American History - Hudson's Bay Company

By the late 1660s, the French pretty much held a monopoly over the North American fur trade.  Though the Iroquois continued to be an extremely troublesome force south of the Great Lakes, French traders were buying a huge number of furs from the Ojibwe and Cree who lived further north.  As well, though the trade was increasingly becoming dominated by voyageurs, who were licensed by the government officials in New France, many independent coureurs continued to trade as well, venturing deep into unknown territory.  In 1658, two of these coureurs were told of a frozen sea further to the north by the Cree, where some of the most premium beaver pelts could be found.  Correctly guessing the Cree were talking about Hudson’s Bay, which had been discovered in 1610 by Henry Hudson, they went back to Quebec with the idea of establishing a trading post on the coast of the bay to save on the costs of moving the furs overland.  The French governor politely told them to fuck off, so the following year they travelled north overland, returning with the best quality beaver pelts ever seen, to which the governor responded by arresting them for trading without a license.

Decidedly done with dealing with morons, the two coureurs travelled to the English colony of Boston and convinced some merchants to finance an expedition in 1663.  However, the voyage was unsuccessful due to running into pack ice.  Despite this setback, the two coureurs remained convinced they had a great idea, travelling to England in 1665 to secure further funding.  Though the fact that an outbreak of the bubonic plague was killing a quarter of the population of London at the time, the two coureurs managed to befriend Prince Rupert, the cousin of the king, who was more than happy to supply funding for a new expedition.  This expedition departed in 1668, returning the following year with a cargo of beaver pelts worth nearly half a million bucks in today’s money, which probably made freezing one’s ass off in the Arctic seem totally worth it.  Not surprisingly, it should go without saying that this excited the shit out of everyone.  The king of England granted Prince Rupert control of the entirety of Hudson’s Bay drainage basin, which he promptly named Prince Rupert’s Land, and told him to get off his ass and get more pelts post haste.  To fund the venture, they created a joint stock company creatively named the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).   

The first trading post built by the HBC was Rupert House along the southeast coast of Hudson’s Bay.  Unlike the French, who liked to send traders deep into the interior to set up relations with local tribes, often marrying native women to cement alliances, the HBC instead went with the Dutch approach, which was basically set up a trading post with a few dozen traders and a shit ton of European goods, let it be known that they were willing to trade for beaver pelts, and wait for the locals to come to them.  The Cree, an Algonquian people, were HBC’s primary trading partner.  The Cree would trap beaver in the winter and fall, travel to Hudson’s Bay via canoe to trade in the spring, and then ships would take the pelts to England in the summer when the pack ice was gone.  The venture was so successful that new trading posts were built around the bay, the largest of which was the York Factory, built on the western shore of the bay in 1684.  The York Factory traded not just with the Cree, but also with a Na-Dene people known as the Chipewyan who lived across what is today northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. 

It should go without saying, that the success of the HBC totally pissed off the French, who suddenly found the Cree much less interested in trading with them since they could get better prices moving pelts north to Hudson’s Bay.  In 1686, a French raiding party travelled overland to the bay, capturing one trading post which it used as a base of operations for raids on the others for the next eight years until it was recaptured in 1694.  Three years later, the a French naval force defeated an English naval force in the Bay and seized control of most of the trading posts, including York Factory until 1713.  However, despite this significant setback, the HBC continued operations in the bay throughout this period.

Though the HBC was overall more than happy to keep its operations to the coast of the bay, it did send some employees further inland to make contact with tribes there, not fully trusting that word of mouth would be enough to let everyone know about the sweet beaver deals they were offering.  One of the more prominent of these was a young man named Henry Kelsey, who in 1690 was sent up the Nelson River where he found much conflict amongst the various tribes he encountered.  In an attempt to monopolize the trade with the English, many groups of Cree were moving westward from their traditional homelands, bringing them into conflict with not only the Chipewyan, but also each other.  Kelsey eventually found his way to the Great Plains in what is today Saskatchewan, becoming the first European to see the vast flat grasslands, as well as buffalo and grizzly bear.  He also met the Assiniboine, a Siouan speaking people who had been recently pushed northwestward onto the plains by both the Ojibwe and Sioux to the southeast.  Kelsey returned to York Factory in 1692, his mission largely a failure as the Cree continued to actively block other tribes from trading directly with the HBC.  No further expeditions were sent into the interior for decades.          

American History - Midwest Mayhem

By the start of the seventeenth century, the region we today call the Midwest was almost entirely inhabited by a wide range of Algonquian tribes who survived via a combination of agriculture, hunting, and gathering, moving from time to time as soils became less fertile and game was depleted.  Formerly the territories of the Siouan peoples, climate change caused famines and warfare in the fifteenth century had weakened them to the point that the Algonquian began to migrate into the region from the east and north, drawn in part by the opportunity of new territories to claim and by the threat of the Iroquoian peoples, who were expanding from the St. Lawrence River.  The pace of this conquest was significantly sped in the middle of the sixteenth century, when a pandemic of Old World diseases swept north, killing two-thirds or more of the Siouan.  Resulting in a rapid expansion of the less affected Algonquian who largely drove the Siouan west of the Mississippi River by the end of the century.

When Europeans first began arriving along the Atlantic Coast, the Algonquian tribes of the Midwest were largely unaffected, distant as they were.  Aside from a few French explorers and Catholic missionaries who began appearing along the shores of the Great Lakes in the 1630s, the Europeans were little more than stories that made their way over the Appalachians in a distorting game of telephone.  Unfortunately, not having significant contact with the Europeans did little to protect the Midwest Algonquian.  In the 1630s and 1640s, an epidemic of measles swept its way westward, spread along established trade routes, killing around half of the natives in its path, disrupting the societal and cultural foundations of the once prosperous tribes.  Lacking knowledge of how diseases spread, it was likely seen as an evil portent and a lack of favor from the gods, something that was little helped by what happened next.

Beginning in the 1650s, raiding parties from the Iroquois Confederacy began attacking the easternmost Midwest Algonquian tribes in the Ohio Country, the most dominant of which were the Shawnee.  Iroquois raiding parties were trying to secure beaver and captives, the former to trade with the Europeans and the latter to bolster their numbers.  Thanks to the Iroquois being armed with muskets by the Dutch, these attacks were devastating.  Unable to defend themselves, the Algonquian fled west and south.  However, the Iroquois had no interest in settling their newly conquered territory.  Not only did they lack sufficient numbers to do so, all they really wanted was to secure valuable supplies of beaver to trade to the Dutch.  As a result, large portions of the Ohio Country became almost entirely depopulated by 1660.  Not content, the Iroquois raiding parties began moving further west into what is today Michigan and Indiana, causing further devastation as they went.

The Iroquois invasion caused what can best be described as a refugee crisis which rippled its way westward.  Tribes fleeing Iroquois attacks moved into the territories of their neighbors, resulting in a depletion of available food supplies, which in turn led to famine and conflict, which in turn led to further movement westward.  These conflicts and famines depleted numbers, which made it more difficult for tribes to fight off Iroquois raids, which exacerbated an already increasingly chaotic situation.  As a result, some tribes began to form alliances for mutual defense from both the Iroquois and the Algonquian refugees, the most powerful being the Illinois Confederacy which was made up of twelve of the most powerful tribes in the Illinois Country.  As a result, the weaker tribes were forced north towards Wisconsin, south towards Kentucky, or further west across the Mississippi River.  This in turn put them into conflict with the less numerous Siouan peoples, who in turn were forced to flee into less fertile lands bordering the Great Plains, or in the case of many weaker tribes, out onto the Plains themselves.  The two most prominent of these Siouan tribes were the Sioux who moved into Minnesota and the Osage who moved into Missouri.  As for the scattered and sparse Numic peoples who inhabited the Plains at the time, they were pretty well fucked.    

Luckily, the Iroquois raids halted for a time by the end of the 1660s thanks to the Dutch losing their colony, cutting the Iroquois off from their primary supplier of muskets and powder.  However, it was a short respite, a new devastating pandemic of Old World diseases swept its way westward in the 1670s, followed by a renewal of raids by the Iroquois, who now being armed by the English, began regularly raiding nearly to the Mississippi River.  To add further to the chaos, the French began selling muskets to the Ojibwe in the 1680s.  Though an Algonquian people, the Ojibwe were eager to ensure they retained their position as the primary middlemen with the French in the beaver trade, a position that was under threat by the French building numerous trading posts along the shores of the Great Lakes.  Using their new firearms, they swept south from their ancestral homelands north of the Great Lakes, asserting their dominance over the other Algonquian tribes in the region.  Allying themselves with the Sioux and Shawnee, they attacked the Illinois Confederacy.  Already decimated by war and disease, the tribes of the confederacy were scattered.    

The musket wielding Ojibwe and French attacks on the Iroquois homeland largely ended the Iroquois raids in the Midwest, though the Iroquois retained control of the Ohio Country, which remained largely depopulated.  Some members of the tribes who fled west did return to their ancestral homelands in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, but many did not, leaving the populations in these areas much sparser than they had once been.  For their part, the Ojibwe did little to help the situation, attacking any tribe that did not respect their monopoly on trading with the French.  One of their most common targets was the Sioux, many of whom moved further west onto the Plains. 

American History - Iroquois Empire

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.