Indigenous Continent, page 13
The Five Nations made peace with New France because they thought that the colony, beaten down as it was, could still be useful as a source of arms and trade goods. The Iroquois had always prioritized relations with other Indigenous nations over relations with European colonies, which they saw mainly as market outlets and providers of weapons and metalware. In the early 1650s, the Iroquois, especially Onondagas, faced growing challenges from the Erie Nation, which controlled much of the southern shore of Lake Erie. The Onondagas and Mohawks approached New France in early 1654, asking for guns and soldiers. The French delivered both. The Indians also approached the Dutch, securing weapons. An Onondaga leader then proposed, as one Frenchman put it, “to separate the Huron Colony from us, and induce the families to go in a body—men, women, and children—into” Onondaga country, in a peaceful reiteration of the mourning wars. The French found themselves “in as great perplexity as Hurons themselves. . . . ‘We see plainly,’ these Huron Captains said to us, ‘that those two Iroquois Nations, in a spirit of mutual envy, wish to win us each to its own side. Whatever plan we adopt, we are equally confronted with misfortune.’ ” They were right. In the summer of 1654, the Iroquois reintroduced the violent version of the mourning wars when they attacked the Eries with an army of some fifteen hundred soldiers. Two years later, more than fifty French priests, laborers, and soldiers settled in a new mission, Sainte-Marie de Gannentaha, next to the principal Onondaga town.11
New France was a crippled colony. The fur trade, its economic backbone, was disrupted by war, and the Jesuit order, its spiritual backbone, had weakened dangerously. The fur trade would recover over time, but the Jesuit enterprise, facing abandoned missions, murdered friars, and a growing number of apostates, went into survival mode. In 1658, the acting governor of New France received Five Nations envoys, who informed him that “the Iroquois and the Dutch are united by a chain of iron, and their friendship cannot be broken.” Mohawks boasted that the French “were not able to goe over a door to pisse” without being shot. By then the Great League of Peace and Power had absorbed nearly all Iroquoians.
In 1663, when the Iroquois pressure forced King Louis XIV to assume direct control of New France, he assigned the running of the colony to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his minister of finance. One of the most talented administrators in history, Colbert set out to transform New France into a centralized colony and a continental powerhouse through exploration, economic reforms, and emigration, including also people beyond the filles du roi. He turned the colony into a royal fiefdom and moved to replace the sprawling French system of forts and missions with a compact, agriculture-based colony in the Saint Lawrence Valley. Colbert wanted the colonists to focus on prospecting, fishing, and farming rather than war. He had the charter of the Company of One Hundred Associates revoked and appointed Jean Talon as the colony’s intendant. Talon promoted measured exploration, the fur trade, and new alliances with Indians to contain the Five Nations. Pierre-Esprit Radisson, an Englishman serving the French, established a trading post in James Bay, extending the French reach by hundreds of miles to the northeast—hundreds of miles in the wrong direction, from the Five Nations’ viewpoint.12
IF THE FRENCH WERE struggling on the Indigenous continent, the Dutch were unraveling. In 1664, New Netherland vanished when England absorbed it bloodlessly in the sprawling English-Dutch trade wars, depriving the Five Nations of yet another essential trading partner. With the stroke of a pen, the metal makers were gone. New Netherland had lasted only six decades, dwarfed by neighboring Indigenous powers. The loss of the major trading outlet was disastrous for the Iroquois, who were reeling from another smallpox outbreak and a war with the Susquehannocks, whom the Jesuits dubbed the “Savages of new Sweden, very warlike, and better than any others to exterminate the Iroquois.” Realizing that “the Iroquois are more crafty than is imagined,” Jesuit friars reported that the Onondagas had dispatched an embassy to Montreal and proposed peace. Having read a dramatic shift in colonial power dynamics correctly, the Iroquois sided with the French.13
In 1665, exhausted by the wars and their ranks filled with adoptees, the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Oneidas agreed to a treaty with the French in Quebec, but the Mohawks held out. A year later, the governor of New France, Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy, led an army of thirteen hundred regular troops, militiamen, and Wyandot and Algonquian allies into Mohawk country to cut the unruly nation down to size. The Mohawks fled, and the colonial army burned their towns and crops. The Five Nations had to make a comprehensive peace with the French and open their villages to Jesuits, who had clamored for their souls for decades. The diminishment of Iroquois power would be only temporary.14
After three generations of contending with Europeans, the Iroquois knew to expect drastic changes from them, and they adjusted quickly. Under the cloak of peace, they began to resettle the Saint Lawrence Valley and extended their domain to the north shore of Lake Ontario, where they built several new towns that enveloped the vast body of water, turning it into an Iroquois lake. Having positioned themselves securely in the east, the Iroquois launched a new campaign that took their armies west, south, and north. They banished the Shawnees from the fertile Ohio River valley to the south, and launched a devastating attack on a Mahican village in the east, finally putting an end to the decades-long war with the Mahican people. They pushed the Atikamekws far to the north and sent a flurry of war expeditions into Susquehannock villages in the south, bringing back scores of captives. In the spring of 1670, the Cayugas executed a Susquehannock emissary and, joining forces with the Senecas, raised a six-hundred-strong army to attack the Odawas. Ranging from New England to the Great Lakes and from the Saint Lawrence Valley to Virginia, the Iroquois seemed to be everywhere at once, keeping a huge portion of the continent in a state of terror.15
Despite appearances to the contrary, the Five Nations League was not a blind conquering machine. Far in the north, the Saint Lawrence Valley was becoming speckled with Iroquois settlements. Drawn there not by captives and loot, but by fish, game, trade, medicine, and Jesuits, the Iroquois sought solace from and explanations for the diseases and mass death, and for the failure of traditional rituals to restore order to the universe. In fact, the new settlements signaled a homecoming: a century earlier the Saint Lawrence Valley had been the heart of Iroquoia, but a combination of cold weather and famine in the late sixteenth century had forced the Five Nations to disperse. Now, peace and a warm climate cycle drew them back. The Saint Lawrence Valley had enjoyed a period of relative quiet since the mourning wars pulled the Iroquois to the west, turning the valley into a safe haven.
The Jesuits were overjoyed. “It is a stroke from Heaven—the change that is becoming manifest in New France,” one wrote. “Formerly, there came out of the Country of the Iroquois only monsters of cruelty, who filled our forests and fields with terror, and laid waste all our settlements. But now that peace prevails everywhere . . . there is no cabin among these barbarous Nations whose door is not open to the Preachers of the gospel.” Jesuits also reported with satisfaction the beginnings of a “little Church” around which a multiethnic community, Kahnawake, had emerged in a place that the Iroquois considered theirs. The Indians showed an “admirable respect for their Pastors, and among themselves a charity and union exceeding all power of conception, especially in view of the fact that they are people gathered from different countries”—Wyandots, Neutrals, Susquehannocks, and Five Nations. Kahnawake and the other new Saint Lawrence settlements were Indigenous places in the heart of what colonial maps labeled as New France. French soldiers avoided them, and Jesuits, though welcome, trod carefully in them—too timid to condemn the ritual torturing of captives, but not above baptizing them at the moment of their deaths. The Saint Lawrence Valley was not a French possession. It was the northern edge of the Iroquois territory.16
The genius of Iroquois foreign policy was its principled plasticity, which enabled the Iroquois to forge alliances with European powers that were locked into intense rivalries over territory, trade, and Indian allies. In 1675, just as Kahnawake and the other Saint Lawrence settlements seemed to be delivering the Five Nations into the French orbit, the Mohawks sought an alliance with the English in New York. Their timing was not accidental. Eager to expand their commercial networks, the Mohawks had approached New York numerous times with little success. But now the English had been chastened by the Dutch, who had briefly taken the colony in 1673–74, and in 1675, in a highly symbolic gesture, the new governor of New York, Edmund Andros, traveled among the Mohawks, the League’s eastern door; visited all the Mohawk castles; and entered into Tionnontogen, the Mohawk capital, to deliver New York into an alliance, tacitly accepting Iroquois primacy. The result was the Covenant Chain, a coalition between the Mohawk Nation and New York, which would be later extended to include all the Five Nations and the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Virginia. In a crucial act of self-serving generosity, Andros opened Albany’s fur and gun markets to the Iroquois, pulling them away from French trade and influence. Suddenly, by comparison, the French seemed stingy and uncaring, and long-sidelined Anglophile Iroquois assumed a more prominent role in Five Nations foreign policy. Andros urged the Iroquois to banish French traders from the lower Great Lakes, and soon violence washed over Iroquois-French borderlands. The Five Nations attacked Fort Frontenac, New France’s largest inland bastion, and French resolve crumbled. The Five Nations forced New France to stop protecting its Illini and Miami allies. Those two peoples, the Five Nations demanded, now belonged to them.17
Plan of Fort Frontenac
The members of the Iroquois-English alliance recognized their mutual dependency, traded in essential goods, and conceived new ways to resolve conflicts, but the compact was fundamentally embedded in Iroquois political ideology and symbolism. The Five Nations expected the English colonies to periodically placate them with gifts—to symbolically polish the silver chain—in order to keep the bond pure and strong. They insisted on calling the English “brethren,” which denoted equality and mutual respect. Andros hated the moniker and insisted on using “children,” but the Iroquois would not allow it.18
Rising amid the beleaguered French and the comparatively more stable English colonies, the Five Nations became the dominant power in the Northeast. Buoyed by their strong connection with New York, they commanded, as the first among equals, an expanding Indigenous network of alliances. In 1677 a Mohawk sachem announced in Albany, “We are one, and one heart and one head, for the Covenant that is betwixt” the governor-general of New York “and us is Inviolable.” The Iroquois accepted Andros and Albany’s symbolic leadership within the Covenant Chain, which facilitated its extension to include Maryland and Virginia. In 1679 an Onondaga sachem announced that the Virginians were always welcome in “our Castles.” That any leadership by the English was, indeed, merely symbolic was made clear by Iroquois leaders, who insisted on being treated as equals. The peace extended “unto the utmost limit of our great Kings Dominion of this Continent of America.”19
The Covenant Chain confirmed the Five Nations’ privileged access to English markets and diplomatic support—a position of unprecedented political clout that they leveraged on multiple fronts. The Five Nations protected their core territory by allowing weaker groups to settle on their borders as tributary allies, who also served as buffers against enemies. They embraced subjugated enemies—Odawas, Wenros, Lenapes, Shawnees, Meskwakis, and Wendats—as “women” and “nephews,” guiding and commanding them as “uncles,” and expecting them to offer soldiers for their campaigns. The seemingly insulting gendered metaphors tied nations together as allies. The mourning wars—the greatest display of military power in seventeenth-century North America—had brought peace in the interior. The Odawas emerged as the leading traders in the western pays d’en haut.
PEACE IN THE EAST fueled expansion in the West. Once again, after two decades of relative calm, Iroquois hunting and war parties pushed deep into the interior, seeking beavers and captives. Most of their pelts now flowed into Albany, where they fetched prices that could be twice as high as those that French merchants had offered. Andros was eager to see the Five Nations interrupt France’s interior trade, and he generously sponsored their operations, but the Iroquois were careful not to provoke a war with the French, who in 1673 had turned Forts Frontenac and Niagara on Lake Ontario into bulwarks against their western forays. The Five Nations depended on unhindered movement to secure vital resources and to keep themselves safe. In 1676, French missionary Louis Hennepin invited a larger number of Iroquois to settle near Fort Frontenac. A “Village of about Forty Cottages” materialized almost immediately, “lying betwixt the Fort and our House of Mission.” Soon, fields of “Indian Corn and Pulse” stretched out around the fort. The Iroquois had made Fort Frontenac theirs—at least momentarily.20
The Iroquois were becoming an empire. They now posed an existential crisis for New France, which relied on furs and Native allies to survive. The Iroquois onslaught had exposed the Illini country—which was thought to extend from the middle Mississippi Valley to the Ohio Valley and the lower end of Lake Michigan—as the soft underbelly of the French Empire, causing panic among New France’s Indian allies. Making matters worse, the French colony was also under threat in the north: English merchants had entrenched themselves in Hudson Bay in the 1670s and were now expanding their operations through Native trappers and a complex fan-shaped river system that extended deep into the interior. New France was losing people to Indian wars, and Colbert, realizing that his vision of a Saint Lawrence–based empire no longer sufficed in an intensifying imperial milieu, imagined a new kind of French empire in North America—one whose tentacles extended into the heart of the continent. To thwart the Five Nations and the English, Colbert established a permit system that enabled French traders to push inland and buy pelts directly from Native trappers. Reluctantly, he also allowed the wide-ranging coureurs de bois—runners of the woods—highly mobile independent traders, to move into the western forests, hoping to regain control of the interior fur trade. Soon, several hundred coureurs de bois and voyageurs, rugged long-distance carriers who canoed the pelts to colonial outposts, were operating in the pays d’en haut.21
Colbert miscalculated. By focusing on the English threat and by unleashing the coureurs de bois among the Indians, he alienated the Iroquois, who thought that much of the interior and its resources now belonged to them. The Iroquois made a concentrated bid to open trade with several nations around Lake Michigan but were denied. Led by the Senecas, the Five Nations launched a major offensive—their third in four decades—to seize furs and captives. They attacked the French-allied Illinis, Miamis, Odawas, Otoes, Wyandots, and Meskwakis across the pays d’en haut and beyond, nearly paralyzing interior trade. The French agonized over how the Iroquois had “obtained so great an advantage over” the Illinis “that, besides three or four hundred dead, they took from them nine hundred prisoners.” In a particularly gloomy assembly in Quebec, Governor Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre reported that the Iroquois’s “undertaking is, to destroy, one after the other, all the nations allied to us, while they keep us in uncertainty, with folded arms.” This, he warned, spelled disaster for New France: “After they have taken from us all the trade in peltries, which they wish to carry on alone with the English and Dutch settled at Manatte and Orange, they may attack us alone. Then they will ruin the Colony by obliging it to concentrate its people and forsake all the outlying settlements, thus putting a stop to the cultivation of the soil.” The English, La Barre lamented, had the Five Nations League on their side, which made all the difference. They were reported to be thinking of little else “than putting Onontio in a kettle,” possibly to symbolically diminish him. “The terror that they have inspired in all the others [has] rendered them so haughty that they consider themselves the masters of the earth,” wrote Father Thierry Beschefer. “They are at the same time very maliciously disposed toward the French, which causes us to feel great apprehensions of war.”22
The highly mobile French voyageurs cooperated closely with Native Americans.
What the missionary thought was simple maliciousness was, in fact, policy. In 1674 the Five Nations met with Governor La Barre in Montreal. The French were eager to put an end to escalating violence that was ruining the fur trade in the Great Lakes, but the summit turned into a kind of conciliation ceremony that saw the French governor do his utmost to appease the people who had waged relentless war for decades against the French and their Indian allies. New to the post, La Barre had taken stock of Five Nations foreign policy and was both alarmed and impressed. The Five Nations had methodically weakened or sidelined their Native rivals while preserving access to colonial markets. Battle by battle, war by war, they had shaped the interior to meet their needs.
At the summit, La Barre apologized to the Five Nations ambassadors for arming their Illini enemies, and he lavished more than forty Iroquois with gifts. He professed that the Five Nations were “the bravest, strongest, and shrewdest [nation] in all North America, having twenty years ago subjugated all their neighbors.” He certainly did not want a war with them. Where the Iroquois could muster hundreds of highly skilled soldiers, he had five fit officers. “Advanced years, or corpulency, render the others incapable of supporting fatigue of that sort,” he would later complain. Fighting the Five Nations, La Barre accepted, was folly. “They will not fail to seize on the most trifling occasions to endeavor to render themselves masters of those people and those posts [in the Great Lakes], and, by robbing us, destroy the Colony of the King of France in Canada.”23
