Great Peace of Montreal - Fur Wars

Fur Wars

The foundation of Quebec City in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, one of the first governors of New France, marked the beginning of the systematic exploitation of the great northern forests by traders from Metropolitan France. Control over the fur trade became a high-stakes game among Native American tribes, as all of them wanted to be the Europeans' chosen intermediary. The "Fur Wars" soon see the Hurons and Algonquins, supported by the French, pitted against the Iroquois of the powerful League of Five Nations, who were supported first by New Netherland, and later by the English when they took New Amsterdam in the 1660s and 1670s, renaming it New York City.

In the first half of the 17th century, the Dutch-allied Iroquois made substantial territorial gains against the French-allied Indians, often threatening French settlements at Montreal and Trois-Rivières. In an attempt to secure the colony, in 1665 the Carignan-Salières Regiment was sent to New France. Their campaign in 1666 devastated a number of Mohawk communities, who were forced to negotiate a peace. A period of prosperity followed for France's colony, but the Iroquois, now supported by the English, continued to expand their territory to the westward, fighting French allies in the Great Lakes region, and again threatening the French fur trade. In the 1680s the French became actively involved in the conflict again, and they and their allied Indians made significant gains against the Iroquois, including incursions deep into the heartland of Iroquoia (present-day Upstate New York). After a devastating raid by the Iroquois against the settlement of Lachine in 1689, and the entry the same year of England into the Nine Years' War (known in the English colonies as King William's War), Governor Frontenac organized raiding expeditions against English communities all along the frontier with New France. French and English colonists, and their Indian allies, then engaged in a protracted border war that was formally ended when the Treaty of Ryswick was signed in 1697. The treaty, however, left unresolved the issue of Iroquois sovereignty (both France and England claimed them as part of their empire), and French allies in the upper Great Lakes continued to make war on the Iroquois.