Ирокезские войны XVII века: Борьба за пушной промысел и господство в Северной Америке

17th c. wars between Hurons and Iroquois

The Beaver Wars , also known as the Iroquois Wars or the French and Iroquois Wars were a series of conflicts fought intermittently during the 17th century in North America throughout the Saint Lawrence River valley in Canada and the Great Lakes region which pitted the Iroquois against the Hurons, northern Algonquians and their French allies. As a result of this conflict, the Iroquois destroyed several confederacies and tribes through warfare: the Hurons or Wendat, Erie, Neutral, Wenro, Petun, Susquehannock, Mohican and northern Algonquins whom they defeated and dispersed, some fleeing to neighbouring peoples and others assimilated, routed, or killed. The Iroquois sought to expand their territory to monopolize the fur trade with European markets. They originally were a confederacy of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes inhabiting the lands in what is now Upstate New York along the shores of Lake Ontario east to Lake Champlain and Lake George on the Hudson River, and the lower estuary of the Saint Lawrence River. The Iroquois Confederation led by the Mohawks mobilized against the largely Algonquian speaking tribes and Iroquoian speaking Huron and related tribes of the Great Lakes region. The Iroquois were supplied with arms by their Dutch and English trading partners; the Algonquians and Hurons were backed by the French, their chief trading partner. The Iroquois effectively destroyed several large tribal confederacies, including the Mohicans, Huron (Wyandot), Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock (Conestoga), and northern Algonquins, with the extreme brutality and exterminatory nature of the mode of warfare practised by the Iroquois causing some historians to label these wars as acts of genocide committed by the Iroquois Confederacy. They became dominant in the region and enlarged their territory, realigning the American tribal geography. The Iroquois gained control of the New England frontier and Ohio River valley lands as hunting ground from about 1670 onward. Both Algonquian and Iroquoian societies were greatly disrupted by these wars. The conflict subsided when the Iroquois lost their Dutch allies in the colony of New Netherland after the English took it over in 1664, along with Fort Amsterdam and the town of New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan. The French then attempted to gain the Iroquois as an ally against the English, but the Iroquois refused to break their alliance, and frequently fought against the French in the 18th century. The Anglo Iroquois alliance would reach its zenith during the French and Indian War of 1754, which saw the French being largely expelled from North America. The wars and subsequent commercial trapping of beavers was devastating to the local beaver population. Trapping continued to spread across North America, extirpating or severely reducing populations across the continent. The natural ecosystems that came to rely on the beavers for dams, water and other vital needs were also devastated leading to ecological destruction, environmental change, and drought in certain areas. Beaver populations in North America would take centuries to recover in some areas, while others would never recover.

French explorer Jacques Cartier in the 1540s made the first written records of the Indians in America, although French explorers and fishermen had traded in the region near the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River estuary a decade before then for valuable furs. Cartier wrote of encounters with the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, also known as the Stadaconan or Laurentian people who occupied several fortified villages, including Stadacona and Hochelaga. He recorded an on going war between the Stadaconans and another tribe known as the Toudaman. 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 both sites abandoned by the Stadacona and Hochelaga and completely destroyed, and they found no inhabitants in this part of the upper river valley—although the Iroquois and the Huron

The Iroquois attacked the Neutrals in 1650, and they completely drove the tribe from traditional territory by the end of 1651, killing or assimilating thousands. The Neutrals had inhabited a territory ranging from the Niagara Peninsula westward to the Grand River valley. In 1654, the Iroquois attacked the Erie tribe, but with less success. The war lasted for two years, and the Iroquois destroyed the Erie confederacy by 1656, 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. The Iroquois were greatly outnumbered by the tribes that they subdued, but they achieved their victories through the use of firearms purchased from the Dutch.

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 French colonists. The following year, 250 warriors attacked and took 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, Hurons, and Algonquins to counter the Iroquois raids, but the Iroquois attacked them when they ventured into the countryside. Only 29 of the French survived and escaped; five were captured and tortured to death by the Iroquois. Despite their victory, the Iroquois also suffered a significant number of casualties, and their leaders began to consider negotiating for peace with the French. The tide of war began to turn in the mid 1660s with the arrival of the Carignan Salières Regiment, a unit of roughly 1000 regular troops from France and the first group of uniformed professional soldiers in Canada. A change in administration led the government of New France to authorize direct sale of arms and other military support to their Indian allies. In 1664, the Dutch allies of the Iroquois lost control of their colony of New Netherland to the English. In the immediate years after the Dutch defeat, European support waned for the Iroquois. The Onondaga, Seneca and Cayuga reached a peace settlement with the French, however, the Mohawk and Oneida remained unwilling. In January 1666, Governor Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle attempted to invade the Mohawk homeland. The invasion force of 400 to 500 men briefly skirmished with the Mohawk but failed to reach their villages as the French soldiers were ill equipped to operate in the cold and deep snow. The second invasion force was led by Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy whom Louis XIV had appointed as Lieutenant Général of the Americas. The invasion force of about 1,300 men set out September 1666 and reached the Mohawk villages in mid October. The villages had been hastily abandoned. Tracy ordered the longhouses and fields of crops destroyed, and the expedition returned to New France. A peace settlement was reached with the Mohawk and Oneida in July 1667. From west of the Mississippi, displaced groups continued to arm war parties and attempt to retake their land. Beginning in the 1670s, the French began to explore and settle the Ohio and Illinois Country from the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and they established the post of Tassinong to trade with the western tribes. The Iroquois destroyed it to retain control of the fur trade with the Europeans. The Iroquois also drove the Mannahoac tribe out of the northern Virginia Piedmont region in 1670, and they claimed the land by right of conquest as a hunting ground. The English acknowledged this claim in 1674 and again in 1684, but they acquired the land from the Iroquois by a 1722 treaty. During a raid into the Illinois Country in 1689, the Iroquois captured numerous prisoners and destroyed a sizable Miami settlement. The Miami asked for aid from others in the Anishinaabeg Confederacy, and a large force gathered to track down the Iroquois. Using their new firearms, the Confederacy laid an ambush near South Bend, Indiana, and they attacked and destroyed most of the Iroquois party, and a large part of the region was left depopulated. The Iroquois were unable to establish a permanent presence, as their tribe was unable to colonize the large area, and the Iroquois' brief control over the region was lost. Many of the former inhabitants of the territory began to return.

With the tribes destroyed to the north and west, the Iroquois turned their attention southward to the Susquehannock. The Susquehannock attained the peak of their influence in the 1650s, and they were able to use that to their advantage in the following decades. In the winter of 1652, the Susquehannock were attacked by the Mohawk, and although the attack was repulsed, it led to the Susquehannock negotiating Articles of Peace and Friendship with Maryland. An Oneida raid on the Piscataway in 1660 led Maryland to expand its treaty with the Susquehannock into an alliance. The Maryland assembly authorized armed assistance, and described the Susquehannock as "a Bullwarke and Security of the Northern Parts of this Province." 50 men were sent to help defend the Susquehannock village. Muskets, lead and powder were acquired from both Maryland and New Netherland. Despite suffering a smallpox epidemic in 1661, the Susquehannock easily withstood a siege by 800 Seneca, Cayuga and Onondaga in May 1663, and destroyed an Onondaga war party in 1666. In 1675, the Susquehannock moved south into Maryland. Later that year the militias of Virginia and Maryland besieged the Susquehannock fort, and assassinated the Susquehannock chiefs during a parley. The survivors of the siege were eventually absorbed by the Iroquois.

English settlers began to move into the former Dutch territory of upper New York State, and the colonists began to form close ties with the Iroquois as an alliance in the face of French colonial expansion. They began to supply the Iroquois with firearms as the Dutch had. At the same time, New France's governor Louis de Buade tried to revive the western fur trade. His efforts competed with those of the Iroquois to control the traffic and they started attacking the French again. The war lasted ten years. In 1681, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, negotiated a treaty with the Miami and Illinois tribes. France lifted the ban on the sale of firearms to the Indians, and colonists quickly armed the Algonquin tribes, evening the odds between the Iroquois and their enemies. With the renewal of hostilities, the militia of New France was strengthened after 1683 by a small force of regular French navy troops in the Compagnies Franches de la Marine, who constituted the longest serving unit of French regular troops in New France. In June 1687, Governor Denonville and Pierre de Troyes set out with a well organized force to Fort Frontenac, where they met with the 50 sachems of the Iroquois Confederacy from their Onondaga council. These 50 chiefs constituted the top leaders of the Iroquois, and Denonville captured them and shipped them to Marseilles, France to be galley slaves. He then travelled down the shore of Lake Ontario and built Fort Denonville at the site where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario. This site was previously used by La Salle for Fort Conti from 1678 to 1679, and was later used for Fort Niagara which still exists. The Iroquois retaliated by destroying farmsteads and slaughtering entire families. They burned Lachine to the ground on August 4, 1689. Frontenac replaced Denonville as governor for the next nine years (1689–1698), and he recognized the danger created by the imprisonment of the sachems. He located the 13 surviving leaders and returned with them to New France in October 1698. During King William's War (1688–1697), the French formed raiding parties with Indian allies to attack English settlements, (as the English had allied themselves with the Iroquois against the French) perpetrating the Schenectady massacre in the colony of New York, the Raid on Salmon Falls in New Hampshire, and the Battle of Fort Loyal in Portland, Maine. The French and their allies killed settlers in the raids and kidnapped some and took them back to Canada. Settlers in New England raised money to redeem the captives, but some were adopted into the tribes. The French government generally did not intervene when the Indians kept the captives. Throughout the 1690s, the French and their allies also continued to raid deep into Iroquois territory, destroying Mohawk villages in 1692 and raiding Seneca, Oneida, and Onondaga villages. The English and Iroquois banded together for operations aimed against the French, but these were largely ineffective. The most successful incursion resulted in the 1691 Battle of La Prairie. The French offensive was not halted by the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick that brought peace between France and England, ending English participation in that conflict.

The Iroquois eventually began to see the emerging Thirteen Colonies as a greater threat than the French in 1698. The colony of Pennsylvania was founded in 1681, and the continued growth there began to encroach on the southern border of the Iroquois. The French policy began to change towards the Iroquois after nearly fifty years of warfare, and they decided that befriending them would be the easiest way to ensure their monopoly on the northern fur trade. The Thirteen Colonies heard of the treaty and immediately set about to prevent it from being agreed upon. These conflicts would result in the loss of Albany's fur trade with the Iroquois and, without their protection, the northern flank of the Thirteen Colonies would be open to French attack. Nevertheless, the French and Indians signed the treaty. The French and 39 Indian chiefs signed the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. 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. The Miami tribe returned to take control of Indiana and northwest Ohio. The Pottawatomie went to Michigan, and the Illinois tribe to Illinois. The peace lasted into the 1720s.

In 1768, several of the Thirteen Colonies purchased the "Iroquois claim" to the Ohio and Illinois Country and created the Indiana Land Company to hold the claim to all of the Northwest. It maintained a claim to the region using the Iroquois right of conquest until the company was dissolved in 1798 by the United States Supreme Court. Many of the Iroquois people allied with the British during the American Revolutionary War, particularly warriors from the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga and Seneca nations. These nations had longstanding trade relations with the British and hoped they might stop American encroachment on their lands. After the Americans emerged triumphant, the British parliament agreed to cede control over much of its territory in North America to the newly formed United States and worked to resettle American loyalists in Canada and provide some compensation for lands the Loyalists and Native Americans had lost to the United States. Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant led a large group of Iroquois out of New York to what became the reserve of the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario. The new lands granted to Six Nations reserves were all near Canadian military outposts and placed along the border to prevent any American incursions. The coalition of Native American tribes, known as the Western Confederacy, was forced to cede extensive territory, including much of present day Ohio, in the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. New France's involvement with the Iroquois and other native tribes in the Great Lakes region greatly impacted the future of French colonies, as well as the native tribes in the region. New France was far less profitable and much more violent than Champlain and other French leaders had hoped. The French involvement in native trade caused the French to entangle with complex native alliances, which pitted tribes against the French, and each other. French involvement also introduced disease, weapons, and war, which led to the further destruction of tribes in the region.