Unfortunately for the Iroquois Confederacy, their defeat of the rival Huron Confederacy in 1649 did little to solve their problems. While the large number of captives had bolstered their numbers, the Huron lands were largely depleted of beaver and the Huron’s main trading partners, the Ojibwe and Cree who lived north of the Great Lakes, refused to trade with them. Just as bad, the Susquehannock Confederacy was dominating the beaver trade with the Shawnee, a powerful Algonquian tribe which lived in the Ohio Country across the Appalachian Mountains. However, given the Swedes were selling the Susquehannock guns and the Iroquois were still fighting a war with the French, they lacked the strength to take on the Susquehannock directly. Instead, the Iroquois went with the tactic of attacking the Shawnee, who not having guns, proved to be rather easy targets. Within five years, the Shawnee had been scattered and pushed southward, leaving the Iroquois firmly in control of territory stretching from the Saint Lawrence River south to Virginia.
This victory gave the Iroquois and their Dutch allies significant control over the North American beaver trade, something that was further cemented in 1655 when the Dutch seized control of New Sweden, cutting the Susquehannock off from their source of firearms. Without the protection of guns, the Susquehannock were put on the defensive, forced to contend with near constant Iroquois raids and attacks. However, weakened by their war with the Shawnee, and distracted by attacks on the French in the north, the Iroquois weren’t able to finish off their rivals. Needing more numbers, they instead focused their attention on raiding deeper into the Ohio Country and along the Great Lakes. Forcefully taking beaver pelts and captives as they pleased. This went on for about a decade, until the hands of fate began to move against them.
In 1665, the English and Dutch went to war, a conflict over global trade in which the various tribes involved in the beaver trade were just pawns. Soon after the war began, the English not only began supplying the Susquehannock with guns, but they also seized New Amsterdam, cutting the Iroquois off from their supplier of guns. Suddenly weakened, the Iroquois found themselves attacked from all sides. The Susquehannock attacked from the south and the Ojibwe attacked from the northwest, both winning major victories. However, the greatest damage was done by the French, who tiring of the seemingly endless conflict with the Iroquois, shipped a regiment of professional soldiers across the Atlantic. These professional soldiers marched into the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy and fucked shit up, burning crops and leaving many Iroquois to starve during the winter. Facing likely defeat, the Iroquois signed a peace treaty with the French, ending the blockade of trade between the French and Ojibwe and Cree.
The Iroquois Confederacy was on the ropes. Cut off from both firearms and major sources of beaver, they found themselves increasingly being pushed back. However, their defeat was forestalled by a series of events. First, becoming rather concerned over the growing power of their ally, the English quit selling the Susquehannock guns in the early 1670s. Soon after, another pandemic of Old World diseases swept westward from the Atlantic Coast, devastating many tribes, but the Susquehannock most of all. Finally, increasingly concerned about French exploration of the Ohio Country and Illinois Country, as well as the building of French trading posts along the Great Lakes, the English began selling guns to the Iroquois figuring the enemy of their enemy was their friend. Before the end of the decade, the Iroquois had used their new guns to annihilate the Susquehannock, the survivors being absorbed by the Iroquois and Shawnee, and had fully restarted their raids westward, this time reaching as far as the Illinois Country and Kentucky. The attacks were so devastating that many tribes fled westward leaving wide swaths of the Midwest completely depopulated.
The French, rather alarmed at this turn of events, finally broke their cardinal rule and began selling guns to the Ojibwe and other native allies in 1681 to ensure their main trading partners weren’t completely overrun. The Iroquois responded by renewing their raids of French settlements, which led to the French attacking Iroquois settlements. In 1687, the French managed to capture the top leaders of the Iroquois, shipping them to France as slaves. In retaliation, the Iroquois slaughtered entire families of French settlers and their native allies. However, the loss of their top leaders, was a crushing blow. In 1689, an Iroquois raiding party attacked a tribe allied with the Ojibwe. Now heavily armed by the French and bolstered by tribes who had fled from the Iroquois, the Ojibwe attacked, killing so many Iroquois that the raids effectively ended soon after. Many tribes who had fled the violence returned to their former territories, but many did not. As for the Iroquois, they retained their status as a significant power on both sides of the Appalachians. They remained at war with the French until 1701, when seeing the growing English colonies as a greater threat, they switched sides and allied themselves with the French.
