The Beaver Wars

The English continued to supply the Iroquois with firearms and manufactured goods, maintaining a relationship that would remain vital to both sides.

The Great Peace had brought an end to an era of major Iroquois French warfare, but had not ended the competition between indigenous nations of the interior.

The Iroquois remained a formidable military and political power, while their access to European trade goods gave them considerable advantage in the struggle that continued across the Great Lakes and northeast.

If the native people sometimes grew tired of warfare, the same cannot be said of their European neighbours, especially the English and French who'd been knocking the living daylights out of each other for hundreds of years and wouldn't finally grow tired for another century.

They had actually collected lots of groups of people to gather into one group and align themselves with Iroquois.

The Creek of the South, the Catawba in South Carolina, all these different groups that we know later are actually conglomerate groups that came together in reaction to what was happening because of these Beaver Wars and the expansion of European trade.

And what's happening is that native peoples are trapped in what we call destructive competition.

They're not free from the intertwined violence and commerce anymore.

We believe this war killed off about a thousand individuals on both sides.

but it also forces the Iroquois to really take an ultimate step, as we'll see.

Now, in response to the losses in the 1640s, the Iroquois decide that the Huron have to be destroyed, and they initiate what's known as the Beaver Wars.

It is a campaign of destruction that begins as the disease is leaving Iroquoia.

The first three were the controlling motives of Pontiac's Indians about Detroit.

They called it the Beaver War.

To them it was a war on behalf of the French traders, who loaded them with gifts, and against the British, who drove them away empty-handed.

But the Senecas and Delawares, with their allies of the Ohio Valley, regarded it as a war for their lands.