French and Iroquois Wars
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The French and Iroquois Wars (also called the Iroquois Wars or the Beaver Wars) commonly refer to an intermittent series of conflicts fought in the late 17th century in eastern North America, in which the Iroquois sought to expand their territory, defeat their traditional enemies, and monopolize the fur trade and weapons trade between the nascent European colonies and the tribes of the west. The conflict pitted the nations of the Iroquois Confederation, led by the dominant Mohawk tribe, against the largely Algonquin tribes of the area and their French allies. The wars were ones of extreme brutality on both sides and considered one of the bloodiest series of conflicts in the history of North America. The resultant expansion in 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 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.
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History
Origins of the conflict
Written records for the St. Lawrence valley begin with the voyages of Jacques Cartier in the 1540s. Cartier tells of encounters with an Iroquoian-speaking tribal group known to history as the Stadaconans or Laurentians occupying two fortified villages—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.
At some point during this same 60 year period, the Iroquois Confederacy was established. Some historians have attempted to implicate this new political and military force for the destruction of Stadacona and Hochelaga, but the evidence is too scanty to arrive at a solid conclusion. 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 highly ritualized, 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.
Relations between the Iroquois and the French were not harmonious in the early 17th century. The first encounter was in 1609, when Champlain, in the company of his Algonquin allies, engaged in a pitched battle with the Iroquois on the shores of Lake Champlain. Champlain himself killed three Iroquois chiefs with an arquebus and set the rest to flight. 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 the siege of an Iroquois town, probably among the Onondagas. The siege ultimately failed, and Champlain was injured in the attempt.
By the 1630s, however, the Iroquois had become fully armed with European weaponry through their trade with the Dutch, and 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 bloodly conflict with the European colonists themselves.
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. 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 tribes, 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.
With the establishment of Dutch trading posts in the Hudson in the 1620s, the Iroquois, and in particular the Mohawk, had come to rely on the trade for the purchase of firearms and other European goods. 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. 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 tribes 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
The war began in earnest in the early 1640s with Iroquois attacks on frontier Huron villages along the St. Lawrence, with the intent of disrupting the Huron trade with the French. In 1649, the Iroquois launched a devastating attack into the heart of Huronia, 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 Catholic Church. Following these attacks, the remaining Hurons dispersed to seek refuge on the islands in the Great Lakes, leaving the Ottawa to later fill the vacuum in the fur trade with the French.
In the early 1650s the Iroquois began attacking the French themselves. 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 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, wielding tomahawk and scalping knife to slaughter the all the inhabitants. In some cases, prisoners were carried back to the Iroquois homelands. In the case of women and children, such prisoners were sometimes incorporated into the tribe. In the case of men, the prisoners were often subjected to a slow death by torture.
Although such raids were by no means constant, when they occurred they were bone chilling 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 the age of 14 led the defence 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 the 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 that is unmatched in Native American history. Led by the Senecas, Iroquois war parties first destroyed the powerful Neutral Confederacy, a nation located in southern Ontario that had been reckoned numerically equal to the Iroquois but lacking European firearms. 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, eastern tribes 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 tribes in the region.
The French counterattack
The tide of war began to turn in the middle 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 Netherlands 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 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 with 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 - in fact the same kind of warfare that was practiced against them by the Iroquois. As they were seen to be urging the Iroquois on, some of the most infamous of these raids were made against settlements in the English colonies, most notably in 1690 against Schenectady in present-day New York, Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, and Portland, Maine. As in the Iroquois raids, the inhabitants were either indiscriminately slaughtered or carried away captive.
The 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 signing of the 1701 Grande Paix (Great Peace) 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. At last, the Shawnee were at peace.
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References