CHAPTER 2Preserving the Longhouse

Mohawk and Oneida residents escorted Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert through their homelands and accepted him into their villages in 1634 during a new phase of social and economic interaction with imperial neighbors. In previous generations, Haudenosaunee men and women traveled long distances over preexisting routes to acquire items of European manufacture or procured them through extensive Indigenous trade networks. The year-round presence of Dutch traders at Fort Orange after 1614, however, brought Europeans and their manufactured goods much closer to Haudenosaunee communities. Haudenosaunee men and women accelerated their acquisition of key trade items like brass or copper kettles, metal triangular points, knives, hatchets, axes, and hoes that outperformed their wood and stone counterparts and made subsistence labor easier and more efficient. Acquiring these manufactured goods also reduced the labor one needed to invest to construct similar products with non-European materials.¹

Mohawk leaders had mapped their emerging spatial and economic relationship with the Dutch in the Kaswentha, or the Two Row, wampum belt in 1613. The Two Row Belt illustrates two parallel rows of purple wampum that depict the Mohawk and the Dutch traveling in canoes and ships, respectively, that carry their culture, spirituality, and material goods (figure 2.1). The three rows of white wampum between them represent the peace and friendship necessary to establish trade relationships. The rows of white wampum, however, separate and keep distinct the purple lifeways of the Haudenosaunee and Europeans. Consequently, the Two Row Belt reflects an economic agreement between equal partners, rather than a hierarchical alliance involving meddling, unsolicited intervention, and authority. Although the Two Row Belt began with the Mohawk and the Dutch in 1613, the purple wampum expanded to absorb other Haudenosaunee nations, Native nations, and European colonizers.²

FIGURE 2.1. Two Row Belt (1613). © Onondaga Nation, https://www.onondaganation.org/culture/wampum/tworow-wampum-belt-guswenta/. Used with permission from the Onondaga Nation.

Van den Bogaert's errand, to uncover the reason for a decline in fur-trade volume, underscored the growing involvement of Haudenosaunee men and women in a global market economy. Throughout their travels west, the Dutchmen endured a Haudenosaunee fascination with European weaponry, particularly guns. As they left Tenotoge, the large western Mohawk community, enroute to the Oneida village, for example, van den Bogaert claimed that “we took our leave amid much uproar that surged behind and before us” with residents shouting “Allese Rondade, or ‘Shoot!’” The travelers, however, did not oblige their hosts. Upon their approach to the Oneida village, their guides asked them to shoot, most likely to alert the community of their impending arrival. This time, the Dutchmen fired their weapons and reloaded, reflecting both their adherence to Haudenosaunee protocols and personal security concerns in an unknown landscape. After remaining at the Oneida village for about two weeks, the Dutchmen prepared for their long walk back to Fort Orange. As they departed, van den Bogaert recalled, “There were many people here who walked along with us shouting ALLE SARONDADE, that is to say ‘Shoot!’ When we passed the chief's grave, we fired three shots, and then they left us and went away.”³

FIGURE 2.2. Jan Jansson, Belgii novi, angliae, et partis Virginiae: movissima delineatio (New Belguim, New England, and part of Virginia: the latest sketch) (Amsterdam: J. Jansson, 1657). Used with permission, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/96686642/.

This early Haudenosaunee captivation with European weaponry, however, quickly faded as men worked aggressively to gain access to their own firearms. By July 1641, the manor of Rensselaerswyck, which claimed a territorial extent from Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk River to its confluence with the Hudson River and then down several miles along both sides of the Hudson River, adopted an ordinance that strictly prohibited the “selling, repairing or lending any firearms, powder or lead,” to Indigenous men or women (figure 2.2). Those who violated the ordinance faced fines or expulsion from the patroonship. The new law modeled a similar ordinance in the lower Hudson Valley from two years earlier. The need for such a prohibition, and the threat of severe punishment, suggested widespread Indigenous access to Dutch firearms.⁴

Archaeological evidence from the Bauder, Rumrill-Naylor, and Oak Hill sites confirms the presence of European firearms in Mohawk communities by the early 1640s. During his captivity at the eastern community of Ossernenon between 1642 and 1643, Jesuit missionary Father Isaac Jogues described widespread Mohawk access to guns. In recording the settlement and demographic details of his Mohawk captors, Jogues noted the “Agneronons [Mohawks] … had three villages, comprising seven or eight hundred men of arms. The settlement of the Dutch is near them; they go thither to carry on their trades, especially in arquebuses [guns]; they have at present three hundred of these, and use them with skill and boldness.” After Arent van Curler visited Mohawk villages in a failed attempt to secure Jogues's release, he corroborated Jogues's statements regarding Mohawk access to firearms. In his letter to the patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, van Curler recalled “we were obliged to halt fully a quarter of an hour before each [Mohawk] castle, in order that the Indians might salute us by firing of muskets.” In less than a decade, and despite restrictions on the trade, the novelty of European firearms among Mohawk men and women had vanished. As more Mohawk men gained access to firearms, residents of each community determined the duration of weapon salutes and controlled the timing of European movement into and out of their communities.⁵

During the 1630s and 1640s, Mohawk men engaged with Dutch traders, including Arent van Curler, for firelock weapons, muskets, powder, and a full range of repair services. Each item represented a low-cost investment for the Dutch: two guilders for a pound of powder, three guilders for a musket, and about twelve guilders for the more desirable firelock weapons. Dutch traders, however, charged exorbitant rates of five to ten times higher for these trade goods to their Mohawk customers. As a result, men could pay as high as 120 guilders for a firelock weapon and more than ten guilders for a pound of powder. Mohawk men exchanged highly desired beaver pelts for the weapons, powder, and repair services. About twenty beaver pelts purchased a firelock weapon, while two or three beaver pelts bought a musket or pounds of powder. To put that cost into perspective, van den Bogaert stated that he ate beaver's meat everyday while staying at the central Mohawk village of Canagere in 1634 and counted 120 “pelts of marketable beaver” that his guide, Sickaris, had “caught with his own hands.” Consequently, the purchase of such desirable weapons was well within the reach of men like Sickaris. More important, astute hunters and headmen could exploit the competition between illicit Dutch traders and, in later years, manipulate the security concerns of colonial officials to gain more favorable rates and gifts.⁶

European travelers also documented the speed and aggressiveness with which Haudenosaunee men and women incorporated other articles of European manufacture into their daily lives as well as some of the unintended consequences of European contact. At the easternmost Mohawk village of Oneckegonka, for example, van den Bogaert noted the use of split planks and iron hinges in Mohawk housing construction, but he claimed residents acquired other items, like iron chains, bolts, hoops, spikes, and harrows, through theft. More ominous, however, was van den Bogaert's remark that Adriochten, one of the village leaders, had isolated himself in a small cabin away from the main community on account of a recent smallpox epidemic. Van den Bogaert also saw “nothing but graves” at the central Mohawk village of Canagere, and Mohawk guides described several other villages as “not worth much” on account of their low population. During his return trip to Fort Orange in January 1635, van den Bogaert observed condolence ceremonies that followed the Great Law of Peace as Haudenosaunee residents offered gifts of wampum to soothe the grief of the families and friends of those killed by epidemic disease.⁷ Van den Bogaert's journal highlights the unprecedented challenges that contact brought to long-standing Haudenosaunee social, cultural, and environmental use practices. Europeans viewed the North American landscape for its natural resources, mainly timber and furs, to fuel a growing global market economy and the ships needed to sustain it. Indigenous men and women provided the labor and the wildlife, especially through hunting beaver, that purchased desired European manufactured goods and fueled the global trade. The desire, and later need, to acquire items of European manufacture, however, disrupted ecosystems and the gendered division of subsistence labor on which Indigenous villages depended for survival. Moreover, competition for beaver pelts and access to European trade goods, specifically guns, elevated the level of violence in Indigenous interactions and triggered more than sixty years of warfare, known as the Beaver Wars (ca. 1630 to 1701). Indigenous communities also weathered dramatic population losses as men and women of all ages died from new and repeated epidemics. Despite these numerous and significant challenges, Haudenosaunee men and women creatively managed the transformations that contact and trade produced. They selectively adapted European material goods to fulfill conventional social and cultural needs of the individual and community, and they adhered to long-standing settlement patterns and subsistence strategies.⁸

Eastern and northeastern Haudenosaunee homelands bordered or included two major water arteries into the interior of North America: the Hudson River to the east and the Saint Lawrence River to the north. The location of Haudenosaunee communities, predominantly along the Mohawk-Seneca River corridor and seasonal settlements around Lake Ontario, provided The People of the Longhouse access to two zones of European economic expansion: the French to the north in the Saint Lawrence River Valley and the Dutch to the east in the Hudson River Valley. The French and the Dutch developed settler communities along well-traveled Haudenosaunee subsistence and exchange footpaths and at key points along rivers. Economic relationships with Europeans, either direct or indirect, offered a multitude of advantages as new manufactured goods had the potential to make one's life easier, improve security, and increase the efficiency of subsistence labor. Haudenosaunee men and women also readily exploited the social and cultural benefits that access to new markets provided.⁹

Contact with European traders, missionaries, diplomats, and captives, however, increased the risk of introducing new diseases as Indigenous bodies became vectors for microbes. This threat accelerated in the 1630s as Dutch, English, and French traders, as well as Jesuit missionaries, took their manufactured goods, words of friendship and alliance, and conversion efforts to Native villages. Indigenous peoples lacked immunities to a wide range of European pathogens, from the highly contagious and debilitating measles and smallpox to the common cold. Consequently, Indigenous communities weathered dramatic population losses as men, women, and children of all ages died from repeated epidemics. Many of the illnesses, known as childhood diseases in Europe because of the propensity of all children to experience them and gain immunity, hit Indigenous men and women in their prime labor years especially hard. Their mobility brought them into contact with more people and increased their risk of exposure. When weakened by illness and paralyzed by widespread loss of life, young men and women could not effectively feed, protect, or reproduce their communities. Haudenosaunee men and women, however, were not passive victims as novel illnesses swept through their longhouses. As Adriochten demonstrated, individuals and communities adopted quarantine measures to limit the destructive effects of new diseases. In addition, populations could recover in due time. But, once exposed to new and deadly diseases, Haudenosaunee communities experienced another epidemic, on average, of once every three years. Indigenous and colonial violence, as well as environmental crises, complicated efforts to rebuild families and communities.¹⁰

Despite the variety of methods employed to thwart the spread of microbes and protect individuals and communities, diseases behaved in new and unknown ways. Influenza, for example, quickly debilitated its victim after only one to three days of incubation, often limiting the spread of the disease beyond the immediate community. Smallpox and measles, in contrast, enjoyed a much longer window between exposure and the onset of symptoms. During that incubation period, about twelve days for measles and twenty days for smallpox, the host engaged in routine daily activities of subsistence labor, visitation, and economic exchanges with outside groups, thereby spreading the microbes to new and unsuspecting populations. In addition, the transmission of smallpox did not require close contact or the respiratory exchange of water molecules with the next host. Smallpox microbes survived outside of the host body and could rest on surfaces and contaminate objects, thus spreading long after the infected person left a community. The combination of debilitating new diseases and unknown epidemiology produced incredibly high death rates in Haudenosaunee communities. The smallpox epidemic of 1634, for example, reduced the Mohawk population from an estimated 7,740 to 2,835, reflecting an overall decline of 63 percent. Before 1634, the Oneida population stood between 3,700 and 4,200. But they suffered a mortality rate of just over 40 percent, reducing their postepidemic population to between 1,500 and 1,800.¹¹

During his tour of Mohawk and Oneida villages, van den Bogaert encountered residents in the aftermath of a recent smallpox epidemic. He recorded 180 Mohawk longhouses spread over eight communities on the south side of the Mohawk River. Longhouses ranged in length from as few as sixteen steps to more than one hundred paces, with the average falling between eighty and one hundred. Although van den Bogaert characterized some communities as “castles,” he described others as “not worth much.” Van den Bogaert did not estimate the number of residents per longhouse, nor did he clarify whether each village sheltered a pre- or postepidemic population. Archaeological evidence, however, reveals that van den Bogaert visited Mohawk villages occupied sequentially, not contemporaneously. Although a depleted natural environment may have contributed to some relocations, dramatic population losses left longhouses half-filled and prompted survivors to construct much smaller communities. Mortality rates ranged from nearly 60 percent in western Mohawk communities to more than 70 percent in eastern Mohawk communities.¹²

The epidemic van den Bogaert encountered most likely originated along the Saint Lawrence River to the north. In July 1634, Father Paul le Jeune made repeated mention of sickness among Huron (Wendat) travelers who arrived at Trois Rivières to trade and take missionaries back to their homelands. Wendat men blamed their delayed arrival, as well as their low numbers, on illness and a large “Hiroquois” attack. They also tried to transport as few Jesuits as possible back home because they wanted “Frenchmen who were well armed … not these long robes, who carried no guns.” The rapidly spreading sickness made the return journey more labor intensive for all. When Father Jean de Brébeuf recounted his trip west, he described days divided into difficult and short stages because the Wendat “are all sick.” Illness, however, carved a wide path and Brébeuf claimed “the people of the countries through which [we] pass are nearly all sick, and are dying in great numbers. There has been a sort of Epidemic this year … it is a sort of measles, and an oppression of the stomach.” For Haudenosaunee fighters who attacked Wendat villages, took numerous prisoners as captives, and negotiated with survivors for peace, they and their new captives returned to Haudenosaunee homelands as potential carriers of the epidemic.¹³

Once established in a community, illnesses with long incubation periods could easily spread to neighboring villages through routine subsistence and economic activities. While at the central Mohawk village of Canagere, for example, van den Bogaert recorded three Oneida women heading east selling salmon and tobacco. Their entrepreneurial efforts highlighted the ease and safety with which Haudenosaunee men and women traveled between Indigenous communities and European trade posts for desired goods. Native men and women also traveled to visit friends and kin in other villages. After 1615, perhaps in response both to Samuel de Champlain's attack on a central Haudenosaunee village near Oneida Lake, and the establishment of a permanent Dutch trade post at Fort Nassau, later Fort Orange, a significant number of Oneida residents, as many as 1,500, began to relocate to the Mohawk Valley. Archaeological evidence has identified a large amount of Oneida-type pottery at the western Mohawk community of Tenotoge, suggesting a sizeable Oneida population. Although the three Oneida women van den Bogaert encountered may have started their journey from the Mohawk Valley village, their trade item of salmon suggests more western connections to at least Oneida Lake. After 1640, however, as repeated epidemics swept through eastern Haudenosaunee villages, Oneida emigrants abandoned the Mohawk Valley and returned to their western homelands.¹⁴

The People of the Longhouse were remarkably creative in using access to new trade goods, especially weapons, to manage the transformations that repeated epidemics wrought. The Haudenosaunee practiced a “mourning war” in which they sought enemy prisoners to replenish their population losses and to ease their personal suffering. Women declared their approval for military campaigns when they provided food for fighting men. Women also determined the fate of any captives. Captured enemy fighters fulfilled the important social and cultural practice of ritual execution to assuage the mourner's pain when strings of wampum failed. Matrons of grieving families also adopted captives into their lineages. Adoptees became full members of their new longhouse and inherited the responsibilities and privileges of those recently deceased. Fighting men specifically targeted women and children from groups with long-standing cultural similarities to the Haudenosaunee for adoption because they integrated easier and more completely into their new lineages. Adoptees could also serve as diplomatic envoys to Indigenous neighbors in their former homelands or to Europeans, particularly the French. In addition, adoptees provided geographic, cartographic, and environmental resource knowledge of distant spaces.¹⁵

The success of mourning war campaigns depended, in part, on access to superior European weaponry, particularly guns. Iron axes and swords also played an important role in hand-to-hand combat. Despite New Netherland restrictions on selling firearms to Indigenous men, guns had become a common possession among eastern Haudenosaunee men by the early 1640s. The incorporation of European weaponry enabled men to fulfill long-standing social and cultural needs, but they also contributed to more violent and more deadly warfare. Successful Haudenosaunee mourning war campaigns between the 1630s and 1650s contributed to the defeat and dispersal of northern enemies, such as the Wendat (Huron), Erie, Petun, and Neutral. Haudenosaunee fighters also targeted Saint Lawrence Valley settlements, both colonial and Indigenous. Many of these campaigns underscored the economic motives of Haudenosaunee men to intercept beaver skins flowing east to French markets and to seize French manufactured goods heading west to Indigenous communities. As a result, the decades of conflict that beset much of the seventeenth century throughout the Saint Lawrence Valley and northern Great Lakes have been characterized as the Beaver Wars. These violent conflicts, however, involved more than the economic prizes of European manufactured goods and beaver pelts. Numerous and successful mourning war campaigns replenished Haudenosaunee population losses, expanded the geographic range of Haudenosaunee homelands, and increased access to environmental resources for subsistence and trade. Consequently, the Beaver Wars combined new European material needs with long-standing Haudenosaunee social and cultural demands.¹⁶

The success of these campaigns, however, was not ubiquitous, and Haudenosaunee communities experienced defeat abroad as well as Indigenous and European invasions of their homelands. After dispersing and absorbing northern and western enemies between the 1630s and 1650s, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca fighters shifted the focus of their mourning wars south, toward Susquehannock villages. Susquehannock fighters, however, proved to be a formidable enemy. Their village locations in the Delaware and Susquehanna watersheds allowed residents easy access to Dutch traders in the Delaware Valley or to their English counterparts in Maryland. These trade partners provided Susquehannock men with the weapons needed not only to repel Haudenosaunee invaders but also to launch attacks deep into Haudenosaunee homelands. In the early 1660s, Susquehannock men raided villages throughout Haudenosaunee territory, often plundering travelers heading to Dutch markets at Fort Orange. Then, in 1663, Susquehannock villagers repelled an eight-hundred-man invading force of western Haudenosaunee fighters, burning several of their diplomats alive. By 1669, Father Jacques Frémin described the Onondaga as being “much humbled of late by the Ganastogué [Susquehannock],” claiming “nearly all of their braves perished in the war.” Although Frémin certainly exaggerated Onondaga losses, he clearly captured the persistent threat Susquehannock raids presented to village peace and security.¹⁷

To the east, Mohawk communities faced a northern threat when New France retaliated for their raids on Indigenous and colonial settlements in the Saint Lawrence Valley. In October 1666, Alexandre de Tracy commanded 1,400 troops to the Mohawk Valley. Jesuit François Joseph le Mercier provided a map to accompany his Relation that outlined key locations for French forts along the Iroquois (Richelieu) River to protect Montréal, as well as four water routes to access Mohawk communities. As a missionary who spent time in Onondaga villages between 1656 and 1657 and worked to spread the Jesuit message to other Haudenosaunee communities, Le Mercier acquired geographic knowledge of important transportation routes and village locations. Le Mercier's map, although not drawn to scale, depicts Mohawk villages located along the south side of the Mohawk River (figure 2.3). Aware of Tracy's advancing army, Mohawk residents set fire to several structures before evacuating their communities. When French troops finally arrived, they found each village “void of men but full of grain and provisions,” reflecting a successful agricultural harvest. After consuming the “refreshments” they needed, French troops set fire to the five Mohawk communities and all harvested crops they found. Despite burning housing structures to the ground and destroying major subsistence resources, the French invasion inflicted few Mohawk casualties. Nonetheless, Tracy believed that “famine will cause as many to perish as would have been destroyed by the arms of our soldiery had they dared to await them.” Tracy's shift in military focus from fighting Mohawk men in the field to burning food stores, made Mohawk women, their subsistence labor, and their connection to the land, the temporary target of his military campaign and the French imperial project.¹⁸

FIGURE 2.3. The Iroquois country, and plans of forts on the River Richelieu (1664–1665). Jesuit Relations 49, between 266 and 267.

The demographic upheaval from repeated epidemics and decades of mourning war violence precipitated fundamental changes to the social and cultural fabric of Haudenosaunee communities. Mourning war success replenished population losses and assuaged the grief of survivors, but victories meant that many Haudenosaunee communities took in large groups of captives rather than isolated individuals. In 1657, for example, Jesuit priest Paul le Jeune reported seven different nations residing in Onondaga villages and eleven nations living throughout Seneca communities. A few years later, diversity in Onondaga villages had grown to ten different nations. In 1668, Father Jacques Bruyas, who oversaw the mission of Saint François Xavier near the main Oneida community, claimed that Algonquian and Wendat captives accounted for two-thirds of the village's population.¹⁹

As displaced captives and refugees relocated by the hundreds to Haudenosaunee communities, they retained important aspects of their identity when emplaced among their Haudenosaunee captors. Wendat survivors, for example, lived in distinct villages and apart from their Mohawk and Seneca captors. Other refugees insisted on access to Jesuit missionaries, a demand more easily met after the French destroyed Mohawk villages and required Jesuit residence as part of the peace agreement. Despite increased access to missionaries, many Haudenosaunee men and women rejected the Jesuits’ message because Christianity demanded a complete reorientation of their beliefs and customs. Jesuits, for example, prohibited divorce, wanted converts to abstain from alcohol and to avoid ceremonial feasts and most other village customs perceived as infused with superstition and sin. Ceremonial feasts and the use of alcohol for spiritual purposes, however, had become central to social functions in every Haudenosaunee village. Residents who retained long-standing Haudenosaunee spiritual and religious beliefs often persecuted new converts and responded violently when someone failed to perform their social role. Alcohol exacerbated the threats and harassment and precipitated new community divisions when Catholic converts refused to fulfill their conventional social responsibilities, especially after a village leader converted. Moreover, without full community participation, ceremonial feasts and rituals lost importance.²⁰

Jesuits residing in different Haudenosaunee communities experienced limited conversion success beyond their emplaced refugee adherents. By the early 1670s, the Superior of the Five Nations missions, Jean de Lamberville, believed that missionary efforts would not succeed until converts escaped unconverted friends and family. Jesuits, therefore, intensified efforts to persuade followers to emigrate to multinational Indigenous villages along the Saint Lawrence River. This tactic was especially successful among emplaced Wendat families who lived in their own communities and retained stronger connections to their Wendat identity, including their adoption of Catholicism. At the same time, many Mohawk families had strong social and cultural ties to friends and kin in communities along the Saint Lawrence River. Both factors eased the flow of Wendat and Mohawk families north. By 1673, Jesuits claimed more Mohawk men, women, and children lived in New France than in their Mohawk Valley homeland. By the end of the decade, as more Wendat families deserted the Mohawk Valley and reunited with relocated kin at Lorette, near Québec, many of their Mohawk neighbors followed. Mohawk families relocated to the Saint Lawrence River Valley at the new community of Caughnawaga (Kahnawake), which received its name from the large number of Mohawk emigrants. In addition, at least four hundred Haudenosaunee men, women, and children, most of them Mohawk families, lived in multinational mission villages along the Saint Lawrence River.²¹

Although Jesuits repeatedly claimed that religious devotion explained Haudenosaunee desires to relocate to missionary communities in New France, a combination of religious and personal motives influenced the decision to relocate from communities in the Mohawk Valley. These included spiritual solace, wanting to be with friends and family who relocated, escaping village violence, personal security against enemy raids, proximity to more abundant hunting resources, and access to European trade goods. Jesuits also offered new clothes as presents to emigrants, a benefit not lost on people wanting European-manufactured clothing but lacking sufficient furs to acquire them. Furthermore, having a missionary on site gave Saint Lawrence Valley Haudenosaunee residents an influential diplomatic figure who provided a steady flow of presents, exerted diplomatic influence, and often served as a liaison to colonial officials.²²

Saint Lawrence Valley Haudenosaunee villages also fulfilled important cultural and social values of community harmony. Throughout Mohawk communities, Christianity created deep divisions when the converted minority refused to bow to the majority. As internal divisions and community discord intensified, many residents who supported more cordial economic and diplomatic relations with New France left their Mohawk Valley homeland and joined the like-minded along the Saint Lawrence River. This relocation, however, did not represent the abandonment of a homeland. Haudenosaunee men and women were already familiar with the northern environment and its inhabitants long before Samuel de Champlain's arrival as they routinely visited the area for seasonal subsistence, economic and military exchanges, and visits with kin. Despite the variety of Native nations residing in the Saint Lawrence Valley, these multinational villages experienced less factional strife. In addition, the heterogenous villages practiced traditional Haudenosaunee values of hospitality and entertained visitors with large receptions and plenty of food. During 1673, for example, more than eight hundred visitors to La Prairie depleted the village's two-year corn supply. The People of the Longhouse idealized this type of reciprocity, hospitality, and harmony. In addition, relocation offered escape from internal divisions, factional disputes, and enemy invasions that more recently characterized their experience in their Mohawk Valley homeland.²³

Although Jesuits had returned to Haudenosaunee communities following French military victories and the demands of captives, Haudenosaunee village leaders accepted Jesuit missionaries from a position of strength, not weakness. Missionaries served as diplomatic hostages who would ensure the good will of New France and its Indigenous allies, and thus prevent future enemy attacks. Securing peace with Native and colonial neighbors to the north and west allowed Haudenosaunee men to focus their mourning war campaigns in other directions without fear of a war on multiple fronts. Peace to the north and west also allowed Haudenosaunee men and women to expand their geographic and resource acquisition range and to launch new communities in distant spaces. After the defeat, dispersal, and absorption of Wendat, Erie, and Neutral villages to the west and north, for example, Cayuga and Seneca bands began to turn favored fishing stations and hunting camps at strategic points along the north shore of Lake Ontario into year-round villages. By 1670, Cayuga men established the village of Quintio, at the Bay of Quinté, while Seneca men occupied three new villages of Quinaouatoua, at the western end of Lake Ontario, and Teyaiagon and Ganestiquiagon, along the Toronto carrying place. Jacques Nicolas Bellin's 1755 map of New France and Canada continued to mark the location of these northern villages nearly a century later, highlighting the long-standing importance of these hunting and fishing stations along key routes on Lake Ontario's northern and western shore (figure 2.4). The new villages served as bases from which Cayuga and Seneca men could exploit local hunting and fishing resources as well as more effectively intercept French furs and divert them south.²⁴

The rapid increase in hundreds of Haudenosaunee hunters along the north shore of Lake Ontario attracted the attention of French traders and missionaries. Worried that furs bound for French markets would fall into Haudenosaunee hands, the French constructed Fort Frontenac, and a missionary community on Lake Ontario's north shore in 1673, near the mouth of the Katarakoui (Cataraqui) River. Men focused on fur-trade activities and extensive hunting expeditions, however, had little interest in the missionaries’ religious messages and the Sulpicians abandoned the area by 1677. The enhanced French trade presence east of the Cayuga village of Quintio also shifted Haudenosaunee subsistence and economic activity farther to the west, toward the Toronto Carry. To intercept this western trade, the French constructed another post in 1676 at the mouth of the Niagara River. This location, as well as the six-mile portage around the falls, sat along a gateway that connected Haudenosaunee homelands to the northern and western Great Lakes. As the Keepers of the Western Door, Seneca men and women controlled this space with small villages, frequent hunting and fishing in the area, and extensive travel along the portage around the falls.²⁵

FIGURE 2.4. Jacques Nicolas Bellin and Homann Erben, Partie occidentale de la Nouvelle France ou du Canada (Western part of New France or Canada) (Nürnberg, 1755). Used with permission, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/73694802/.

Although western Haudenosaunee nations interacted with familiar Indigenous and European neighbors to the north and west, eastern nations worked to incorporate new colonial neighbors into long-standing economic and diplomatic networks. During the 1670s, the English ultimately succeeded in eliminating Dutch economic competition in North America after the Dutch surrendered New Netherland. When the English replaced the Dutch in the renamed colony of New York, Mohawk leaders wanted to incorporate their new English neighbors into the Two Row Belt alliance. New York Governor Edmund Andros hoped to reap the benefits of existing fur-trade partnerships and recognized the importance of strong and dependable allies, particularly among the Mohawk. Loyal Mohawks ensured furs made their way to English markets at Albany (formerly Fort Orange), not French traders at Montréal. In addition, Mohawk settlements insulated New York's colonial frontier from northern enemy raids, both Indigenous and French. The English, however, replaced the Dutch just as Jesuit missionaries stepped up their efforts to relocate Catholic converts, specifically from Mohawk Valley villages to the Saint Lawrence Valley. The emigration of Mohawk families jeopardized New York's economic ambitions and security needs because a strong French influence, whether in Mohawk Valley villages or in New France, directly threatened New York's fur-trade economy and frontier security.²⁶

Haudenosaunee leaders also had economic and military motives for courting a new European ally to replace the departed Dutch. Strong economic relationships ensured trade goods continued to flow to Haudenosaunee communities and increased Haudenosaunee leverage for favorable trade rates. In addition, a diplomatic and military alliance with the English made the assistance of men or weapons, as well as the protection of women and children, possible if Haudenosaunee villages suffered attack. New York Governor Edmund Andros and Haudenosaunee leaders built on the foundations of the Two Row Belt to negotiate a complex set of English-Indigenous alliances, collectively known as the Covenant Chain. These diplomatic and military discussions involved relationships with external friends and foes and differed in context and audience from the internal relationships between different Haudenosaunee communities that made up the Five Nations. The internal relationships among the Five Nations involved the larger Iroquois League while negotiations with outsiders reflected League ideals applied beyond the Five Nations and were thus the workings of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Covenant Chain alliance made the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy and the colony of New York the dominant players in intercultural diplomacy. Other English colonies could join the Covenant Chain, but as subordinates to New York. Similarly, the Confederacy appointed leaders to serve as diplomatic brokers for Native peoples over whom they, in fact, had little authority or control. In the Covenant Chain alliance, the Iroquois Confederacy, principally through Mohawk leaders, and New York cooperated to enhance their respective power at the expense of weaker Indigenous groups and colonial neighbors. In 1677, Governor Andros sent Wentworth Greenhalgh on a formal diplomatic expedition to Haudenosaunee villages, ostensibly to promote New York's obligations in the new Covenant Chain alliance. As with van den Bogaert's errand two generations earlier, Greenhalgh depended on Haudenosaunee geographic knowledge through an unknown landscape as guides, their physical labor as porters, their protection as he traveled on their footpaths and approached their villages, and their generosity and hospitality for provisions and as hosts. Throughout his trip, Greenhalgh gathered intelligence on each nation's military strength through a count of villages, longhouses, and men of fighting age, and he assessed each community's defensive structures.²⁷

The ebbs and flows of mourning warfare, spatial relations with Indigenous and European neighbors, and heightened imperial interests in and around the periphery of the Haudenosaunee homeland influenced settlements patterns, the location of villages, the level of community consolidation, and the size and structure of village defenses. The defeat, dispersal, or adoption of Indigenous neighbors, for example, allowed Haudenosaunee nations to expand their geographic reach and to settle in distant spaces. Enemy invasions, in contrast, prompted village consolidation, temporary subsistence, and shelter hardship or emergency relocations when villages burned to the ground. Diplomatic visitors and missionaries provide one window into Haudenosaunee village life, while archaeological evidence reveals what residents left behind. Together, these sources paint a picture of a seventeenth-century Haudenosaunee experience of residents who adhered to long-standing patterns of living within their environment despite the challenges of demographic losses from epidemics and violence.

Throughout the century, The People of the Flint continued to live in multiple communities protected by extensive perimeter palisades close to the Mohawk River. After the French burned their villages on the south side of the river in 1666, Mohawk men built four new communities on the opposite shore. Reflecting persistent security concerns, defensive stockades surrounded all four communities. The two eastern communities included Cahaniaga, with a double stockade protecting twenty-four longhouses, and a single stockade at Canagora around sixteen longhouses. A single stockade also surrounded sixteen longhouses at the central community of Canajorha. To the west, a double stockade enclosed thirty longhouses at Tionondogue. In addition, two swivel guns recently purchased from Albany sat at two ends of the village. West of Tionondogue, an unnamed, unfenced community contained an additional ten houses. As Jesuits encouraged emigration to the Saint Lawrence Valley in the 1670s, Mohawk villages became sparsely populated communities of partially filled longhouses. By 1679, Jesuits abandoned their missions in the Mohawk Valley because all their converts had relocated north. The declining population in the Valley made it difficult and unnecessary for men to sustain four communities. When residents built new communities in the 1680s, remaining eastern Mohawk families merged to form a new community of Caughnawaga, while western Mohawk residents converged around Tionnondagé.²⁸

As Greenhalgh continued his travels west, he documented Oneida communities that also adhered to long-standing settlement patterns. Greenhalgh described the main Oneida village, about two miles east of Oneida Creek, with a double stockade surrounding one hundred newly built longhouses. Although Greenhalgh noted that “their corne growes round about the towne,” he claimed that The People of the Standing Stone had to purchase corn from Onondaga neighbors because they had cleared only a small amount of land. Given the timing of Greenhalgh's visit, in July, the corn he saw around the town was not ripe enough to harvest and may have contributed to subsistence distress. The need to purchase food from neighbors, however, suggests an unplanned village relocation or environmental crisis. Normal village relocations took place over a period of seasons, with the preparation of new agricultural fields among the first stages. A breakdown in relations with colonial neighbors, renewed threats from enemies, or unexpected disaster, such as a community fire, could explain an abrupt move. The double stockade and one hundred longhouses, however, reflect a substantial investment of male labor into building and protecting the community. Greenhalgh may have presumed incorrectly that Oneida women did not have large tracts of land cleared for agricultural production elsewhere. As an outsider, Greenhalgh was not privy to a full view of the Oneida environment, where women concealed important subsistence resources short distances from their villages. Although the documentary record is silent on the issue, and this village has not yet revealed itself for the archaeological record, an environmental crisis may have contributed to crop shortages and thus may explain the temporary need to purchase corn from neighbors, rather than a lack of cleared land.²⁹

During the 1690s, Oneida residents relocated from the village Greenhalgh had visited in 1677. This relocation followed the typical ten- to twenty-year occupation as the large community stripped the local environment of woodland and made annual longhouse and palisade repairs more difficult. In their new community, Oneida men replaced their double stockade with a European-style compact fort. Although the shift away from customary defensive structures represented a significant break from long-standing settlement patterns, Oneida men incorporated European military strategy to fulfill the security needs and concerns of the community. The French assault on Mohawk communities in 1666 demonstrated that double and triple palisades offered no protection for residents or longhouses against thousands of invading forces and superior European weaponry. It was counterproductive to continue to invest labor and resources into obsolete defensive structures. A compact fort, however, provided emergency protection for vulnerable populations. In addition, a fort placed fewer demands on male laborers and environmental resources, allowing men to redirect their time spent on village and housing repair projects to other subsistence, economic, or military exploits. Clay pipes recovered at the site reveal a 1690s settlement.³⁰

To the west of the Oneida village, The People of the Hills faced the dual threat of French-led invasions from the north and Susquehannock raids from the south. These external factors influenced community decisions about village location and defenses as well as when to relocate. After a fire in the summer of 1654 consumed more than twenty longhouses, nearly one-third of the residential community, Onondaga men constructed a new village, repeatedly referred to as Onnontagué, about a mile east in the hills southeast of Onondaga Lake and west of Limestone Creek. The topography highlighted the security concerns of residents as it sat atop an elevated terrace that offered long sight lines. In addition, the rectangular-shaped double and triple palisade that surrounded the town offered only one access point into the community. Onondaga families also lived in numerous resource acquisition sites, particularly in seasonal and year-round fishing villages along the Oswego, Oneida, and Seneca Rivers.³¹

As conflict with Susquehannock fighters intensified in the early 1660s, Onondaga men relocated Onnontagué to a large north-south-oriented hill that dropped sharply on the east and west to two creeks. When the first US settlers arrived in the area, they found the remains of a defensive perimeter ranging from 300 to 350 feet in diameter with a narrow opening providing the only entry into the community. Archaeological evidence verified the settlers’ claims and revealed that defensive stockades, including additional protections at exposed entrances, surrounded the large settlement. Onondaga men also cleared two miles of land on each side of the village to improve their ability to see an invading force from a great distance. In addition to each of these main mid-century Onondaga communities, Onondaga men and women, including recent adoptees, continued to inhabit seasonal fishing and hunting stations throughout the Oneida and Seneca River corridor and in between Onondaga and Oneida lakes. In addition, some Onondaga families located a smaller settlement of twenty-four houses along the edge of a steep ravine, about a mile south of the larger community, and on the west side of Limestone Creek. The archaeological and documentary evidence from these pre-1670 communities reveal the continuation of long-standing settlement patterns and defensive strategies despite decades of exposure to European material culture and construction practices.³²

When Greenhalgh visited the Central Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy in 1677, however, he described the community as one very large “unfenced town.” The lack of defensive structures reflected a change in security concerns as well as the long occupation. Mourning war campaigns against Susquehannock villages ended in 1675, with many Susquehannock families returning to more southern territories. With the close of warfare on their southern flank and relative peace with the French and their Indigenous allies to the north and west, Onondaga security concerns diminished and men no longer prioritized repairs and allowed the defensive perimeter to deteriorate.³³

In 1682, Father Jean de Lamberville witnessed Onondaga men, women, and children relocating from their old town near Limestone Creek, to a new residence about four miles west, along Butternut Creek. Onondaga families had lived at Onnontagué from approximately 1663 to 1682, giving the community an occupation of nearly twenty years. Lamberville described a routine village relocation when he noted: “They made this change in order to have firewood in convenient proximity, and to secure fields more fertile than those they were abandoning.” Relocation on this scale took years to complete and explains Greenhalgh's reference to a smaller Onondaga settlement separate from the main community as residents moved between villages and resource acquisition sites. The main Onondaga community remained along Butternut Creek until the mid-1690s. In 1696, Louis de Buade de Frontenac, governor of New France, described the defensive perimeter around the community as “a tolerably strong state of defense …. The two rows that touched each other were of the thickness of an ordinary mast, and outside, at a distance of six feet, stood another row of much smaller dimensions, but between 40 and 50 feet in height.” Archaeological testing confirms Frontenac's account of a triple-palisaded village. Onondaga men neatly arranged about sixty houses within the European-style rectangular palisade and an additional thirteen structures just outside the defensive walls. Although Onondaga men adopted the straight lines of European forts, their compact community layout replicated the typical settlement pattern of numerous longhouses protected by a defensive perimeter.³⁴

The topography of Cayuga territory and their lower population often insulated them from large-scale enemy invasions. French leaders focused their energies on the more populous Seneca villages to the west or the Central Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy at Onondaga to the east and retained little enthusiasm to wade through the swampy terrain along the Seneca River to visit Cayuga villages. Nonetheless, relationships with Indigenous and French neighbors influenced Cayuga settlement patterns and their interactions with Jesuits missionaries in their homeland. During the late 1660s, for example, amid concerns of Susquehannock raids from the south, Cayuga families lived in dispersed communities where fifteen to twenty miles separated their three villages. Jesuits established missionary posts at each of these villages: Saint Joseph near Goiogouen, the main Cayuga town between Cayuga and Owasco Lakes; Saint Stephen close by Thiohero near the outlet of Cayuga Lake; and Saint René at Onontaré several miles down the Seneca River from Thiohero.³⁵

Two changes in spatial relations with Indigenous and European neighbors in the 1670s precipitated the construction of new Cayuga communities. First, the end of the Susquehannock War in 1675 brought peace along their southern flank. Second, the construction of Fort Frontenac increased New France's economic and military presence on the north shore of Lake Ontario and precipitated the return of north-shore Cayuga families to their southern kin. By the time of Greenhalgh's visit, Cayuga residents had responded to these spatial and demographic changes by building three new villages, without palisades, between Cayuga and Owasco Lakes and south of the Seneca River. The People of the Marshy Area recognized the environmental protections their land provided and chose sites among the defensible hills south of the swampy terrain of the Seneca River. The clustering of their three villages within one mile of each other, however, underscored their sense of security in a time of peace. Jesuits also struggled to retain a following in these new communities as they lost their diplomatic role in this time of peace. Consequently, Jesuits eventually abandoned their missions in Cayuga homelands in 1682.³⁶

At the western door, The People of the Great Hills sustained the largest villages of any of their Haudenosaunee confederates. When René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle embarked on an exploratory mission from Montréal into the western Great Lakes in 1669, his chaplain, Sulpician Father René de Bréhant de Galinée, kept a detailed record of the environment and Indigenous communities along the way. While traveling through Seneca homelands, Galinée counted one hundred “cabins” at the two larger villages of Gandagan, meaning “great town,” and Gandachiorágon. A smaller village, Gandougaraé, was associated with Gandagan, while an unnamed western village was associated with Gandachiorágon. These smaller communities had between twenty and twenty-five houses each. Galinée also provided the earliest description of a Seneca village and its defenses that underscored Seneca security concerns. At the large eastern village, Gandagan, he reported the village “like all those of the Indians, is nothing but a lot of cabins, surrounded with palisades of poles 12 or 13 feet high, fastened together at the top and planted in the ground, with great piles of wood the height of a man.” With the location of the village on a hill and some distance from a water source, Galinée concluded the simple square enclosure would protect the houses inside.³⁷

Galinée described a mix of European and Indigenous defenses in the village. Seneca men still employed traditional methods of constructing their palisades with twelve- and thirteen-foot poles buried in the ground and fastened together at the top, additional wood stacked at the base to strengthen the structure, and elevated platforms from which to fend off invaders. Seneca men, however, replicated European defensive designs and built a square palisade instead of the more familiar oval, or circular, stockade. A circular stockade limited the range of protection to the area immediately in front of and below the defenders. Square palisades, however, optimized village defenses. Sitting atop sentry posts on the corners of the palisade, defenders could protect a much larger area, including two flanks of the palisade.

After a nearly twenty-year occupation, Seneca men constructed new villages that reflected a growing population as kin returned from communities along the north shore of Lake Ontario and the close of the Susquehannock war eased concerns of attacks from the south. Seneca men built a new eastern village, Gannagaro, and western village, Totiakton, as well as the smaller hamlets associated with these larger communities; Keint:he for the western sequence and Canoenada for the eastern sequence. Diplomatic visitors specifically noted “none of their towns are stockadoed,” reflecting a lull in mourning war violence and reduced security concerns. Nonetheless, Seneca men and women evaluated the natural defenses of the topography and located their large communities on the edge of high hills. Numerous trade items recovered from these new sites, such as beads, combs, and iron goods, as well as a lead seal dated 1676, reflect a post-1675 occupation.³⁸

When Wentworth Greenhalgh reached the western communities of The People of the Longhouse in 1677, he described Seneca villages and longhouses that adhered to long-standing Haudenosaunee settlement patterns. The size of Seneca villages, length of longhouses, and total population had changed little over recent years. Gannagaro contained 150 houses and covered nine acres, and Totiakton contained 120 houses over fifteen acres. The small, satellite villages of Keint:he and Canoenada contained twenty-four and thirty houses, respectively. In addition, Seneca men continued to construct longhouses of varying lengths, depending on the size of the matrilineal family, including adopted kin, as they were fully incorporated into a lineage. Greenhalgh described the houses at Totiakton as “largest of all the houses wee saw, the ordinary being 50 or 60 foott and some 130 or 140 foott long with 13 or 14 fires in one house.” With approximately twenty feet per family apartment space, the sixty-foot structures could hold six families and between twenty and thirty people in these “ordinary” longhouses. The much larger houses could hold as many as fourteen families, or more than seventy people. These larger longhouses clearly duplicated the extended structure in which numerous matrilineal families resided. But even the smaller, “ordinary” houses of fifty or sixty feet in length continued to shelter multiple families. Seneca families remained in these communities until 1687.³⁹

Throughout the seventeenth century, Haudenosaunee communities experienced extraordinary social and cultural challenges in the wake of sustained European contact. Repeated exposure to new epidemic diseases dramatically reduced village populations while engagement in a global economy through the fur trade pitted Indigenous nations and villages against one another. These factors precipitated a dramatic and traumatic increase in violence, death, and displacement that produced a patchwork of shattered families, refugees, and captives. Haudenosaunee individuals and communities, however, pulled from long-standing social and cultural experiences of adaptation and innovation to manage the challenges an expanding European market economy generated. They countered their demographic losses in two distinct ways. First, they created and built new kinship networks of captives fully adopted into matrilineal families. Second, the new kinship networks extended to include emplaced refugees in nearby communities who retained connections to their former homelands and cultures.

The archaeological evidence captures these changes to the social and cultural fabric of Haudenosaunee families and communities. Before the devastating population losses, the size of the matrilineal family determined the length of the housing structures. But, as epidemics and warfare decimated matrilineages, housing length began to reflect greater consistency. Longhouses became smaller with more spacing in between interior posts and more unorganized space within the longhouse. As standardized longhouse lengths determined the number of kin each structure sheltered, it signaled a decline in matrilineal authority. In addition, many emplaced refugees challenged Haudenosaunee hegemony by residing in separate communities and building housing structures to their cultural preferences.⁴⁰

Archaeological evidence, however, also demonstrates the continuity and strength of long-standing settlement patterns. Eastern Mohawk families, for example, occupied Caughnawaga on the north side of the Mohawk River from 1680 to 1693. The palisaded community contained twelve longhouses ranging from between seventy and one hundred feet in length and averaging twenty-one feet in width. About six families lived in an eighty-foot longhouse, and eight families lived in the larger, one-hundred-foot length structures. Interior post molds, denoting bed lines, reveals eight of the longhouses served as residential structures. Residents used the remaining four structures for storage or diplomatic and religious meeting places. Caughnawaga longhouse lengths reflected greater consistency than those van den Bogaert had encountered earlier in the century. Population losses from disease, mourning wars, and out-migration to the Saint Lawrence Valley precipitated the shift to smaller and more uniform longhouses. Nonetheless, the evidence from Caughnawaga clearly supports that The People of the Flint consciously preserved long-standing settlement patterns. They continued to live in compact communities located near the river for communication, transportation, subsistence, and access to water. They also consistently located their seventeenth-century villages among defensible high hills with palisades to protect any exposed access to the community. Although longhouses may have become more standardized in their length as the century progressed, matrilineal families still filled the apartments. As a result, longhouses continued to demonstrate the strength of matrilineal authority, not its decline, in Mohawk communities and settlement patterns.⁴¹

The main Onondaga community also continued to adhere to long-standing settlement patterns at the end of the seventeenth century. Onondaga families remained in the defensible hills southeast of Onondaga Lake and near freshwater systems. Archaeological evidence from the late seventeenth-century Weston site shows a reduction in longhouse lengths to between fifty and eighty feet. Some excavated structures revealed nonresidential purposes, particularly storage houses. Other, much larger structures, or additions to the residential longhouse, reflected community use for ceremonial or diplomatic purposes. As the Central Fire of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Onondaga community hosted diplomatic guests from all League Nations, as well as Indigenous and imperial dignitaries. Longhouses located outside of the defensive perimeter provided shelter to visitors during diplomatic discussions and fulfilled community needs for more residential or storage space.⁴²

Throughout the seventeenth century, Haudenosaunee communities incorporated European material culture to fulfill conventional village needs. Men, for example, increasingly favored European-style square or rectangular defensive structures over their long-standing oval palisades. Some communities abandoned defensive palisades altogether and constructed separate forts for protection. The defensive perimeter of the main 1680s and 1690s Onondaga community, for example, adopted many aspects European military design and function. The four bastions with elevated platforms and straight walls enabled fewer defenders to protect a larger perimeter of the community. Although the fort contained many elements of the European model, Onondaga men built the structure using long-standing sizing and methods for securing poles into the ground. In addition, limited colonial funds reduced European involvement in fort projects beyond colonial engineers offering advice or sketches, thus leaving specific design decisions and physical labor to Onondaga community members.⁴³

Despite the enormous social disruptions of population losses, nearly continuous intertribal warfare, and new challenges presented by hundreds of newcomers and Jesuit missionaries, Haudenosaunee communities sustained their settlement patterns and subsistence practices. Survivors coalesced as a patchwork of shattered biological families, emplaced refugees, and fully adopted captives to recreate large kinship networks. Matrilineal families consciously preserved tradition when they built new communities with extensive longhouses that sheltered multiple families and sustained seasonal subsistence practices. In addition, residents continued to maximize the natural defenses of their local environment when choosing a new village location. Although Haudenosaunee men increasingly incorporated European trade goods and military strategy into building new villages, their seventeenth-century longhouses, defenses, and communities retained significant elements of traditional design.