I had never heard of the Beaver Wars until I came across this Facebook Post...It is LONG, but is a fascinating read, covering the period before the beginning of the French & Indian War...
The Beaver Wars : When I Look at a map of The Beaver Wars, I'm truly amazed at How Powerful The Iroquois 5 Nations Were and How Much Ground They Covered and How Many Indian Nations They Destroyed. Remember they were on foot and were not like The Great Plains Warrior Tribes who were Amazing Horse Warriors.
A French Monk described an Iroquois Five Nation Attack " They Approach Like Fox , Attack Like Lions , and disappear into The Forest like a flight of birds ". The Beaver Wars, also known as the Iroquois Wars or the French and Iroquois Wars, commonly refers to a series of conflicts fought in the mid-17th century in eastern North America. Encouraged and armed by their Dutch and English trading partners, 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 French-backed and largely Algonquian-speaking tribes of the Great Lakes region.
The wars were brutal and are considered one of the bloodiest series of conflicts in the history of North America. As the Iroquois succeeded in the war and enlarged their territory, they realigned the tribal geography of North America, and destroyed several large tribal confederacies—including the Huron, Neutral, Erie, and Susquehannock—and pushed some eastern tribes west of the Mississippi River, or southward into the Carolinas. The Iroquois also controlled the Ohio Valley lands as hunting ground, from about 1670 onward, as far as can be determined from contemporary French (Jesuit) accounts. The Ohio Country and the Lower Peninsula of Michigan were virtually emptied of Native people as refugees fled westward to escape Iroquois warriors (much of this region was later repopulated by Native peoples nominally subjected to the Six Nations; see Mingo).
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 objective to gain the Iroquois as an ally against English encroachment. After the Iroquois became trading partners with the English, their alliance was a crucial component of the later English expansion. They used the Iroquois conquests as a claim to the old Northwest.
* ( Beaver War Origins ) The expeditions of French explorer Jacques Cartier in the 1540s made the first written records of the Native Americans in North America. French explorers and fishermen had traded in the region near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River estuary a decade before then for valuable furs. Cartier wrote of encounters with a people later classified as the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, also known as the Stadaconan or Laurentian people, who occupied several fortified villages, including Stadacona and Hochelaga. Cartier recorded an ongoing war between the Stadaconans and another tribe known as the Toudaman, who had destroyed one of their forts the previous year, resulting in 200 deaths.
Wars and politics in Europe distracted French efforts at colonization in the St. Lawrence Valley until the beginning of the 17th century, when they founded Quebec in 1608. When the French returned to the area, they found the sites of both Stadacona and Hochelaga abandoned, completely destroyed by an unknown enemy.
Based on analysis of political and economic conditions at the time, some anthropologists and historians have suggested that the Mohawk Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy destroyed and drove out the St. Lawrence Iroquoians. When the French returned, they found no inhabitants in this part of the upper river valley. The Iroquois and the Iroquoian-speaking Huron used it as hunting ground. The causes remain unclear. (Iroquois oral tradition, as recorded in the Jesuit Relations, speaks of a draining war between the Mohawk and an alliance of the Susquehannock and Algonquin sometime between 1580 and 1600). This was perhaps in response to the formation of the League of the Iroquois (The American Heritage Book of Indians puts this as taking place about 1570).
When the French returned in 1601, the St. Lawrence Valley had already been the site of generations of blood feud-style warfare, as characterized the relations of the Iroquois with virtually all neighboring peoples. In 1603, when Samuel de Champlain visited Tadoussac near the St. Lawrence, the Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron almost immediately recruited him and his small company of French adventurers to assist in attacking their Iroquois enemies upriver. Before 1603, Champlain had formed an offensive alliance against the Iroquois. He decided that the French would not trade firearms to the Iroquois. He had a commercial rationale: the northern Natives provided the French with valuable furs and the Iroquois, based in present-day New York, interfered with that trade. The first deliberate battle with the Iroquois in 1609 was fought at Champlain's initiative. Narrative makes it plain Champlain deliberately went along with a war party down Lake Champlain, and further, this battle created 150 years of mistrust that poisoned any chances that French-Iroquois alliances would be durable and long lived. Champlain wrote, "I had come with no other intention than to make war".[9] In the company of his Huron and Algonkin allies, Champlain and his forces fought a pitched battle with the Mohawk on the shores of Lake Champlain.[8] Champlain singlehandedly[8] killed three chiefs with an arquebus despite the war chiefs having worn "arrowproof body armor made of plaited sticks".
In 1610, Champlain and his armed French companions helped the Algonquin and the Huron 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 Onondaga south of Lake Ontario (in present-day New York State). The attack ultimately failed, and Champlain was injured. After Hudson River's discovery for the Dutch East India Company in 1609, a year-round trading post was placed near Albany. At Fort Nassau the Dutch were surrounded by 1600 warriors and families of the Mahican tribe (Algonquian). The Dutch offered to buy the land off of the Mahicans but allowed traders to live among them as valued guests and in 1618 they had an agreement with the traders around. In the earlier 17th century, the great potential was yet to be discovered west towards the Great Lakes. 1617 Fort Nassau was abandoned due to flooding and in 1624 Fort Orange was built. Fort Orange renewed efforts to exploit traffic along the Mahicans Channel, and thus started war with the Mohawks. In 1626 the Dutch and the Mahicans were ambushed by Mohawks who were only armed with bows and arrows. The Dutch withdrew from the treaty with the Mahicans and made a truce with the Mohawks. The Mohawks wanted to avoid further conflict with Fort Orange. They wanted to prosper rather than destroy it. By 1628 the Mohawks defeated the Mahicans, who eventually fled to the Connecticut Valley. The Mohawks did not intend to defeat the Mahicans to open free trade; rather, they wanted to destroy Dutch trade.
* ( Dutch competition ) In 1610-1614, the Dutch established a series of seasonal trading posts on the Hudson and Delaware rivers, including one on Castle Island at the eastern edge of Mohawk territory near present-day Albany. This gave the Iroquois direct access (through the Mohawk) to European markets. The Dutch trading efforts and eventual colonies in New Jersey and Delaware soon also established trade with the coastal Delaware nation (Lenape) and more southerly Susquehannock. The Dutch were reluctant to trade firearms to the Delaware. Their founding in 1614 of Fort Nassau and its 1624 replacement by Fort Orange (both at Albany) removed the Iroquois' need to rely on the French and their allied tribes or to have to travel through southern tribal territories to reach European traders. The Dutch supplied the Mohawk and other Iroquois with guns.In addition, the new post offered valuable tools that the Iroquois could receive in exchange for animal pelts.[6] They began large-scale hunting for furs to satisfy demand among their peoples for new products.
At this time, conflict began to grow quickly between the Iroquois and the Indigenous people supported by the French. The Iroquois inhabited the region of present-day New York south of Lake Ontario and west of the Hudson River. The Iroquois lands comprised a large ethnic island, surrounded on all sides but the south by Algonquian-speaking nations, all traditional enemies—including the Shawnee to the west in the Ohio Country. Their rivals also included the Iroquoian-speaking Neutral Nation and Huron confederacies, who lived on the western shore of Lake Ontario and southern shore of Lake Huron to the west, respectively, and the Susquehannock to their south. While part of the Iroquoian-speaking language family, these tribes historically were competitive with and sometimes enemies of the Iroquois, who at that time had Five Nations in their confederacy.
* ( Beaver Wars begin ) In 1628 the Mohawk defeated the Mahican, pushing them east of the Hudson River and establishing a monopoly of trade with the Dutch at Fort Orange (later Albany, New York), New Netherland. In the same era, the Susquehannock, also well armed by Dutch traders, effectively reduced the strength of the Delaware and won a protracted declared war with the English-dominated Province of Maryland. By the 1630s, the Iroquois had become fully armed with European weaponry through their trade with the Dutch. The Iroquois (particularly the Mohawk), had come to rely on the trade for firearms and other highly valued and much coveted European goods for their livelihood and survival. They used their growing expertise with the arquebus to good effect in their continuing wars with the Algonquin, Huron, and other traditional enemies. The French, meanwhile, outlawed the trading of firearms to their native allies, though they occasionally gave arquebuses as gifts to individuals who converted to Christianity. Although the Iroquois first attacked 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 directly with the colonists.
The expansion of hunting for the fur trade with Europe accelerated the decline of the beaver population in the region. By 1640 the animal had largely disappeared from the Hudson Valley. Historian-editors of American Heritage Magazine have noted that the growing scarcity of the beaver in the lands controlled by the Iroquois in the middle 17th century accelerated the wars. The center of the fur trade shifted northward to the colder regions of present-day southern Ontario, an area controlled by the Neutral as well as by the Huron peoples, who were close trading partners of the French. The Iroquois, displaced in that region by other nations, and threatened by their high losses to smallpox and other infectious disease, began an aggressive campaign to expand their area of control.
* ( Course of war ) With the decline of the beaver population, the Iroquois began to conquer their smaller neighbors. They attacked the Wenro in 1638 and took all of their territory. Survivors fled to the Hurons for refuge. The Wenro had served as a buffer between the Iroquois and the Neutral tribe and Erie allies. These two tribes were considerably larger and more powerful than the Iroquois. With expansion to the west blocked, the Iroquois turned their attention to the north.The Dutch also encouraged the Iroquois in this strategy. At that time, the Dutch were the Iroquois' primary European trading partners, with their goods passing through Dutch trading posts down the Hudson River and from there sent back to Europe. As the Iroquois' sources of furs declined, so did the income of the trading posts. In 1641, the Mohawks traveled to Trois-Rivières in New France to propose peace with the French and their allied tribes. They asked the French to set up a trading post in Iroquoia. Governor Montmagny rejected this proposal because it would imply abandonment of their Huron allies.
In the early 1640s, the war began in earnest with Iroquois attacks on frontier Huron villages along the St. Lawrence River; their intent was disruption of the trade with the French. In 1645 the French called the tribes together to negotiate a treaty to end the conflict. Two Iroquois leaders, Deganaweida and Koiseaton, traveled to New France to take part in the negotiations. The French agreed to most of the Iroquois demands, granting them trading rights in New France. The next summer a fleet of eighty canoes carrying a large harvest of furs traveled through Iroquois territory to be sold in New France. When the Iroquois arrived, the French refused to purchase the furs and told the Iroquois to sell them to the Huron, who would act as a middleman. Outraged, the Iroquois resumed the war.
The French decided to become directly involved in the conflict. The Huron and the Iroquois had similar access to manpower, each tribe having an estimated 25,000–30,000 members.To gain the upper hand, in 1647 the Huron and Susquehannock formed an alliance to counter Iroquois aggression. Together their warriors greatly outnumbered those of the Iroquois. The Huron tried to break the Iroquois Confederacy by negotiating separate peaces with the Onondaga and the Cayuga. When the other tribes intercepted their messengers, they put an end to the negotiations. During the summer of 1647 there were several small skirmishes between the tribes. In 1648 a more significant battle occurred when the two Algonquin tribes attempted to pass a fur convoy through an Iroquois blockade. Their attempt succeeded and they inflicted high casualties on the Iroquois.[16] In the early 1650s the Iroquois began attacking the French themselves, although some of the Iroquois tribes, notably the Oneida and Onondaga, had peaceful relations with the French, but were under control of the Mohawk, who were the strongest tribe in the Confederation and had animosity towards the French presence.
After a failed peace treaty negotiated by Chief Canaqueese, Iroquois moved north into New France along the Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River, attacking and blockading Montreal. By 1650 they controlled the area from the Virginia Colony in the south up to the St. Lawrence. In the west, the Iroquois had driven the Algonquin-speaking Shawnee out of the Ohio Country and seized control of the Illinois Country as far west as the Mississippi River. In January 1666 the French invaded the Iroquois and took the Chief Canaqueese prisoner. In September they proceeded down the Richelieu; unable to find an Iroquois army, they resorted to burning their crops and homes. Many Iroquois died from starvation in the following winter. The 1701 Grande Paix (Great Peace) in Montreal was signed 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.
During the following years, the Iroquois strengthened their confederacy to work more closely and create an effective central leadership. Although the workings of their government remain largely unknown, by the 1660s the five Iroquois nations ceased fighting among themselves. They also easily coordinated military and economic plans among all five nations. As a result, they increased their power and achieved a level of government more advanced than the decentralized operations of the surrounding tribes. Although Indian raids were not constant, they terrified the inhabitants of New France. Initially, the colonists felt helpless to prevent them. Some of the heroes of French-Canadian folk memory are individuals who stood up to such attacks. Dollard des Ormeaux, for example, who died in May 1660 while resisting an Iroquois raiding force at the Battle of Long Sault, the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa Rivers, succeeded in saving Montreal by his actions. In 1692, 14-year-old Marie-Madeleine Jarret (renowned as Madeleine de Verchères) successfully frustrated an Iroquois attack on Fort Verchères.
* ( Defeat of the Huron ) In 1648, the Dutch authorized selling guns directly to the Mohawk rather than through traders, and promptly sold 400 to the Iroquois. The Confederacy sent 1,000 newly armed warriors through the woods to Huron territory. With the onset of winter, the Iroquois warriors launched a devastating attack into the heart of Huron territory, destroying several key villages, killing many warriors and taking thousands of people captive, for later adoption into the tribe. Among those killed were the Jesuit missionaries Jean Brebeuf, Charles Garnier, and Gabriel Lallemant. Each is considered a martyr of the Roman Catholic Church. The surviving Huron fled their territory to seek assistance from the Anishinaabeg Confederacy in the northern Great Lakes region. The Odaawaa Nation (Ottawa) temporarily halted Iroquois expansion further northwest. With the Hurons' withdrawal, the Iroquois controlled a fur-rich region and had no more native tribes blocking them from the French settlements in Canada.
** European diseases had taken their toll on the Iroquois and neighbors in the years preceding the war, however, and their populations had drastically declined. To replace lost warriors, the Iroquois worked to integrate many of their captured enemy by adoption into their own tribes. They invited Jesuits into their territory to teach those who had converted to Christianity. One priest recorded, "As far as I can divine, It is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Huron...put the Chiefs to death...and with the rest to form one nation and country". The Jesuits also reached out to the Iroquois, many of whom converted to or added Roman Catholicism to indigenous belief. The converted Iroquois would play an important part in the years to come.
In the early 1650s, the Iroquois began to attack 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. The latter were the strongest nation in the Confederacy 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 Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. They attacked and blockaded 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 without warning. In many cases, prisoners, especially women and children, were brought back to the Iroquois homelands and were adopted into the nations.
* ( Defeat of the Erie and Neutral ) The Iroquois attacked the Neutral Nation in 1650. By the end of 1651, they had completely driven the tribe from traditional territory, killing or assimilating thousands. At the time, the Neutrals inhabited a territory ranging from the present-day Niagara Peninsula, westward to the Grand River valley.
In 1654 the Iroquois attacked the Erie, but with less success. The war between the Erie and the Iroquois lasted for two years. By 1656 the Iroquois had almost completely destroyed the Erie confederacy, whose members refused to flee to the west. The Erie territory was located on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie and was estimated to have 12,000 members in 1650. Greatly outnumbered by the tribes they had subdued, the Iroquois had been able to achieve their victories through the use of firearms purchased from the Dutch.
* ( French counterattack ) The Iroquois continued to control the countryside of New France, raiding to the edges of the walled settlements of Quebec and Montreal. In May 1660 an Iroquois force of 160 warriors attacked Montreal and captured 17 colonists. The following year, an attack by 250 warriors yielded ten captives. In 1661 and 1662 the Iroquois made several raids against the Abenakis, who were allied with the French. The French Crown ordered a change to the governing of Canada. They put together a small military force made up of Frenchmen, Huron, and Algonquin to counter the Iroquois raids. When the militia ventured into the countryside, they were attacked by the Iroquois. Only 29 of the French survived and escaped. Five were captured and tortured to death by the Iroquois in retaliation. Despite their victory, the Iroquois also suffered a significant number of casualties. Their leaders began to consider negotiating for peace with the French.
Topic: The Beaver Wars: Part I (Read 47 times)