The conquest of the New Netherlands by the English in 1665 wasn’t all that great for the Iroquois, who suddenly lost their primary source for firearms. However, it was a pretty sweet deal for the French, who suddenly had easy access to the Great Lakes again. No longer afraid of getting their heads split open, the French voyageurs began travelling further west to find new trading partners. Along with them came a shit ton of Jesuit missionaries, just as eager to save what they saw as lost souls.
The Jesuit were a Catholic religious order with an extreme hard on for converting people to their brand of Christianity. From the earliest days of New France, the Jesuits had been doing their level best to convert as many of the locals as possible, funded by wealthy nobles and merchants eager to make up for the sins involved with being rick dickheads. It was not exactly safe or easy work. For some reason, though some of the locals were receptive, for some reason many weren’t down with some busybody just showing up to tell them their gods sucked, resulting in many Jesuits mysteriously disappearing. Furthermore, even when they were successful, the various epidemics that they brought with them tended to kill off the recently saved and unsaved alike at an alarming rate. Undeterred, the Jesuits just moved further out into the frontier to find new converts. For protection, they built missions, which became centers for trade, and eventually towns with both French and native populations.
When the Iroquois threat ceased in the late 1660s, the Jesuits got on their knees and thanked god for the new opportunity, then got up and asked the government for money, which the aristocracy was totally down to give. Alarmed over reports of English traders appearing along the Great Lakes, the nobles and merchants who were making a bundle off of the fur trade were eager to build up any kind of French presence in the area. Over the next decade, numerous missions were built along the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, this created conflict with many of the French voyageurs already operating in the area, who were trading liquor for pelts, something the Jesuits were not all that happy about. Having never had access to liquor before, many of the natives went pretty crazy when they drank, causing all sorts of problems for everybody. This conflict eventually convinced the French government that perhaps depending upon liquor selling asshats and bible thumping douchebags to make first contact with the natives was not the best policy given neither guaranteed a stable supply of furs, which is what they ultimately wanted.
Beginning in the 1670s, French merchants and government officials began funding professional expeditions, who proved pretty damn successful at creating new alliances with the tribes they met, even at times brokering peace treaties between formerly warring tribes. This eventually led to a great meeting of chiefs from across the Great Lakes region in 1677, where the French gave them gifts and declared all to be now subjects of the King of France. The chiefs were rather confused by this, and not really understanding what was going on, just shrugged their shoulders and assumed it was all part of some kind of weird French fur trading ritual. The English, who had been effectively shoved out of the region, were much less confused. Rather pissed off, they began selling the Iroquois guns, which restarted that whole cluster fuck. However, by the French were too dug in, and though some missions and trading posts were destroyed, they were there to stay.
From the Great Lakes region, most of the French exploration that followed were mostly in a westward direction. Mostly because the Iroquois were killing anyone and everyone in the Ohio Country to the south, which made it less than inviting. However, the new lucrative trade soon became less lucrative with the arrival of the Ojibwe, who eager to maintain a monopoly over trade with the French, were moving westward and beating the crap out of anyone who got in their way. As a result, French explorers began moving more southwestwardly into the Illinois Country, eventually making their way down the entirety of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682.
The navigation of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico was a pretty big deal all the way around. For the French, it created a new opportunity to cheaply move furs out of the interior, while for the Spanish it was a very direct threat to territory they most definitely saw as belonging to them even though the closest settlements they had to the area were in Florida. Either way, the Spanish weren’t really in a position to stop the French, who still managed to muck it up pretty badly. Their first attempt to establish a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1684 resulted in a colony in Texas instead, which was soon after wiped out by the locals. Several other attempts followed, but none were successful until 1699 when they established the colony of Louisiana. The success of the colony secured for them an important new trade network and a claim to all of the territory along the Mississippi.
