CHAPTER 3The Mourning Wars Come to Haudenosaunee Homelands, 1687–1701

In April 1700, New York Governor Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, sent Robert Livingston, Hendrick Hansen, and Colonel Peter Schuyler to several eastern Haudenosaunee villages to gauge Haudenosaunee fidelity to their English neighbors. Livingston, Hansen, and Schuyler each had many years of diplomatic and trade experience with The People of the Longhouse. Livingston, for example, was New York's secretary of Indian Affairs, Hanson was a fur trader and had recently served as mayor of Albany, and Schuyler was Albany's first mayor and chair of the Board for the Commissioners of Indian Affairs. The Albany representatives also knew well the plotting of French diplomats, military leaders, and Jesuit missionaries to sour Haudenosaunee relationships with the English and to entice New York's Covenant Chain allies to relocate to the Saint Lawrence River Valley. In addition, the French worked to redirect Haudenosaunee traders away from Albany markets and north to merchants in New France. As New France and New York battled for Indigenous military and economic partners, Haudenosaunee communities occupied and controlled the space between competing imperial interests.¹

Governor Bellomont sent the three Albany elites to investigate rumors of impending Indigenous attacks on exposed English colonial settlements from the Hudson River Valley east to New England. Although Haudenosaunee community leaders friendly to the English claimed that they had no knowledge of any planned attacks, the news they relayed from New France fed Livingston's suspicions of French intrigue. First, Jesuits ridiculed the English as stingy for their paltry presents and lack of new clothing for their Indigenous allies. Second, the French planned to build several forts throughout Haudenosaunee territory to indicate French claims to the land. Finally, the French warned that the English would soon eliminate the trade in weapons and gunpowder with their Haudenosaunee allies. These trade restrictions would foreshadow an English attack on defenseless villages and pave the way for removing Haudenosaunee peoples from their homelands and allow the English to claim them.²

These rumors circulated among a Haudenosaunee audience acutely aware of New York's repeated failures during the previous decade to fulfill their military obligations under the Covenant Chain alliance and to provide timely and meaningful assistance when thousands of French troops and their Indigenous allies swept through their homelands. Although Haudenosaunee fighting men had repeatedly fulfilled their promises in the alliance and answered Albany's calls to march against New France during King William's War, English military debacles and other setbacks prevented any offensive campaigns. French military successes and English inactivity of the 1690s contributed to a rise in community discord and internal divisions as factions who supported closer relations with the French or the English, and those who advocated greater neutrality with both, jockeyed for control in many Haudenosaunee communities. This backdrop of internal division and concerns about waning Haudenosaunee support for the English provided the context for Livingston's analysis of the communities he visited.³

In his report to Governor Bellomont, Livingston expressed grave concern about New York's Haudenosaunee allies. Throughout his trip to the Central Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy at Onondaga, Livingston found “the Indians much dejected and in a staggering condition.” Livingston believed many Mohawk families had fallen under the Jesuits’ spells when they left their Mohawk Valley homeland to relocate north. “The Maqua's nation are grown weak & much lessened,” he claimed, “by the French daily drawing them from us to Canada so that near two thirds of sd nation are now actually at Canada with their familyes.” He reinforced concerns of Jesuit generosity when he noted that newcomers were “kindly received, being cloathed from head to foot.” While at the main Onondaga village, Livingston identified another unsettling trend. After reassuring his hosts that the English had no plans to disarm and attack them, and reminding them of French efforts to “spread false reports,” Livingston advised residents of the Central Fire to “make your dwellings and habitations compact together, that upon occasion they may be secured and not straggling to and again, as we see they are; which will be a means to preserve your name and keep you from any suddain assault or incursion of an enemy.” To Livingston, French intrigue worked on multiple levels to weaken New York's Indigenous allies: many Mohawk men and women had been “debauched” into abandoning their homelands and Onondaga families now lived scattered from one another. Livingston believed that these internal divisions pushed the previously tight-knit communities of extensive longhouses filled with matrilineal kin in outward directions and produced a more dispersed and disorganized settlement pattern.⁴

Three months later, David Schuyler offered Bellomont more shocking news when he learned that Kanatakwente, an Indigenous village about four miles from Montréal, boasted 350 fighting men, a total four times higher than what Albany officials had estimated. When Schuyler doubted the number, Kanatakwente Mohawks confirmed the French count. Although the figure included relocated Haudenosaunee families from all Five Nations, as well as other Indigenous groups, emigrant Mohawk men represented New York's greatest concern. New York depended on compact and crowded Mohawk villages along the Mohawk River to protect exposed colonial settlements from French and French-allied Indigenous attacks.⁵

As Livingston viewed Haudenosaunee villages through the lens of New York's colonial economy and frontier security, his observations provided valuable insight into Haudenosaunee settlement patterns and spatial relations in transition. His complaint about a weakened Mohawk Nation, for example, highlighted their continued population losses and social displacement as European diseases and more violent warfare followed in the wake of an expanding market. His settlement pattern advice to Onondaga residents suggested a dramatic change in the way some Haudenosaunee communities lived within their local environment. During the late 1680s and 1690s, numerous French military officials, as well as the archaeological record, document multiple extensive longhouses arranged in compact communities throughout the Mohawk and Seneca River Valleys. Human-made defensive structures, either of European or Indigenous design, complemented the natural topography to protect residents. But in a short number of years, settlement patterns for some communities had changed significantly. Livingston's report to the governor painted a vivid picture of declension in disorganized and divided Haudenosaunee villages. To be sure, the waning years of the seventeenth century brought tremendous obstacles and hardship to every Haudenosaunee community. The French and their Indigenous allies mounted multiple invasions into Haudenosaunee homelands that targeted and destroyed the main settlements of all nations except the Cayuga. In addition, repeated epidemics during the 1690s took a toll on survivors, and extreme weather events complicated subsistence practices.

The People of the Longhouse, however, did not share Livingston's bleak view of their situation as the seventeenth century ended. To the contrary, their freedom of movement to visit or relocate to distant spaces reinforced their geographic mobility as men and women continued to travel great distances for subsistence, trade, and personal reasons. Although some communities developed more dispersed settlement patterns, Haudenosaunee men and women sustained their long-standing seasonal and mixed subsistence strategies and their gendered division of labor to feed their families. Most important, Haudenosaunee leaders developed innovative responses to the imperial competition for Indigenous economic partners that emphasized diplomacy instead of warfare to acquire the pelts necessary to engage in the global market. Throughout the 1690s, Confederacy leaders negotiated with long-standing adversaries in the upper Great Lakes to end decades of warfare. These efforts intensified throughout 1700 and 1701 as headmen who wished to end intermittent warfare with the French visited New France to discuss a truce, whereas other headmen in close alliance with New York worked to reconfirm the Covenant Chain with the English. These multiple negotiations culminated in the Grand Settlement of 1701 that ended decades of mourning war violence between Haudenosaunee peoples and Indigenous neighbors, allowed Haudenosaunee fighting men to remain neutral in future imperial conflicts, and opened trade with both imperial competitors. The Grand Settlement also inaugurated more than forty years of peace among Haudenosaunee peoples and Native nations in the upper Great Lakes, New France, and New York. During this time, Haudenosaunee men and women were able to rebuild their lives and communities without fear of devastating invasions of their homelands.

Recovering from waves of intense violence and destruction represented the greatest challenge The People of the Longhouse faced in the last decade of the seventeenth century. The last phase of the Beaver Wars exploded in the 1680s as a series of French-led military invasions laid waste to Haudenosaunee communities and food stores. After obtaining peace in 1675 along their southern flank with Susquehannock peoples, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca men renewed warfare with western enemies in the Illinois country, particularly against Miami, Illinois, Wendat, and Odawa peoples, as well as their French allies. In addition, Haudenosaunee men targeted the French fur trade and plundered Montréal-bound furs and Great Lakes–bound trade goods. Diplomacy and peace negotiations often followed violent attacks as adversaries worked to earn the release of captives. New France depended on western allies to bring their furs to Montréal. Renewed mourning wars engaged men in warfare, not in hunting or trapping furs. Peace, in contrast, opened economic avenues to new exchange networks, especially the competitive markets in Albany. Haudenosaunee men threatened New France's imperial project in multiple ways when they attacked western nations, French traders, and French supply lines, or when they offered alternate paths to English manufactured goods.⁶

Although Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca men used theft and warfare as well as the potential of peace to gain valuable pelts, Mohawk men and women developed closer trading ties with their emigrant kin in Saint Lawrence Valley villages that also undermined New France's fur-trade economy. In an extensive, and illicit, trade network, Mohawk men and women on both sides of the Saint Lawrence River transported northern furs to Albany and trade goods from Albany to Indigenous villages along the Iroquois (Richelieu)-Hudson River corridor, altogether bypassing markets at Montréal. Moreover, exposed French colonial settlements along the Saint Lawrence River offered easy targets for Mohawk fighters. To safeguard their fur trade, maintain relations with their Indigenous allies, and protect their colonial settlements, New France embarked on an ambitious series of military campaigns to destroy or intimidate The People of the Longhouse.⁷

In July 1687, Jacques René de Brisay, marquis de Denonville, led a combined force of more than 1,600 French soldiers and Canadian militiamen and 400 Indigenous allies into Seneca country. Denonville targeted the western door of Haudenosaunee homelands first because Seneca men exploited their geographic proximity to harass New France's trade and communication with western allies. On July 10, Denonville's troops arrived at Irondequoit Bay, the landing place for Seneca communities on the south shore of Lake Ontario. As Denonville's slow progress on Lake Ontario gave ample warning of his arrival and the size of his invading force, Seneca men and women successfully evacuated their families east to Cayuga villages. When an eight-hundred-man ambush outside of their large eastern town at Ganondagan failed to reverse the French advance, Seneca fighters retreated and burned Ganondagan as they fled. Denonville's army then spent the next ten days destroying the four major Seneca towns and a European-style fort described as a “new village,” setting fire to any growing and stored provisions they found and killing a “vast quantity of hogs.” At Gannounata, the smaller village associated with the western castle Totiakton, Denonville described the agricultural destruction by fire as “incredible.” At Totiakton, he confessed, his troops had “burned so large a quantity of old corn that the amount dared not be mentioned.” Nonetheless, Denonville estimated his troops destroyed a total of 1.2 million bushels of growing and stored corn among the four Seneca villages, most of it still in the field. In addition, Denonville believed his campaign had killed, captured, or severely wounded nearly one hundred Seneca residents.⁸

Seneca men and women may have purchased a few hogs that reproduced into the “vast quantity” Denonville encountered, but free-ranging domestic animals, such as swine, often wandered far from colonial farms and ate their way into Indigenous communities. In this instance, Seneca families found ways to incorporate the newcomers through experimental management. As consumers of all types of food, Indigenous children and adults provided roaming hogs and piglets food scraps and waste to create a semidomesticated state and to monitor their movements. When the voracious intruders threatened women's agricultural produce, residents could remove them to islands in rivers or to the other side of water arteries. Ultimately, hogs provided an alternative food source, and Indigenous men and women later sold pork in market exchanges.⁹

Denonville's destruction of Seneca longhouses and cornfields did not impress his Indigenous allies. After the Seneca families evacuated their communities, Denonville turned his focus from fighting Seneca men on the field of battle to destroying the agricultural production of Seneca women, both growing in the field and harvested. He wanted his Indigenous allies to help burn caches of provisions and agricultural fields. Odawa, Wendat, and Illinois fighters from the upper Great Lakes, however, not only refused to target food stores but also ridiculed the French for going “out to fetch a walk rather than wage war.” Western men had joined the French campaign to fight Seneca men, and now they wanted to track down those who fled for capture and to loot their abandoned villages. They refused to participate in Denonville's style of warfare because of its explicit attack on the reproductive labor of women to provide for and sustain their communities. More important, burning crops was a direct assault on women's connections to the land and beyond the pale for Indigenous fighters. Frustrated by French inaction against the male enemy, many western warriors returned home after the initial battles.¹⁰

In addition to tactical military disagreements with their western allies, the French also doubted the enthusiasm of their Saint Lawrence Valley Indigenous allies to fight against kin. Although Haudenosaunee fighters on both sides of the Saint Lawrence River died in the campaign, Haudenosaunee men from Seneca and Saint Lawrence Valley villages tried to avoid conflict and minimize losses. Scouts, for example, communicated in person or through early warning shouts to relay French movements and locations. Men also fired their weapons early and purposefully missed their targets. In addition, two Mohawk men, Adandidaghko and Kakariall, accompanied the French expedition against their will. Both had traveled to New France for trade and to visit kin, but Jesuits prevented their return home for fear they would relay intelligence regarding the planned invasion. Consequently, Adandidaghko and Kakariall joined the French campaign to avoid imprisonment, not out of loyalty to the French, and they had no interest in assisting the French military effort. Moreover, the refusal of Indigenous fighters to help locate and destroy the agricultural produce of Seneca women allowed numerous outfields and caches of provisions to go undiscovered.¹¹

A few years after burning Seneca communities and crops, New France targeted Mohawk villages for the continued attacks of their young men on exposed Saint Lawrence Valley colonial settlements. In February 1693, Louis de Buade de Frontenac, governor of New France, led a 625-man combined force of French soldiers, Canadian colonials, and Indigenous allies, many of whom were emigrant Mohawk men, against Mohawk Valley communities. Given the season of the year, most men were engaged in hunting expeditions and away from their main villages, thus leaving women and children as easy victims for capture. The French first attacked Caughnawaga and Ganagaro, the two eastern communities within a mile of each other. The extensive defensive palisades and locked gates provided little protection for residence after raiders scaled the walls and opened the gates. Once inside, the sleeping women, children, and old men offered minimal resistance. Frontenac repeated these tactics a few days later against the larger community of Tionnondogé, about twenty miles upriver. The French burned all housing structures and stored provisions at the three Mohawk communities. The winter season eliminated any need to locate and destroy crops in the field. Saint Lawrence Valley Haudenosaunee fighters took nearly three hundred prisoners, a great number of them relatives. The invading party then beat a hasty retreat north before the English could help their Mohawk neighbors mount a counterattack and rescue.¹²

Frontenac's early success, however, was short lived. Although Frontenac had ordered “not to give any quarter to the [Mohawk] men who were found under arms,” his northern Indigenous allies, many of them Mohawk emigrants, carried out their own wishes and allowed several Mohawk men to join the retreating French expedition after they agreed to relocate to the Saint Lawrence Valley with their captured wives and children. More problematic for the retreating French, their allies insisted on building a fort in the woods from which to intercept Mohawk and English colonial fighters. But when the fighting started, French-allied Mohawks refused to participate. “We should … have succeeded,” Frontenac complained, “had not several Indians remained in the fort, doing nothing.” In addition, several prisoners escaped when their captors went hunting and left them unguarded. As a result, Frontenac lamented, only eighteen to twenty Mohawk men died in the campaign and most prisoners escaped. Colonel Peter Schuyler confirmed that most captives escaped, claiming only five men and a few women and children made the full journey to the Saint Lawrence Valley.¹³

A few years later, Governor Frontenac turned his military attention to the Central Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy at Onondaga. Onondaga men had long engaged in mourning war campaigns against New France's Indigenous allies. But a new emphasis on peace with western nations concerned Frontenac far greater than violence. As Frontenac explained to his king, Louis XIV, a significant military strike “was the sole and only feasible means that remained for me to prevent the conclusion of the peace between our allies and the Iroquois.” If the Confederacy and western nations confirmed a peace agreement, New France's Indigenous allies would gain access to English fur traders. In Frontenac's mind, this was “a step that would inevitably accelerate the entire ruin” of New France because the colony could not “subsist except by the trade it carries with the Upper [western] Indians.” Frontenac originally planned the attack for the winter months, as he did against Mohawk communities, when men would be away from the village on hunting expeditions, women and children would be easy targets for capture, and all food provisions would be stored nearby. He predicted that the capture of Onondaga women and children would force their male relations to fight or accept peace on his terms. Deep snows, however, canceled the winter assault, and the French did not march until July 1696.¹⁴

In the summer expedition, Frontenac assembled hundreds of Indigenous allies and most of the Canadian forces, totaling nearly 2,200 men. His large expeditionary force made steady progress along the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and then it slowed considerably while ascending the numerous rapids of the Oswego River. The delays gave Onondaga men sufficient time to assess the strength of the invading force and determine the best course of action. Onondaga scouts left Frontenac a “descriptive drawing” of the French army on bark to demonstrate the accuracy of their intelligence. The scouts also provided “two bundles of cut rushes, indicating that 1434 Indian warriors” awaited the French. Cayuga and Seneca men initially offered military assistance to their Onondaga neighbors, as reflected in the high warrior count, but they decided to protect their communities after an escaped Seneca prisoner informed them that French military plans included attacks on all three western nations. These Onondaga messages reinforced French concerns that they had to proceed with great caution as they ventured into Onondaga homelands and unfamiliar territory. When Frontenac reached the south end of Onondaga Lake on August 1, 1696 he halted a few additional days to build a fort to safeguard the bateaux, canoes, and provisions.¹⁵

Onondaga residents took advantage of French caution and delays to prepare stores of provisions, weapons, and other necessary supplies and evacuated their community. Although a palisade surrounded their longhouses, they knew it offered little protection against thousands of invading troops and cannon. Consequently, residents burned their community and left the same night Frontenac landed at the head of Onondaga Lake. When Frontenac reached the Onondaga village a few days later, on August 4, he found “merely a heap of dust and ashes.” From these remains, however, Frontenac reconstructed a compact Onondaga community in a map of his military invasion. Onondaga men had neatly arranged more than fifty houses inside a European-style, rectangular palisade, with an additional thirteen structures just outside of the protective walls. In his account of the expedition, Frontenac believed that the fort had been in “a tolerably strong state of defense. It was an oblong, flanked by four regular bastions.” A triple palisade with two inner rows touching each other and a third row, six feet farther out, protected the community. Large-diameter posts made up the two inner rows and supported the bastions and any walking paths of the palisade, while small-diameter posts made up the outer perimeter and provided additional defenses for the fort's walls. Archaeological testing confirms Frontenac's description of this triple-palisaded village.¹⁶

The evacuation of the Onondaga community frustrated Frontenac, who complained that their flight robbed his army “of the glory of entirely destroying them.” Frontenac, therefore, turned his attention to razing the community's cornfields that extended nearly two leagues from their main village. The army spent three days cutting down the stalks until “the destruction was complete” and there was “the least fear that any could sprout again.” Although Onondaga fighters refused to engage Frontenac in battle and only lost an old man and an old woman who remained behind, Frontenac reassured Louis XIV that they “will not escape destruction.” Frontenac believed his agricultural razing “will cause more of them to perish of hunger than we could have destroyed by fire and sword.” Many Onondaga men, women, and children, however, relocated south, into the Susquehanna River Valley and to a subsistence environment they already knew well from seasonal hunting and fishing expeditions. In addition, Jacques de Lamberville, a former missionary to Onondaga villagers, confirmed that evacuating Onondaga families already had a village and planted fields of corn in this southern location.¹⁷

As Frontenac's troops engaged in the environmental destruction of Onondaga women's fields, Oneida emissaries arrived, hoping to avoid a similar fate. Frontenac promised them peace on the condition they abandon their homeland and relocate north near Montréal. Frontenac assured them he would take care of their needs and provide them land and food. To force compliance with his demands, Frontenac dispatched Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil to the main Oneida village with orders to burn their homes and provisions, reminding them they would want for nothing in Canada. Although village leaders stated they would relocate north, most residents fled to the woods when Vaudreuil approached with more than six hundred men. Only about thirty men, many of them principal leaders of the community, returned with Vaudreuil as hostages. Before leaving the Oneida community, Vaudreuil's men burned all the homes, growing and stored crops, and a fort. The French repeatedly discovered in the last stages of the Beaver Wars that many Haudenosaunee communities had constructed European-style forts for community protection. These defensive structures underscored the continued need for village security while also reducing demands on the local environment and human laborers. The new forts protected inhabitants against raiding enemies, but residents had no confidence the structures could withstand hundreds, even thousands, of invading forces or the superior weaponry of European cannon.¹⁸

The French expressed great confidence in each of these military expeditions to eliminate the economic and security threats that Haudenosaunee fighting men posed to New France's Indigenous allies and colonial settlements. Soon after burning all the Seneca communities and provisions, for example, Denonville claimed Seneca men “considered this check so decisive” that they mounted no counterattacks. Frontenac later argued that Denonville's campaign forced subsistence hardship on Seneca families for several years. In his narrative of the attacks on Mohawk villages, Frontenac reported that the expedition “succeeded as much as could possibly be desired,” particularly with respect to the destruction of their winter provisions. Mohawk leaders underscored their desperate subsistence situation only a few weeks later in a meeting with New York Governor Benjamin Fletcher when they described themselves in a “meane condition” and thanked Fletcher for providing immediate provisions and directing Peter Schuyler “to take care of the Maquas Nation” to prevent starvation “in the midst of this extremity.” After his 1696 military campaign, Frontenac claimed Onondaga losses were “considerable,” and he described Oneida peoples as “ruined.” New York again stepped in to provide immediate subsistence support and supplied corn to both nations in the ensuing year. In Frontenac's final conclusions of the major military campaigns against The People of the Longhouse, in which he oversaw the complete destruction of Mohawk, Oneida, and Onondaga villages and provisions, he boasted, “the Iroquois were powerful and are since diminished.” Although the English offered subsistence aid, Frontenac doubted the longevity of this generosity and was certain the “Iroquois will be reduced to the necessity of perishing of hunger, or of accepting peace on such conditions as we shall conclude to impose.” Frontenac encouraged western allies to remain vigilant in their attacks on Haudenosaunee hunting parties and fishing expeditions to quicken their collapse.¹⁹

Epidemic diseases compounded Haudenosaunee subsistence problems and recovery. A smallpox epidemic that circulated throughout New England, New York, and New France between 1688 and 1691, for example, killed more than three hundred Haudenosaunee men, women, and children, with Mohawk communities suffering the highest losses. Their proximity to English colonial settlements in the Mohawk Valley and contact with emigrant kin in the Saint Lawrence Valley increased opportunities for exposure to and transmission of the disease. This multiyear epidemic affected subsistence practices as men and women could not perform their normal labor while sick, and the community mourned the loss of friends and family.²⁰

After the epidemic subsided, extreme environmental conditions continued to hamper agricultural productivity. New Yorkers recorded a difficult winter between 1691 and 1692 and Governor Bellomont described the winter from 1697 into 1698 as “the severest that ever was known in the memory of man …. the snow being deeper than the height of a man.” Unfavorable weather conditions during the 1695, 1698, and 1699 growing seasons resulted in poor harvests. Unusual snowfalls delayed the planting season, and high waters from the melting snow flooded fields and destroyed crops. In June 1699, Colonel Peter Schuyler informed Lieutenant Governor John Nanfan that the previous season's crops had failed on account of these high waters, and there was little prospect that the upcoming harvest would be any better.²¹

In times of subsistence emergencies, such as failed crops or burned agricultural fields and stored provisions, Haudenosaunee communities invoked the long-standing practice of the Dish with One Spoon whereby villagers provided immediate and temporary subsistence relief to hungry or homeless neighbors. Haudenosaunee leaders worked to incorporate New York governors and Indian Affairs officials into this custom, reminding them of their obligations under the Covenant Chain alliance. As Dackashata, a Seneca leader, informed Governor Fletcher in September 1696, “we have lately had the loss of two Castles [Onondaga and Oneida] by the enemy, we have concluded to do our best to assist them and we desire Caijenquiragoe [Fletcher] will do the same.” Governor Fletcher agreed to assist Onondaga and Oneida villages throughout the winter, just as previous governors provided provisions in the aftermath of the invasions into Seneca and Mohawk homelands. Village leaders also exaggerated their community's suffering as a tactic to gain more provisions. In a March 1697 speech to Governor Fletcher, for example, Onondaga spokesmen complained that their young men were all out hunting “for a livelihood” because “our people cry out for want of meat, therefore wee begg you will please to order us some provisions.” As the colonial partner in the Covenant Chain alliance, Haudenosaunee leaders used an array of cultural strategies to pressure New York's colonial officials to play the part of benevolent ally and offer provisions.²²

Haudenosaunee leaders also exploited the military needs and frontier security concerns of their New York neighbors to gain food, weapons, and other goods. The French-led invasions against Haudenosaunee communities intersected with the larger imperial conflict, King William's War, over control of the North American interior. Throughout the war and into the eighteenth century, New York governors worried constantly about frontier defense and repeatedly complained that neighboring English colonies failed to render them sufficient financial or military support. In February 1690, for example, the French and their Saint Lawrence Valley Indigenous allies sacked and burned the New York frontier community of Schenectady, located on the Mohawk River about halfway between Albany and the eastern Mohawk communities. In the attack, the invaders killed sixty colonial inhabitants and carried away twenty-seven captives. A raging smallpox epidemic and their own security concerns limited nearby Mohawk assistance. The destruction at Schenectady demonstrated New York's inability to protect its communities and their need for Haudenosaunee military allies. Albany officials reminded their colonial neighbors of the considerable expense required to keep Haudenosaunee fighters “employed in the war against the French … and [it] cannot be effected without dayly supplying them wth what they want,” particularly cloth, blankets, weapons, and food. Haudenosaunee leaders also stressed that the imperial conflict was a war between the French and English, not an Indigenous fight. As a result, if the English wanted Haudenosaunee military assistance, fighting men expected high returns for their service.²³

Haudenosaunee leaders welcomed any subsistence aid New York offered, but they did not depend on it to feed their villages. The distance between Haudenosaunee communities and Albany, as well as hundreds of residents in each village, made it impossible for New York to provide provisions beyond emergency relief or to individuals who traveled to, or lived near, Albany. During the final years of the 1690s, Indian Affairs agents, including Robert Livingston, recorded numerous disbursements of food for Haudenosaunee leaders, French prisoners, and French-allied Indigenous visitors, as well as disparate Indigenous nations north of Albany, referred to as River Indians in the historical record. Between November 1696 and December 1697, for example, Indian Affairs agents distributed approximately 200 pounds of bread, 100 pounds of beef, 250 pounds of pork, 400 quarts of peas, and 520 quarts of corn to Indigenous communities around Albany. During the summer of 1698, Livingston supplied more than 2,000 pounds of pork, 450 pounds of beef, more than 2,100 quarts of peas, and 200 loaves of bread to New York's Indigenous allies. Although the cost of these food items greatly increased the colony's expenses, the allotted provisions supplied emergency or temporary rations to specific recipients, not long-term subsistence needs for entire communities.²⁴

In the wake of the French military invasions that destroyed communities and agricultural stores, Haudenosaunee men and women reverted to secondary subsistence practices and exploited all the environmental resources available in their homelands. After suffering summer invasions, Seneca, Onondaga, and Oneida women harvested the crops from hidden outfields that had escaped fire and sword and relocated wandering hogs, horses, cattle, and poultry. Men, however, could not immediately rebuild their communities because they collected bark for residential construction projects in the late spring and early summer season, and then shaped and dried it before use. Consequently, residents sought temporary shelter at neighboring communities or with kin in Saint Lawrence Valley villages. Other residents relocated to distant resource procurement camps. French traders and missionaries who lived and traveled throughout the northern and western Great Lakes noted the presence of numerous Haudenosaunee hunting parties, especially north of Lake Ontario, as men and their families extended their stay in these familiar spaces. After the collapse of nearly all agricultural output, families began their seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering cycle early and relied more heavily on nonagricultural subsistence resources.²⁵

The flexibility of mixed subsistence practices and the array of nonagricultural resources available throughout Haudenosaunee homelands diluted the long-term impact of New France's environmentally destructive military campaigns. When Denonville shifted his focus to burning Seneca villages and provisions, for example, western allies warned this was “a fruitless adventure … to burn some Hutts of Bark that the Enemy could rebuild in four days.” In addition, they underscored the cultural practice of the Dish with One Spoon when they claimed that Seneca women “did not matter the spoiling of their Corn, for that the other Iroquese nations were able to supply ‘em.” By 1690, Captain Duplessis, charged with planning Canada's defense, openly disputed the success of Denonville's campaign, complaining, “the destruction in 1687 of the Indian corn belonging to the Senecas, subjected them to but a small amount of inconvenience. Not one of them perished of hunger, as two arrows are sufficient to enable a Savage to procure meat enough for a year's support, and as fishing never fails.” Although Duplessis minimized Seneca suffering, he recognized their ability to shift their subsistence focus and receive emergency assistance from neighbors to prevent devastating famine. In addition, when hunters and fishers from all Five Nations traveled freely north of Lake Ontario, harassed the French around Fort Niagara and Fort Frontenac, and joined numerous Haudenosaunee attacks on Saint Lawrence Valley settlements from 1687 until the end of the century, they demonstrated that the massive French-led military campaigns had done little to intimidate or destroy them.²⁶

Contemporary French maps of Haudenosaunee territory, often drawn by Jesuit missionaries or based on their firsthand geographic and environmental knowledge, noted the importance of nonagricultural resources in the Haudenosaunee diet and highlighted the subsistence mobility of Haudenosaunee families. In 1680, Abbé Claude Bernou produced a map of Lake Ontario and its northern environment that underscores the threat that peaceful Haudenosaunee relations with western nations posed to New France's economic ambitions. The map outlines principal footpaths and water arteries that connected northern and western nations to The People of the Longhouse (figure 3.1). At the east end of Lake Ontario paths entered Cahihonoüagha (Salmon River), a key subsistence and spiritual place for Onondaga peoples, and then headed east to English markets at Albany. Bernou's map also provides environmental and subsistence resource information for the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Bernou, for example, located difficult sections along water routes, such as rapids and swamps, and noted that one could find Haudenosaunee men engaged in “leur principale subsistence” (their principal subsistence) activity of fishing in the ponds and marshes all along the southern shore. Women also gathered countless environmental resources from swampy landscapes. The numerous rivers that fed into the lake provided year-round fishing opportunities. The emphasis on water routes, rivers, and fishing highlights the critical role of water in Haudenosaunee connections to the land, spatial relations with neighbors, mobility, and survival.²⁷

FIGURE 3.1. Carte du Lac Ontario ou de Frontenac et de sa Region (Map of Lake Ontario or Frontenac and its region) (1680). Gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53016904s.

In 1688, Jesuit Pierre Raffeix produced another map of Lake Ontario and its surroundings, but one that reorients its directionality so that the geographic representation appears upside down. This perspective offers the view from New France looking south into Haudenosaunee homelands. The map reflects substantial French geographic knowledge of the terrain south of the lake and provides more specific placement of Haudenosaunee villages among the lakes and rivers, rather than generalized locations (figure 3.2). Raffeix illustrated multiple paths to and between several communities, occasionally noting the distance, and identified numerous fishing stations (peches) that demonstrate the continued importance of this key subsistence resource. Jesuit residence at Haudenosaunee villages, either as invited guests or diplomatic hostages, gave Jesuits firsthand knowledge of the environment and the many ways Haudenosaunee peoples lived within and daily exploited their ecosystems. Jesuit environmental knowledge articulated on maps also assisted New France's military campaigns. In addition, Raffeix included the communities along Lake Ontario's north shore, reflecting their continued use as resource acquisition centers even after most of the residents had returned south before 1687. After the French burned and destroyed all Seneca villages in 1687, many Seneca families returned to these north-shore centers for short-term recovery. Drawn amid the massive and sustained French military campaigns to destroy the Five Nations, the map represented growing French geographic knowledge of the northern reaches of Haudenosaunee homelands, particularly along the entire Lake Ontario coastline.²⁸

Despite Jesuit residency in Haudenosaunee communities, much of the environment beyond the village center remained, at best, territory only partially known to the French. Their lack of environmental and geographic knowledge beyond villages, the lake shore, and the most traveled routes reflected the ability of Haudenosaunee guides and hosts to restrict the free movement of Jesuit missionaries and to control their access to new spaces. The limited mobility of Jesuits also underscored their precarious existence in communities and Haudenosaunee homelands where they were not always welcomed guests. As a result, missionaries did not travel alone or beyond the protections of supportive residents.

FIGURE 3.2. Pierre Raffeix, Le lac Ontario avec les lieux circonvoisins et particulièrement les cinq nations iroquoises (Lake Ontario and the surrounding areas and particularly the Iroquois Five nations) (1688). North is to the lower left. Gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40739412k.

Although New York fur traders and officials occasionally visited the villages of their Haudenosaunee customers and allies, their time in Haudenosaunee territory did not match the duration of Jesuit missionaries, nor did they produce detailed cartographic representations of Haudenosaunee space. When Greenhalgh visited all Five Nations in 1677, for example, he recorded the number of longhouses, estimated warrior counts, and described defensive structures for each village, but he did not draw maps of the places he traveled or viewed. In the Covenant Chain alliance, the path of interaction often originated in a west-to-east flow, with Haudenosaunee fighting men, traders, headmen, and women traveling to colonial officials in Albany, rather than New Yorkers heading west. As a result, Haudenosaunee men and women explicitly limited English exposure to and knowledge of their homelands, footpaths, water routes, and subsistence resources, particularly west of Mohawk villages.²⁹

When Robert Livingston traveled to Onondaga in 1700 and visited “those Countreys” he had “so much heard talk of,” he informed Governor Bellomont that he now better understood the proper route west, a route that only a few years earlier “was reckoned … impassable” because of the lack of knowledge. The trip through Mohawk, Oneida, and Onondaga communities influenced Livingston's decision to propose a different strategy to meet New York's security needs. With Mohawk villages in such a “weak” condition, Livingston worried Albany could not depend on their distant and reduced populations for protection. Instead, Livingston suggested removing Mohawk communities to a tract of land within “7 or 8 hours … either summer or winter by land or water” from Schenectady, currently the halfway point between Albany and eastern Mohawk villages. Furthermore, Livingston believed relocating Mohawk communities would represent the first domino to fall in a more general eastward shift of Oneida and Onondaga villages. Livingston thought it would be easy to persuade both nations “to desert their habitations and remove nearer us, upon our river, some what above the Maquas where there is a fertile soyle and out of the road to be attacked by the French with Canoes; they will then be strong and numerous and too hard a bit for the French to digest.” Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk villages clustered closer to Albany would better insulate New York's colonial settlements from French and Indigenous attacks. In addition, Livingston argued, their eastward migration would place greater distance between Onondaga and Oneida communities and the water routes from Lake Ontario that Frontenac had traveled in 1696 and thereby offer greater security for all three Haudenosaunee nations. Livingston's language and tone, however, highlighted an English perspective that the Mohawk River was no longer an Indigenous space, it was, in Livingston's words, now “our” river, meaning an English-controlled space. In addition, Livingston's suggestion that Haudenosaunee peoples would willingly leave their homeland because of fear of the French or faith in English protection were both misplaced assumptions. Haudenosaunee men and women in every village had experienced firsthand the lack of English military assistance throughout the 1690s and earlier. More important, French military destruction of longhouses and cornfields did not equate to the defeat of The People of the Longhouse.³⁰

Livingston also challenged the economic strategy of building forts near Haudenosaunee villages to retain loyalty and attract fur-trade customers. He agreed to the necessity of forts but wanted environmental and financial factors to play a greater role in determining location. Because Haudenosaunee men and women evaluated the natural defenses of an environment when choosing new village sites, villages were often difficult, and therefore expensive, for European armies to access. In addition, the surrounding environment and singular access points that increased Haudenosaunee village security complicated colonial emergency escape plans. Furthermore, when Livingston considered the prospect of a defensive post at the main Onondaga community and the Central Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy, he surmised that a fort located near their village would serve only to protect Onondaga residents and that other villages would demand the same. Instead, Livingston proposed constructing a fort farther down the Onondaga and Oswego Rivers, closer to Lake Ontario. This location would intercept any French troops departing Lake Ontario on their way to Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, or Seneca villages, but only after the invading force ascended the many rapids of the Oswego River. As a result, the English could appear to fulfill their Covenant Chain responsibilities as military allies with one strategically located defensive structure instead a series of forts at multiple Haudenosaunee villages. If placed correctly, the English fort could also intercept western Indigenous groups traveling to English markets.³¹

Early in Livingston's trip west, he encountered Onucheranorum and Sinnonquirese, two Mohawk leaders, fishing along the Mohawk River. The two men revealed intelligence they learned from a Seneca leader that piqued Livingston's concerns about French military activity and economic meddling south of Lake Ontario. Onucheranorum and Sinnonquirese outlined French plans to construct five forts at strategic locations throughout Haudenosaunee homelands. From the west, the first fort, at Niagara, represented the western gateway into Haudenosaunee homelands. Denonville had established a post at the mouth of the Niagara River after his 1687 invasion but repeated harassment from Seneca men and difficulty supplying the fort caused the French to abandon it. The French planned a second fort at Irondequoit on the south side of Lake Ontario and the primary access point to Seneca villages about thirty miles to the south and Cayuga villages to the southeast. A third fort at Kaneenda targeted a key Onondaga fishing location and the main landing spot for returning hunters. A fourth fort focused on another favored fishing camp, this one in Oneida country at Kahioghage, less than two days from their main village and about twelve miles east of Lake Ontario. The French proposed a final fort along the Mohawk River, about three days west of Dekanohage, the westernmost Mohawk village and within striking distance of New York's colonial settlements.³²

The intelligence Onucheranorum and Sinnonquirese revealed represented a direct challenge to the sovereignty of all Haudenosaunee peoples because European forts threatened unrestricted access to important subsistence resources and control over their homelands. The two Mohawk headmen explained their opposition to Livingston, stating, “Wee Sachems are of opinion, if the French offer to do these things and will not be diverted by fair means, that we shall be necessitated to rise up all hands and resist him with force.” They also invoked the Covenant Chain alliance, reminding Livingston “for certainly our Great King that lives over the Great Lake [in England] will never suffer us thus to be penn’d up round about on all sides.” The two leaders prodded Livingston and the English to confront the French threat, recognizing that Haudenosaunee warriors and weapons could not prevent a fort once construction commenced nor dislodge the military force once the fort was completed. But they also made clear that being “penn’d up … on all sides” was not an acceptable future.³³

After Livingston heard Onucheranorum and Sinnonquirese's concerns, he continued his journey west, reaching the main Onondaga village about ten days later. After several Onondaga leaders returned from their fishing stations, they met with Livingston to discuss French rumors and intrigue. In their final meeting, Livingston reassured Onondaga headmen of the King's protection, informing them that Governor Bellomont awaited orders to build a fort at the Central Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy. Livingston boasted that the fort would protect all of the Five Nations from French attacks. Onondaga leaders thanked Livingston for the announcement but withheld a formal statement accepting the proposal until consulting leaders from all Five Nations. Both sides agreed to meet again in four months at Albany. The delay gave Haudenosaunee leaders time to determine a proper response to a proposed European fort deep within their homelands.³⁴

FIGURE 3.3. A mappe of Colonel Römers voyage to ye 5 Indian Nations: going from New Yorck to Albany, thence west (1700). Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library.

When Haudenosaunee leaders met with Governor Bellomont in August 1700, their speeches revealed weak enthusiasm for an English fort. Aqueendara, an Onondaga leader and the main conference speaker, repeatedly avoided Bellomont's propositions on the proposed fort or offered vague and delayed promises of Onondaga assistance in providing guides, laborers, and, if necessary, protection. Nonetheless, Colonel Wolfgang Römer, New York's chief military engineer, left Albany the following month to survey Onondaga territory for a suitable fort location. Römer integrated English, French, and Haudenosaunee cartographic knowledge and lexicon to produce a map that outlined his travel route (figure 3.3). Römer's map was a significant cartographic contribution to the period because much of it was based on his personal travels, and it provided new detail for Haudenosaunee space far west of New York's colonial settlements. The map also appealed to a colonial and imperial audience interested in extending English economic and political influence up the Mohawk River and farther west.³⁵

As Römer visited, documented, and mapped Haudenosaunee homelands, his safety and success hinged on the goodwill, guidance, and environmental knowledge of his Indigenous hosts. Römer also relied on Haudenosaunee porters and canoes at every village because Bellomont instructed him to follow the Mohawk River-Wood Creek-Oneida Lake route, to measure the distance on the rivers and portages, and to assess improvements needed to shorten the trip. Römer recorded his path on the map and in the cartouche as he traveled north from New York to Albany and then headed west into the homelands of The People of the Flint. After visiting the western Mohawk community of Dekanohage, Römer followed the “Indian highway” south of the Mohawk River to the “Second Nation,” The People of the Standing Stone. He then continued west to the “Third Nation,” The People of the Hills. During his visit at the main Onondaga village, Römer headed northwest to “Lake Cananda” (Onondaga Lake) and wanted to follow this water route north down the Oswego River to Cadragqua Lake (Lake Ontario). He was most interested in surveying the southeast corner of Cadragqua Lake, at the mouth of the Oswego River, because this strategic location would allow the English to intercept Indigenous fur traders heading to markets in New France. Römer, however, failed to reach his desired destination, explaining in the cartouche that the traveling group ran out of provisions.³⁶

Römer's experience in different villages confirmed the resistance ofHaudenosaunee leaders and residents to the English fort. While atOnucheranorum's western Mohawk community of Dekanohage, for example, Römer needed new guides and porters because two of the original four refused to continue the journey. Onucheranorum eventually found replacements but explained that because all the men were busy making new houses, he could find only female substitutes. This arrangement challenged Römer's expectations of proper diplomatic protocol because he did not believe a European man should be escorted by a woman. Nonetheless, the appointment of female guides reinforced the geographic knowledge and mobility of Haudenosaunee women who traveled freely and independently. At the next village, Oneida men failed to make Römer a canoe, partly because some charged exorbitant rates the English could not afford and others made excuses for their unwillingness to perform the work. Kanagquaindi, a village leader, expressed regret that the young men refused to help, but excused himself from the job because he was heading south the next morning to wage a mourning war against Catawba enemies. In addition, Römer's men needed to hire a new round of porters. Römer did not anticipate these setbacks and expenses, rather he expected village leaders to compel their men to perform requested tasks.³⁷

Römer expressed daily frustration with delays in travel while awaiting village leaders at different communities, the inability of leaders to order their men to make canoes and serve as porters, and the refusal of guides to travel his preferred routes. That frustration peaked when his Onondaga hosts would not take him to the southeast corner of Lake Ontario. Instead, they led him through the woods to several swampy and isolated locations wholly unsuitable for a fort. When Römer asked leaders for their opinion on the best location for a fort, leaders deferred their answer until all Five Nations could discuss the matter together. Teganissorens, an Onondaga headman, advised Römer that he should not expect an answer sooner than the following spring when the trees begin to bud. Teganissorens underscored the continuance of seasonal subsistence labor and noted men would be out hunting and fishing and therefore not engaged in diplomatic discussions. When Römer tried to continue his expedition west to visit Cayuga and Seneca villages as instructed, Onondaga leaders claimed that western enemies made the route too dangerous to procure any guides and porters. Furthermore, the refusal of Onondaga leaders to provide adequate canoes forced Römer to alter his return route and to retrace his southern footpath, rather than investigate the portages and water routes along Wood Creek and the Mohawk River.³⁸

The cartographic intelligence depicted on Römer's map (figure 3.3) highlighted the continued ability of The People of the Longhouse to restrict and control European mobility within their homelands after more than three generations of sustained contact. Römer, for example, specifically located the three main Mohawk communities and the main Oneida and Onondaga settlements on his map. He also labeled several rivers feeding into these villages, marked the prominent footpath far south of the Mohawk River, identified significant carrying places along Wood Kill and Beaver Kill, and clearly dotted the paths he traveled, both on horseback or foot, and by water. His settlement pattern and environmental detail for Haudenosaunee homelands east of Onondaga villages reflects a landscape at least partially known to Europeans. Specific details showing Haudenosaunee village locations and topographical information, however, become increasingly vague west of Onondaga country and away from the paths he traveled. Oneida Lake, for example, is clearly shown, but the other Finger Lakes, and the rivers connecting them, are more distorted because Römer proceeded no farther west than the main Onondaga village.³⁹

The diplomatic exchanges between Haudenosaunee leaders and English officials over the proposed fort in Onondaga homelands evolved from Haudenosaunee experiences with the French at Fort Cadaraqui on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario. In a 1695 meeting with Governor Frontenac, for example, an Onondaga headman, Aqueendara, articulated the Haudenosaunee position as he used language and word choice appropriate for the military leader of New France to restate many examples of French violence and deceit. Aqueendara reminded Frontenac: “You did steale that place [Cadaraqui] from us … You thinke yourselfes the ancient inhabitants of this country & longest in possession … Wee Warriours are the firste & the ancient people & the greatest of You all, these part's and country's were inhabited and trod upon by us the warriour's before any Christian.” Although Haudenosaunee men had successfully “quenched the fyre” at the fort in 1689, they lacked the weapons and manpower necessary to prevent French reoccupation. English failures to provide meaningful military assistance in these efforts fueled Haudenosaunee doubts of the English as a reliable partner. Aqueendara and other Onondaga headmen understood the imperial and military impositions of European occupation and maneuvered to slow European intrusion into their homelands. As Onondaga leaders and guides rebuffed English efforts to construct a fort or to cooperate in any attempts to survey their homelands, Römer grew weary of his uncooperative hosts and returned to Albany in disappointment.⁴⁰

Although Haudenosaunee leaders defused the threat of English intrusion into their homelands, mourning wars with western enemies and the need to participate in a global fur-trade economy that contributed to that violence still loomed large. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick ended King William's War, but the peace between the French and the English did not extend to the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, nor to New France's Indigenous allies. New York officials argued that The People of the Longhouse were English subjects and, therefore, the treaty included them. New France, however, rejected this claim and encouraged mourning war raids on Haudenosaunee communities and hunting parties until each nation made peace with New France. New York worked to prevent Haudenosaunee leaders from negotiating separately with New France because such a peace would threaten New York's imperial claims to Haudenosaunee homelands. In addition, peace between the Five Nations and New France would expose New York's isolated colonial settlements to enemy attack. Without peace, however, violence and mourning war continued. When Haudenosaunee families dispersed to distant hunting and fishing camps in routine seasonal subsistence patterns, they lacked the protection of large defensive communities and were easy targets for enemy attacks. During the last years of the 1690s, Haudenosaunee leaders claimed they had lost more than one hundred fighters. In a sign of increasing violence, more than fifty Onondaga and Seneca men died fighting western bands of Odawa, Miami, and Illinois foes during the first few months of 1700.⁴¹

War weariness and protecting access to marketable beaver made it imperative that the Confederacy reach a peace agreement with New France and western nations. Haudenosaunee leaders, however, faced competing challenges in negotiating an end to hostilities. On the one hand, they wanted a peace with New France and western nations that would not be viewed as economic and military capitulation. Western Haudenosaunee men, particularly from Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga villages, wanted to hunt throughout the Great Lakes without worry of attack. The Confederacy, however, lacked the military power to guarantee access to a region gained by conquest. Therefore, some leaders hoped French diplomatic assistance would keep hunting territories open and prevent enemy raids. On the other hand, Haudenosaunee leaders also needed to maintain political and economic ties with the English in Albany. A strong Covenant Chain alliance increased pressure on New France to agree to, and enforce, a truce. Most important, Haudenosaunee leaders wanted to retain their autonomy and avoid becoming pawns of their imperial neighbors who competed for control of the region.⁴²

To address these challenges, village leaders debated the best policies for their communities and for the Confederacy as a whole as well as the best strategy to ensure a balance of power in villages and with Indigenous and imperial neighbors. Villages often contained a mix of voices, from those who supported closer economic and diplomatic ties to New France, to those who wanted a permanent peace with Native nations to the north and west who occupied prized beaver-hunting environments, to those who wanted to strengthen the economic and military alliances of the Covenant Chain. Other voices worked to avoid Haudenosaunee involvement in future imperial conflicts altogether. Although these competing interests pursued different tactics, they had the same goal of increasing Haudenosaunee opportunities in the global economy through protected access to hunting territories and pulling more Indigenous economic partners into Haudenosaunee trade networks. Supporters of each strategy cultivated ties with favored European neighbors, whether English or French, and vocal proponents of a position competed for leadership within their communities. This community competition prevented complete control by any one group. More important, by ensuring that diplomatic balance and peace prevailed, Haudenosaunee peoples retained their autonomy against aggressive imperial friends and foes.⁴³

During the late 1690s, the influence of community voices pushing for closer ties to one imperial neighbor over the other waned as advocates for open trade with both gained prominence. Teganissorens, an Onondaga headman, emerged as a vocal proponent of this position, especially as warfare with western nations continued. Teganissorens accepted Haudenosaunee economic reliance on European trade goods but wanted open trade and military neutrality with both New France and New York to avert political dependence on either. Teganissorens worked with other advocates for open trade, as well as leaders who supported stronger ties to either New France or to New York to implement a strategy of balance and peace. In 1700, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy participated in two separate treaty conferences: one with the French and western nations, and a second with the English. The Seneca and Onondaga spokesmen, Tonatakout and Ohonsiowanne, respectively, joined Teganissorens as he traveled to Montréal to push for stronger economic ties to New France and peace in the west. Additional members of the party represented Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga community interests. Oneida and Mohawk villages did not send delegates to Montréal, but western Haudenosaunee diplomats claimed to speak for them. In addition, each nation sent delegates to Albany. At both conferences, Haudenosaunee speakers sought peace, neutrality, and open trade relations with their European and Indigenous neighbors.⁴⁴

These two conferences opened the door for peace between The People of the Longhouse, New France, western Indigenous nations, and the English. Following the 1700 conferences, Haudenosaunee leaders continued to visit Montréal to press for peace and open trade, and Albany to convince officials that peace would bring western nations into New York's fur-trade economy. In the summer of 1701, Haudenosaunee delegates signed one treaty with New France and western Indigenous groups and a second treaty with the English. Collectively known as the Grand Settlement of 1701, these two treaties initiated a long period of peace, over forty years, in which The People of the Longhouse could rebuild their lives and villages and sustain their mixed subsistence economies. Peace allowed men to focus on hunting while women could cultivate more extensive agricultural fields and personal gardens, both for subsistence and for the market. Violence did not disappear, for men continued their mourning war raids against southern enemies, primarily Catawba peoples in the Carolina piedmont. But Haudenosaunee peoples no longer feared a repeat of the massive, well-organized, and well-coordinated French-led military invasions of the 1680s and 1690s.⁴⁵

The Grand Settlement of 1701 brought significant changes in Haudenosaunee relations with New France's Indigenous allies. For much of the seventeenth century, Haudenosaunee men engaged in repeated and distant mourning war campaigns to assuage grief, replenish their population losses, gain access to beaver-hunting territory and beaver pelts, and acquire European manufactured goods. By the end of the century, however, The People of the Longhouse laid a new path to fulfill the needs and goals of individuals and communities. Rather than continue with destructive violence, Haudenosaunee men and women creatively responded to the challenges their communities faced. Instead of theft to acquire needed beaver pelts for the market, leaders emphasized diplomacy to encourage Indigenous nations throughout the upper Great Lakes to trade with the English. Haudenosaunee leaders, however, did not become pawns in English imperial policy. Western travelers, for example, needed Haudenosaunee permission to travel through to Albany and depended on Haudenosaunee hosts for shelter and Haudenosaunee women for provisions. As a result, Indigenous nations to the west sought peaceful and friendly relations with Haudenosaunee village leaders before heading east. These services came at a cost and enhanced Haudenosaunee prestige among Indigenous neighbors looking to do business with the English and colonial officials hoping to extend New York's economic and military reach. English imperialists believed the fur trade with Indigenous nations in the upper Great Lakes sustained New France's economy while their military alliances provided the colony's security. Consequently, the English, as well as Haudenosaunee leaders who wanted to build stronger ties to Albany, hoped to destabilize New France by pulling her Indigenous allies into New York's fur-trade economy. English officials believed New France would quickly collapse without the economic and military support of western nations. New York, however, needed Haudenosaunee leaders to initiate diplomatic and economic relations with distant nations to precipitate this collapse.⁴⁶