The Iroquois Expansion Wars

The Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy—the league of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—were the most formidable Native power in the seventeenth-century Northeast. As the European fur trade transformed the region's economy, the Iroquois, having exhausted the beaver in their own country, launched a series of wars to seize control of the trade and the rich hunting grounds beyond. Armed with Dutch and later English firearms, they struck outward in every direction in what became known as the Beaver Wars.

Between the 1640s and the end of the century, Iroquois war parties shattered and scattered neighboring nations across a vast territory—the Huron, Petun, Neutral, Erie, and others were destroyed, absorbed, or driven into exile as far as the Great Lakes and the Ohio country. The conquests made the Confederacy the dominant force between the English and French empires, a position it used to play the rival powers against each other for decades. The wars also depopulated much of the interior, reshaping the map of Native North America long before large numbers of settlers ever arrived.