By the close of the seventeenth century, France and England were the two dominant powers remaining in North America. Of the two, the English were by far the more numerous, numbering some 155,000 colonists who controlled nearly the entirety of the Atlantic coast. In comparison the French were much less numerous, with only around 14,000 colonists, but they controlled a vast trade network made up of forts and native allies stretching in a broad arc up the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, and then down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. This network allowed them to dominate the fur trade, especially as Iroquois Confederacy, England’s primary native ally, found itself increasingly cut off from ever more distant supplies, though new English trade networks along Hudson’s Bay barred France from gaining complete control. Though not officially at war, both provided arms to natives who fought proxy wars on their behalf. The English supplied the Iroquois who attacked the French along the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence, and the French supplied the Wabanaki Confederacy, who attacked the English is what is today Maine.
This proxy war shifted into a real war in 1688, as it became one front of many in a larger European conflict. A series of war between France and first Spain, and then the Dutch, over the preceding decades had led to France becoming the most powerful nation in Europe, a state of affairs which led to France attacking the Holy Roman Empire, which quickly snowballed into England, the Dutch Republic, Portugal, and Sweden all joining in against France. What became the Nine Year’s War spread to colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and India, killing over a million people before fizzling out in 1697.
In North America, the conflict was known as King William’s War. With neither side able to spare professional troops for the colonies, the war was one fought by small groups volunteer militias and native allies using raids and hit and run tactics. For the French, their primary goals were to keep the English from claiming what is today Maine and to end English competition in the northern fur trade. They were successful in both objectives. Thanks to the New England colonies being distracted by their growing revolt against the Dominion of New England, the French and Wabanaki were able to destroy nearly all of the English settlements in Maine, opening up New Hampshire and Massachusetts to further raids. Meanwhile, in the north, they managed to secure all of the English trading posts along Hudson’s Bay. For the English, the primary war aims were to have the Iroquois disrupt the French fur trade, would they did quite successfully, and to capture Quebec and other key settlements along the Saint Lawrence River, which they failed at dramatically due to poor leadership and issues with disease and supply lines.
Following the initial successes and failures of both sides, the war collapsed into one of attrition, with both sides primarily engaged in defensive operations, skirmishes, and retaliatory raids. Neither side had the might to strike a significant blow, so they contented themselves with a slap fight that did little but cause fear and leave handfuls of people dead. As a result, the frontier between the two sides became largely burned out and depopulated. This continued until 1697, when the war ended in Europe. The treaty signed by England and France left the borders between them in North America the same as they had been before the war, except for France controlling Hudson’s Bay, with none of the disputes about exactly where the border should be resolved.
Of course, it was both sides native allies who got the most shitty end of the stick. For the Wabanaki, numerous villages had been destroyed in the tit-for-tat actions which characterized the war in Maine and famine caused by destroyed food supplies killed even more. The Iroquois in many ways fared even worse. When the French began to retaliate by attacking Iroquois lands, the Iroquois expected help to come from the English, but so such help ever appeared. The sense of being betrayed only grew when England ended the war with France, but still continued to encourage the Iroquois to carry on their attacks. The Iroquois signed their own treaty with the French in 1701.
