page_title: Beaver Wars
section_title: Resumption of war with France
hierarchical_section_title: Beaver Wars / Course of war / Resumption of war with France
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontenac with the Indians. LAC description: Frontenac dancing the war dance, 1690. Watercolour over pencil on commercial board. Support: 30.70 x 44.90.Français&#160;: Frontenac avec les Indiens. Description de BAC ( Bibliothèque et Archives Canada): Frontenac dansant la danse de la guerre, 1690. Aquarelle sur dessin au crayon sur carton commercial. Support: 30.70 x 44.90.
context_page_description: The Beaver Wars, also known as the Iroquois Wars or the French and Iroquois Wars, encompass a series of conflicts fought intermittently during the 17th century in America. They were battles for economic welfare throughout the Saint Lawrence River valley in Canada and the lower Great Lakes region which pitted the Iroquois against the northern Algonquians and the Algonquians' French allies. From medieval times, Europeans had obtained furs from Russia and Scandinavia. American pelts came on the market during the 16th century, decades before the French, English, and Dutch established permanent settlements and trading posts on the continent. Basque fishermen chasing cod off Newfoundland's Grand Banks bartered with local Indigenous peoples for beaver robes to help fend off the Atlantic chill. By virtue of their location, the tribes wielded considerable influence in European–Indian relations from the early seventeenth century onwards.
  The Iroquois sought to expand their territory into the Ohio Country and to monopolize the fur trade with European markets.
context_section_description: English colonization 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 colonial settlements, as the English had allied themselves with the Iroquois against the French, carrying out the Schenectady massacre in the Province of New York, the Raid on Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, and the Battle of Fort Loyal in Portland, Maine. The French and their allies killed settlers in the raids and carried some 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 colonists and Iroquois banded together for operations aimed at New France, 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, but it ended English participation in the conflict.
caption: New France's Governor General Louis de Buade de Frontenac with Indian allies; his attempts to revive the fur-trade in the frontier led to renewed hostilities with the Iroquois
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