Beaver Wars

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 and 18th centuries in eastern North America.

During the 17th century, the Beaver Wars were battles for economic welfare throughout the St. Lawrence River valley and the lower Great Lakes region. The wars were between the Iroquois trying to take control of the fur trade from the Hurons, the northern Algonquians, and their French allies. From medieval times, Europeans had obtained furs from Russia and Scandinavia. American pelts began coming on the market during the 16th century—decades before the French, English, and Dutch established permanent settlements and trading posts on the continent—after Basque fishermen chasing cod off Newfoundland's Grand Banks bartered with local Indians for beaver robes to help fend off the numbing Atlantic chill. By virtue of their location, military might, and diplomatic skill, these tribes wielded tremendous influence in European-Indian relations from the early seventeenth century through the late 18th century.

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. They were an aboriginal confederation of five nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. (The confederation later became the "Six Nations" when the Tuscarora were adopted in the 18th century.) Each of these Native American nations has beliefs in tribal sovereignty and a collective body called a league. Government officials in the later American capital in Washington, D.C. and Canadian capital of Ottawa recognized the Iroquois sovereignty only in existence of individual tribal governments. The Iroquois Confederation, led by the dominant Mohawk, mobilized against the largely Algonquian-speaking tribes of the Great Lakes region. The Iroquois were armed by their Dutch and English trading partners; the Algonquian were backed by the French, their chief trading partner.

The wars were brutal and are considered one of the bloodiest series of conflicts in the history of North America. As the Iroquois destroyed several large tribal confederacies—including the Huron, Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock, and Shawnee, they became dominant in the region and enlarged their territory, realigning the tribal geography of North America. They pushed some eastern tribes to the west of the Mississippi River, or southward into the Carolinas. The Iroquois gained control of the Ohio River valley lands as hunting ground, from about 1670 onward. The Ohio Country and the Lower Peninsula of Michigan had become virtually empty of Native people as refugees fled westward to escape the 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 disrupted by these wars. The conflict subsided with the loss by the Iroquois of their Dutch allies in the New Netherland (later lower New York State) colony after England took it over in 1664, with Fort Amsterdam and the town of New Amsterdam, renaming it New York, and with French objective of gaining 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 western and northern expansion leading to the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The English/British also used the Iroquois conquests as a claim to the later old Northwest Territory, of the United States, northwest of the Ohio River and around the Great Lakes.