the New Netherland colony to the
English in the south.
In January 1666, the French invaded the Iroquois homeland, led by the aristocrat
Alexandre de Prouville the "Marquis de Tracy" and viceroy of
New France. Although the invasion was abortive, they took Chief Canaqueese prisoner. In September, they proceeded down the
Richelieu River and marched through Iroquois territory a second time. Unable to find an Iroquois army, they resorted to burning their crops and homes. Many Iroquois died from starvation in the following winter.
The Iroquois sued for peace, which lasted a generation. In the meantime, many from the Carignan-Salieres regiment stayed on in the colony as settlers, significantly altering the colonial demography. They were, after all, hardened veteran soldiers, who before coming to Canada had fought the
Turks. They were rough in manners and speech, and any hope that local churchmen might have had of fostering a quiet, pietistic society on the banks of the St. Lawrence evaporated. After the departure of the Carignan-Salières regiment in 1667, with the Iroquois temporarily pacified, the colony's administrators at last took steps to form an effective
militia organization. Now all men in the colony between the ages of 16 and 65 (excluding the clergy and certain public officials) were issued a musket and ammunition and became liable for military service.
Resumption of the war
The war between the French and Iroquois resumed in the 1683 after the Governor
Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, attempted to enrich his own fortune by pursuing the western fur-trade with a new aggressiveness, which adversely affected the growing activities of the Iroquois in this area. This time the war lasted ten years and was as bloody as the first.
With renewal of hostilities the local militia was stiffened after 1683 by a small force of regular troops of the French navy, the
Compagnies Franches de la Marine. The latter were to constitute the longest-serving unit of French regular force troops in New France. The men came to identify themselves with the colony over the years, while the officer corps became completely Canadianized. Thus in a sense these troops can be identified as Canada's first standing professional armed force. Officers' commissions both in the militia and in the Compagnie Franches became much coveted positions amongst the socially eminent of the colony. The militia together with members of the Compagnie Franches, dressed in the manner of their Algonquin Indian allies, came to specialize in that swift and mobile brand of warfare termed
la petite guerre, that was characterized by long and silent expeditions through the forests and sudden and violent descents upon enemy encampments and settlements—the same kind of warfare that was practiced against them by the Iroquois.
During
King William's War, the French urged the Indians to attack the English colonial settlements. Some of the most notable of these raids in 1690 were the
Schenectady massacre in the
Province of New York,
Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, and
Portland, Maine. As in the Iroquois raids, the inhabitants were either indiscriminately slaughtered or carried away captive.
Great Peace
Finally in 1698, increasingly seeing themselves as the convenient scapegoat in what was essentially an English inspired war, the Iroquois sued for peace ending the wars. The French, meanwhile, were eager to have the Iroquois as a bulwark between New France and the English to the south. The peace treaty,
Great Peace of Montreal was signed in 1701 in Montreal by 39 Indian chiefs, the French and the English. In the treaty, the Iroquois agreed to stop marauding and to allow refugees from the Great Lakes to return east. The Shawnee eventually regained control of the Ohio Country and the lower
Allegheny River.
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