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Chapter 5

The 1600s (The 17th Century)!

1600s. In the early 17th century (1600s), the Iroquois Confederacy was at the height of its power, with a total population of about 12,000 people. 1600. The 101 Year French-Iroquois Beaver Wars (1600-1701) begins in eastern North America. Encouraged and armed by their Dutch and English trading partners, the Iroquois sought to expand their territory and monopolize the fur trade, and trade between European markets, and the tribes of the western Great Lakes region. The French-Iroquois rivalry is legendary; comparable to UofL v. UK, or Hatfield v. McCoy, or Israel vs. Palestine, American State Empire Terrorism vs. Poor People's Terrorism, etc. The French were into Genocide, just like Israel is doing to Palestine right now. Over 2,000 dead, mostly civilians, and hundreds of children, mostly babies. America started in the blood of Millions of dead Indians, so what's two thousand more, to her governement, and her people? If 1 million dead in Iraq doesn't make ya whence, I guess 2,000 won't do it fur ya either. They wanted their Beaver (who doesn't?), but so did the Iroquois, and the Iroquois lived here, but the French did not. They were the occupying invaders. Absent of property laws, natives could even claim their ancestral homelands as their own, without a claim. Combined, some communal, some private. We're all in this thing together, whatever it is. ~Kurt Vonnegut. The French also didn't have land, and wanted complete and total domination of this continent, hemisphere, Earth, so... Yuchi, Mosopelea, Chickasaw, Delaware, Wyandot, Cherokee, Creek, and Shawnee Indians lived in Kentucky, and maybe Iroquois too, and others. The Traditional story was that the Iroquios were so ferocious and terrifying, that all native Kentuckians, picked up their houses, and moved out of their homeland for good. Without occupation. Just because. Hey man. It's the fuck'n Iroquois man! The conflict pitted the nations of the Iroquois Confederation, led by the dominant MOHAWK Mohawk, against the French and French-backed Algonquin tribes. As the Iroquois swept westward, the Ohio Country was virtually emptied of Native people as refugees fled westward to escape the marauding warriors. Much of this region was later repopulated by Native peoples nominally subjected to the Six Nations. The Beaver Wars—also known as the Iroquois Wars or the French and Iroquois Wars—encompass a series of conflicts fought in the mid-17th century in eastern North America. Encouraged and armed by their Dutch and English trading partners... The Beaver Wars were brutal, and are considered one of the bloodiest series of conflicts in the history of North America. As the Iroquois succeeded in the war and enlarged their territory, they realigned the tribal geography of North America, and destroyed several large tribal confederacies—including the 1) The Huron Republic; 2) Neutral Republic; 3) Erie; 4) Susquehannock; 5) Shawnee Nation, and; 6) Pétun (“tobacco” in old French) aka Tobacco Republic aka TINONTATI Tionontati http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petun—and pushed some eastern tribes west of the Mississippi River, or southward into the Carolinas. Both Algonquian and Iroquoian societies were greatly disrupted by these wars. The conflict subsided with the loss by the Iroquois of their Dutch allies in the New Netherland colony, and with a growing French objective to gain the Iroquois as an ally against English encroachment. After the Iroquois became trading partners with the English, their alliance was a crucial component of the later English expansion. They used the Iroquois conquests as a claim to the old Northwest Territory. Editors of the American Heritage Book of Indians (AMBoI) note that some anthropologists and historians have suggested that the Mohawk Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy destroyed and drove out the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, based on analysis of political and economic conditions at the time. The Beaver Wars. The Shawnee warred in the Ohio Valley during the first part of the Beaver Wars against the Iroquois, most likely, or perhaps, the Erie Nation or/and the Neutral Nation.

1600s AD. Kentucky was uncharted wilderness, a Garden of Eden, plush with large game, small game, berries for gathering, fertile land for planting, plenty of flowing waters, creeks, streams, trees for lumber, and lots of native Americans, living in small bands of decentralized tribes, organized by gender, some male-dominated, others female, all by family, some war tribes, no worker councils, scattered all throughout Kentucky. The Iroquois and the Iroquoian-speaking Huron hunting expeditions would spend months in Kentucky.

1600s. By the latter part of the 1600s, bands of Shawnees were making their way toward Pennsylvania from at least 3 general locations: 1) South Carolina; 2) the Cumberland region, and; 3) Illinois. The date the first band of entered Pennsylvania is uncertain. It is known that the inhabitants of at least one village abandoned South Carolina in 1677 or 1678, and migrated north. There is no direct evidence of Shawnee settlement in Pennsylvania, however, until 1692.

1600s. The Saponi people returned in mass into southeastern Ohio in the early 1600's. The English and Christian surnames that they had taken on begin to appear in Gallia, Jackson, Lawrence, Pike, Ross and Highland counties.Our present day Saponi community encompasses only a fractional portion of our ancestral territory and is located primarily in Gallia, Jackson and Lawrence counties in Ohio.The Siouan Saponi, one of the oldest groups of indigenous people in the Ohio River Valley, have upheld the proud heritage of their people and have struggled defiantly to preserve their Indian community.

1600s. In the early 1600s, the supply of beavers in the East was dwindling, and Iroquois trade with the Dutch and English was diminishing. The Iroquois looked to western lands around the Great Lakes, where beavers still flourished. In that region the French were allied with the Huron in the fur trade, while Jesuit priests established missions and worked to Christianize the Huron.

1600-1700 POPULATION BOOM; The Ohio River Valley Sioux became so large in population that their settlements spread to the eastern slopes of the Allegheny Mountains, in what is now Virginia and West Virginia. During this time, the Tutelo/Saponi and other tribes related to the Sioux made first contact with European colonists. Because of attacks by the Iroquois from the north, Siouian tribes were forced to move to North Carolina.

1601AD. When the French returned in 1601, the St. Lawrence Valley had already been the site of generations of blood-feud-style warfare, as indeed characterized the relations of the Iroquois with virtually all neighboring peoples. When Samuel de Champlain landed at Tadoussac on the St. Lawrence, the Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron almost immediately recruited him and his small company of French adventurers to assist in attacking their Iroquois enemies upriver. The Iroquois lands comprised an ethnic island, surrounded on all sides, but the south, by Algonquian-speaking nations, all traditional enemies—including the Shawnee to the west in the Ohio Country. Their rivals also included the Iroquoian-speaking Huron and Neutral Nation Confederacies, who lived on the southern shore of Lake Huron and the western shore of Lake Ontario, respectively, and the Susquehannocks to their south but all of which while sometimes allies were also sometimes enemies, so were not part of the Iroquois Confederation, despite shared linguistic heritages.

1603AD. Before 1603, French conquistador Samuel de Champlain had formed an offensive alliance AGAINST the Iroquois, and a precedent was set: the French would not trade firearms to the Iroquois. He had a commercial rationale: the northern Natives provided the French with valuable furs and the Iroquois, based in present-day New York, interfered with that trade.

1603AD. “Indications of Shawnee locations in the Northeast are more numerous. In 1603, the Satanas or Shawanoes lived on the banks of the lakes in western New York, south of Lake Erie. When Captain John Smith (Pocahontas) first arrived in Virginia, the Iroquois were fighting a fierce war against the allied Mohicans, residing on Long Island, and Shawanoes on the Susquehanna River.” (Jerry E. Clark).

1603. British Redcoat King Henry IV brought an end to the French wars of religion. Magically. And religion never caused a point of contention in the world amongst peoples ever again.

1604. Saint Croix Island in Acadia was the site of a short-lived French colony, much plagued by illness, perhaps scurvy. The following year, the settlement was moved to Port Royal.

1607AD. After the English arrived on the present site of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, there was continuous contact with Cherokee from Kentucky as English traders strengthened their alliances, and worked their way into the Appalachian Mountains. KENTUCKY!

1608AD. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec, France’s first sustained settlement in the New World. When Champlain returned in 1608 the Algonquin had replace the Iroquois along the St Lawrence river. The region became known as New France and the city was used as a base from which Champlain and other Frenchmen explored the area. Champlain used the friendships he forged with the Indians to start a profitable fur trading business. The French established a lucrative economic network with the Huron and Algonquin Indians, which soon developed into a military alliance against the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon British Redcoat settlers in the South.

1608AD. The first European contact with the Susquehannock was in 1608 when Captain John Smith (from Jamestown) was exploring the northern end of Chesapeake Bay. This encounter was friendly enough, but Smith was wary because of their reputation and awed by their size. His later reports described them as giants. The Powhatan also knew the Susquehannock (whom they called CANNIBALS cannibals) from painful experience, and when the English first settled Virginia, the Powhatan had placed their villages well-inland to protect them from Susquehannock war parties who ranged the coastline by canoes.

1608-1626AD. Most Iroquois tribes ally with the Dutch Fur Traders over the French. In 1608, French explorer Samuel de Champlain sided with the Huron people living along the St. Lawrence River against the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (“The Five Nations”, aka The Iroquois Confederacy) living in what is now upper and western New York state. The result was a lasting enmity by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy towards the French, which caused them to side with the Dutch Fur Traders coming up the Hudson River in about 1626. THE DUTCH The Dutch offered better prices than the French and traded firearms, hatchets, and knives to the Iroquois in exchange for furs.

1609AD. Many Iroquois Die of a Measles Outbreak. The first deaths occurred among the Iroquois from MEASLES that they caught from the Dutch traders.

1609AD. This settlement was identical with the “Mowhemenchouch” or “Massinacack” found by Newport's expedition from Jamestown in 1609. The English, settled on their border at the falls of the James (Richmond), of course were constantly encroaching upon them, and they rapidly wasted away. The English, the Powhatans, and the Iroquois all waged war against them. Mention has just been made of the Shawnees, that tribe that was such a scourge to our early settlers. Of the Algonkian stock, they originated along the Savannah River, in Georgia, and southward from the Ashley River, in South Carolina.

1609AD. The first deliberate battle in 1609 was fought at Samuel de Champlain's initiative. Champlain, the Founder of Quebec, wrote, “I had come with no other intention than to make WAR!!!”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y81gQZhbYc In the company of his Huron and Algonkin allies, Samuel de Champlain and his forces fought a pitched battle with the MOHAWK Mohawk on the shores of Lake Champlain. Samuel de Champlain singlehandedly killed three Iroquois chiefs with an ARQUEBUS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arquebus despite the war chiefs having worn “arrowproof body armor made of PLAITED STICKS”.

1609AD. “In 1609, Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec, joined some of his allies in a skirmish against their Mohawk enemies on the shores of Lake Champlain, near where Fort Ticonderoga in New York stands today. It was a small affair as battles go: The Indians lined up, shouting insults and invoking their war medicine. Protected by shields and body armor fashioned from wood and leather, they made ready to do battle with spears and arrows. Champlain and his French comrades stepped forward with their muskets, shot down several Mohawk Chiefs, and put the rest to flight. The fight was over in a matter of minutes, but its repercussions reverberated across northeastern America for years.” (Calloway, pg. 8-9).

1609. Henry Hudson explored Delaware Bay and the Hudson River in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company.

1609AD. When Jacques Cartier arrived in the early 1500's, the Iroquois occupied the St Lawrence river valley and were the natives that he met at Stadacona and Hochelaga. When Champlain returned in 1608 the Algonquin had replace the Iroquois along the St Lawrence river.

1610s

1610s. Spain, hands down, was the most dominant power in Europe.

1610AD. When the British Redcoats were going through their “starving time” in the winter of 1610, some of them ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least be fed. When the summer came, the governor of the colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways, whereupon POWHATAN! Powhatan, according to the English account, replied with “noe other than prowde and disdaynefull Answers.” Some soldiers were therefore sent out “to take Revenge.” They fell upon an Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard “and shoteinge owit their Braynes in the water.” The queen was later taken off, and stabbed to death. Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the English-speaking British Redcoats settle.

1610AD. One reason the Powhatan were not completely opposed to English settlement at first was that they provided additional protection, but the Susquehannock still attacked the Potomac (Powhatan) villages in northern Virginia during 1610. Drawn by the potential profits from furs, other Europeans came to Amerika during the early 1600s.

1610AD. Samuel de Champlain and his arquebus-wielding French companions helped the Algonquin and the Huron defeat a large Iroquois raiding party.


1610-1614. In 1610-1614, with eyes long aware of French fur sales, the Dutch established a series impermanent (seasonal) trading posts on the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, one on Castle Island at the edge of Iroquois territory near present day Albany, giving the Iroquois direct access to European markets. Their trading efforts and eventual colonies in New Jersey and Delaware soon also gave the DELAWARE Delaware Nation and Susquehannock Democratic Republic trade with the DUTCH Dutch, which for their own reasons were reluctant to trade firearms to the Delaware.

1610-1614. Virginia. Powhatan War.

1611AD. From the French settlement at Quebec on the St. Lawrence River, Étienne Brulé visited the Huron villages on Georgian Bay in 1611.

1614 AD. Europeans reported encountering Shawnee over a widespread geographic area. One of the earliest mentions of the Shawnee may be a 1614 Dutch map showing some “Sawwanew” located just east of the Delaware River. Later 17th-century Dutch sources also place them in this general location. Accounts by French explorers in the same century usually located the Shawnee along the Ohio River, where the French encountered them on forays from eastern Canada and the Illinois Country. A Shawnee town might have from forty to one hundred BARK-COVERED houses, similar in construction to Iroquois longhouses. Each village usually had a meeting house or council house, perhaps sixty to ninety feet long, where public deliberations took place, unlike at Occupy Louisville. 1614AD. The 1614 founding of Fort Nassau and its 1624 replacement by Fort Orange (both at Albany) removed the Iroquois' need to rely on the French and their allied tribes nor on traveling through the lands of the more southern Susquehannock or more coastally positioned Delaware Nations (whom the Shawnee considered their “Grandfathers”, or “Uncles”) to trade with the Dutch— all of whom had functioned as middlemen in the trading of goods, in particular firearms, which the Dutch were happy to supply whereas the French only reluctantly supplied them to non-Huron tribes. The new post offered valuable tools that the Iroquois could receive in exchange for animal pelts. This began the Iroquois' large-scale hunting for furs. At this time, conflict began to grow quickly between the Iroquois and the Canadian Indian peoples supported by the French. The Iroquois inhabited the region of present-day New York south of Lake Ontario, and west of the Hudson River. 1614. Dutch and Swedish navigator maps as early as 1614 place a nation called the “Sawwanew” on the east bank of the Delaware River (but the Delaware River was at that date known as “South” River and Sawwanew may have been a general term applied to any Indians residing on that river). 1614. The Dutch had established a trading post on the Hudson River and were trading with the Delaware on the lower Delaware River and Delaware Bay. 1614AD. 1614 Violent confrontation between hundreds of English and Powhatan men on the Pamunkey River, Virginia.

1615AD. The first French contact with the NIPISSING Nipissing was in 1615. Ignoring Huron stories of Nipissing sorcery, Samuel de Champlain visited their village while enroute to the Huron villages on Georgian Bay. At the time, the Nipissing occupied one of the most important beaver producing areas in Canada and also had trading connections to the Ojibwe and Cree to the north and west. These reasons were more than enough to have made the Nipissing an invaluable trading partner for the French, but their location on the portage between the Ottawa Valley and Lake Huron meant that virtually all of the French fur trade from the western Great Lakes passed through the Nipissing homeland. The Nipissing and Susquehannock can be used to further understand the “Iroquois” dominance of the 1600s.

1615AD. In 1615, Samuel de Champlain joined a Huron raiding party and took part in a siege on an Iroquois town, probably among the Onondaga, south of Lake Ontario in present-day New York State. The attack ultimately failed, and Samuel de Champlain was injured.

1615AD. BRULE Brulé explored the area south of the Huron homeland. Crossing the Niagara River, he reached the Susquehannock villages on the upper Susquehanna River, where he discovered the Susquehannock were more than willing to ally themselves with the French and Huron in their war against the Iroquois League. Friendly relations with the Susquehannock were particularily valuable to the French, not only for purposes of trade, but because they trapped the Iroquois between two powerful enemies. Unfortunately, the new alliance alarmed DUTCH Dutch traders on the Hudson River, and they actively supported the MOHAWK Mohawk in 1615 against the Susquehannock. Although they were relatively few in number, and isolated by their inland location, the Susquehannock managed to become an important trading partner with all of the competing European powers—an achievement unmatched by any other tribe.

1616AD. As many as 8,000 Gens de Petun (Tobacco People) exited before contact in 1616.

1617AD. The Delaware, or Lenape, another nation of Indians occupying this region of the country, were once the formidable enemies of the Iroquois. The Delaware were conquered by the Iroquois in 1617, and since then had been submissive in their dealings with the Iroquois Confederacy.

1618 AD.  Chief Openchancanough is born. http://www.mytrees.com/ancestry/Virginia/Born-1560/Op/Openchancanough-family/Chief-Openchancanough-ro004047-4282.html http://www.myheritage.com/research?action=query&formId=1&formMode=0&qname=Name+fnmo.2+fnmsvos.1+fnmsmi.1+ln.Openchancanough+lnmo.3+lnmsdm.1+lnmsmf3.1+lnmsrs.1 According to one European legend, some Shawnee were descended from a party sent by Chief Opechancanough, ruler of the POWHATAN Powhatan Confederacy 1618–1644, to settle in the Shenandoah Valley. The party was led by his son, Shee-wa-a-nee. http://home.comcast.net/~wdegidio/Sizemore/Shawnee.htm Opechancanough liked the country so much that he sent his son Sheewa-a-nee with a large party to colonize the valley. Sheewa-a-nee drove Sherando back to his home in the Great Lakes, and descendants of Sheewanee's party, according to this account, became the Shawnee. http://firstsettlersshenandoahvalley.com/history.html

1618-1620AD. European conquest of interior Angola began when Portugal attacked the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo in the modern Malange district of Angola in a military campaign lasting from 1618-1620. At the time, England and its American colonies had no direct trade in African slaves. Nevertheless, during Portugal's war on Ndongo, Africans began appearing in British Virginia aboard Dutch and English privateers, which specialized in robbing Portuguese merchant-slavers leaving the Angolan port of Luanda.

1619AD. The very first black ancestors of Melungeons appeared in tidewater Virginia, not in the 18th century, but in 1619. Melungeons are not the offspring of white southern plantation owners and helpless black slaves. Most of the African ancestors of Melungeons were never chattel slaves. They were frequently black men freed from indentured servitude just like many white servants of the 17th century. Less often, African ancestors of the Melungeons either purchased their freedom from slavery or were freed upon the deaths of their masters. The black patriarchs of the Melungeons were commonly free African-American men who married white women in Virginia and other southern colonies, often before 1700. Paul Heinegg in his revealing book, “Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware” provides strong evidence that less than one percent of all free Africans were born of white slave-owners. Understanding the status of the African-American ancestors of Melungeons and the era, in which they came to America, is critical to understanding their history and the origin of the name “Melungeon”. Now we have the DNA study, which tends to support Heinegg's work, since it identifies African ancestry in the male lines and European in the female. There is almost no American Indian genetic connection. Why does anyone even fuss about this? If there were Africans in Melungeon family trees generations ago, and the families are now “white,” who cares? People do. We are not in Brazil where “race” is constructed differently. We are still harnessed to HYPODESCENT hypodescent (the one drop rule) of “race.” We still live in a highly racist society, and Melungeons live in conservative Appalachian areas. Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin. “Tri-racial isolate” groups of theSoutheastern United States; historically, Melungeons were associated with the Tri-racialdescribes populations thought to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.

1619AD. The first slaves arrive in British White Angle Saxon Protestant colonial America, and thus begins the most vicious and brutal and barbaric Atlantic slave trade, and bondage in all human history, the subjugation of Africans, for the benefit of slave masters, to build the White House, and the rest of Amerika. Goodbye Uncle Tom:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCtCEKzmMsQ. The first 19 or so Africans arrived ashore near the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, brought by Dutch traders who had seized them from a captured Spanish slave ship. The Spanish usually baptized slaves in Africa before embarking them. As English law considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, these Africans were treated as indentured servants who joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony. They were freed after a prescribed period, and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters. The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the “charter generation” was sometimes made up of mixed-race men who...

1620s

1620AD. There were zero European whites in Kentucky in 1620AD.

1620s. “Indian warriors needed guns to compete against armed enemies, and they needed beaver pelts to buy guns. As French missionaries and traders pushed west into Indian country, Ottawa and Huron traders from the Great Lakes paddled their canoes down to Montreal and Quebec, eager to trade pelts for guns and metal weapons that, literally, gave them an edge over their enemies. The Mohawks, who together with the Oneidas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas, made up the League of the Iroquois stretching the length of upstate New York, had to look elsewhere for guns and ammunition. In the 1620s, they pushed aside the Mahicans so they could trade directly with the Dutch on the Hudson River, near what became Albany, New York.” (Calloway, pg. 9).

1620s. From the 1620s, in southern British colonies like Virginia, white northern Europeans intermarried with Indians. They also intermarried with Africans who began entering the American colonies as early as 1619. Melungeons originate from these red (?), white and black peoples in this period of American history.

1620s-1630s AD. The Monongahela Culture disappeared some time during the 1620s or 1630s before having significant direct contact with Europeans. Most of the Monongahela were killed by, or assimilated into, either the Iroquois or the Delaware tribes during warfare, as these powerful tribes competed to control area hunting grounds for the fur trade.

1621AD. The Iroquois nominally gave the English much of the disputed territory north of the Ohio in the Nanfan Treaty in 1701, although this transfer was not recognised by the French, who were the strongest actual presence there at the time. In that treaty, the Iroquois leadership claimed to have conquered this “Beaver Hunting Ground” 80 years previously, or in ca. 1621.

1622-1632. Virginia. The Powhatan Wars, battles and bloodbaths in Virginia between colonists and American Native Indians.

1622. March 22. AD. Jamestown Massacre. Powhatan (Pamunkey) killed 347 English men, women and children throughout the Virginia colony, almost one-third of the English population of the Jamestown colony, in an effort to push the English out of Virginia.

1624-1628AD. Also handicapped by their inland location, the Iroquois first had to contend with the powerful Mahican confederacy in order to trade with the Dutch, and it took four-years of war (1624-28) before the Mohawk emerged as the pre-eminent trading partner of the Dutch in the Hudson Valley. The Susquehannock, however, had an easier time against the numerous—but peaceful and disorganized—Delaware tribes who traded with the Dutch along the lower Delaware.

1625AD. Meanwhile, to the south in Virginia, the English colonists in 1625 had defeated the Powhatan, the only Algonquin confederacy strong enough to have challenged the Susquehannock. It took another war (1644-46) for the English to completely crush the Powhatan and take control of eastern Virginia, so they had little time to concern themselves about the Susquehannock. Unchallenged, the Susquehannock extended their dominion south from the Susquehanna to the Potomac River and claimed the area in between as hunting territory. They did not ask the tribes who lived there.

1626-1630AD. Beginning in 1626, the Susquehannock attacked the Delaware and by 1630 had forced many of them either south into Delaware or across the river into New Jersey. The Dutch accepted the outcome, but when they began to trade with the Susquehannock, they were pleased to discover the Susquehannock (skilled hunters and trappers) had more (and better) furs than the Delaware.

1627-1628AD. Juan de Torres led 10 Spanish soldiers and 60 Indian allies to Cofitachequi on two expeditions in 1627-1628. He was “well entertained by the Chief who is highly respected by the rest of the chiefs, who all obey him and acknowledge vassalage to him.”

1628AD. To remain, the PATUXENT Patuxent and CONOY Conoy (Piscataway) PISCATAWAY on the western shore of the Chesapeake were forced to ally with the English in Virginia by 1628. This alliance was never tested, since the Susquehannock SUSQUEHANNOCK usually left the residents alone as long as they did not challenge their right to hunt when and where they pleased.

1628AD. In 1628, the Mohawk (Iroquois) defeated the Mahican, and established a monopoly of trade with the Dutch at Fort Orange (later Albany, New York), New Netherland. In the same era, the Susquehannocks, also well armed by the fur trade with Dutch traders, effectively reduced the Delaware's strength, and won a protracted declared war with the Province of Maryland.

1629 AD. British colonists in Virginia establish a trade network with Cherokee living in the Appalachian Mountains.
1630s

1630s. By the 1630s, the Iroquois had become fully armed with European weaponry through their trade with the Dutch.The Iroquois, particularly the Mohawk, had come to rely on the trade for the purchase of firearms and other highly valued and much coveted European goods for their livelihood and survival. They used their growing expertise with the ARQUEBUS arquebus to good effect in their continuing wars with the Algonquin, Huron, and other traditional enemies. The French, meanwhile, outlawed the trading of firearms to their native allies, though they occasionally gave arquebuses as gifts to individuals who converted to Christianity. Although the Iroquois first attacked their traditional enemies (the Algonquins, Mahicans, MONTAGNAIS Montagnais, and Hurons), the alliance of these tribes with the French quickly brought the Iroquois into fierce and bloody conflict directly with the European colonists.

1630s. After a series of epidemics swept the area during the 1630s, only 3,000 Tionontati (Petun), in nine villages, had survived by 1640.

1630s-40s. During the 1630s and 40s, alliances were formed between the Nipissing, Ottawa, Tionontati, Huron, and Neutrals to seize territory from the Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Fox, and Sauk who apparently were the original resident tribes on the lower Michigan peninsula to the west. The attacks by the warriors of these alliances, forced the Michigan tribes to surrender territory, and relocate farther west.

1631AD. The British Redcoats in Virginia soon grew interested in fur trade with the Susquehannock, and William Claiborne established a trading post on Kent Island in upper Chesapeake Bay in 1631. The Susquehannock by this time were able to trade with the French in Canada (through the Huron), the Dutch on Delaware Bay, and the English-speaking British Redcoats in Virginia.

1632AD. Captain Henry Fleet mentioned a town called “Shaunetowa” at the head of navigation of the Potomac River.

1632AD. The fur trade provided the Nipissing with steel weapons and, after 1632, their first firearms for “hunting.” Despite their small population, these made the Nipissing formidable to the much-larger neighboring tribes. The numerous lakes and small streams of the Nipissing homeland had a lot of beaver, but the huge demand by the French for fur quickly used up what was available. This forced the Nipissing and other French trading partners to look elsewhere for new hunting territory which, of course, belonged to other tribes, many of whom were inclined to resist unauthorized poaching.

1633AD. Smallpox Plague Epidemic Pandemic on Iroquios Villages. The Iroquois competed with their Native neighbors for domination of the Dutch and French fur trade. Catastrophic smallpox plagues, beginning in 1633, escalated this rivalry. Firearms also gave the Iroquois a superior weapon system with which to wage war against their traditional rivals, the French-allied Huron. The Iroquois fought the Huron and soon displaced them as the dominant Native power of the colonial frontier.

1634AD. Following decimation by infectious diseaseafter 1634, when immigration of children from England, France and Holland (Dutch) increased and brought contact, both the Wendat WENDAT and Petun PETUN societies were in a weakened state.

1634AD. The friendly trade relationship with the English became increasingly strained after the settlement of Maryland by British Redcoat English Catholics began in 1634. For obvious reasons, the Conoy and Patuxent welcomed the new colonists, and a Jesuit mission was opened that year at their village at Piscataway. The reaction of the Susquehannock was not nearly as friendly, especially when settlements began to move steadily up the western side of Chesapeake Bay from Fort St. George on the St. Mary's River. A mutual desire to trade kept the English and Susquehannock from open warfare for a while, but steady encroachment eventually led to a series of incidents and confrontations, including wars with the Conoy and Wicomese.

1634-37AD. The first to get hit with smallpox was New England during 1634, and by 1636-37, smallpox had spread to the St. Lawrence River, and then up the Ottawa River to the Nipissing. Jesuit missionaries visited in 1640, but soon moved on to the Huron villages allowing the Nipissing, for the moment, to remain devoted to their traditional "sorcery."

1635AD. As early as 1635, the Iroquois and Huron came into conflict as war parties met and fought, and villages on both sides were raided and burned. The conflict mounted as the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy spread out, and invaded Huron lands to the north and west. Huron Jesuit towns and villages were attacked and burned, and those not killed, were taken captive.



1637AD. The French Jesuit missionary JEAN DE BREBEUF Jean de Brébeuf saw Iroquois tribesmen play Lacrosse during 1637 in present-day New York. He was the first European to write about the game. He called it la crosse (“the stick”). Some say the name originated from the French term for field hockey, le jeu de la crosse. Others suggest that it was named after the crosier, a staff carried by bishops that bears a similarity to the sticks used in the sport.

1637AD. May 26. The Mystic River Massacre. The Pequot War of 1637 in Connecticut. In the Pequot War, the British Redcoat colonists commanded by John Mason, with Mohegan and Narragansett allies, launched a night attack on a large Pequot village on the Mystic River in present-day Connecticut, where they burned the inhabitants in their homes and killed all survivors, for total fatalities of about 600–700. The Moravian missionary John Heckewelder associated the Pequots, who were involved in a bloody war with the Massachusetts colonists in 1637—the Pequot War—with the Piqua division of the Shawnee.  1637. Pequot War. 700 innocents are slain, at night. All women, children, and the old, and sickly. The warriors were out hunting for them. The British English Anglo-Saxon Protestant Redcoat-loving Whites celebrate with the First Thanksgiving ever, which they still celebrate today!

1638AD. The Iroquois Imperial Confederate War Against The Wenro. With the decline of beaver as a vital natural resource for trade relations, the Iroquois began to conquer their smaller neighbors. They attacked the Wenro in 1638 and took all of their territory. Survivors fled to the Hurons for refuge. The Wenro had served as a buffer between the Iroquois, and the Neutral tribe and Erie allies. These two tribes were considerably larger and more powerful than the Iroquois. With expansion to the west blocked, the Iroquois turned their attention to the north. The Dutch also encouraged the Iroquois in this strategy. At that time, the Dutch were the Iroquois' primary European trading partners, with their goods passing through Dutch trading posts down the Hudson River, and from there sent back to Europe. As the Iroquois' sources of furs declined, so did the income of the trading posts.The rivalry among the French, Dutch, and English for control of the fur trade in North America encouraged intertribal warfare among the Indians.

1638AD. By the time the Swedes made their first settlements on the Delaware River in 1638, the Delaware were entirely subject to the Susquehannock, and needed permission from the MINQUA “Minqua” to sign any treaties.

1638AD. The Susquehannock hardly noticed the brief interruption of trade with the English. In 1638, Peter Minuit MINUIT, a former Dutch governor of New Amsterdam who had a new job, brought the Swedes to the lower Delaware River (claimed by the Dutch). Minuit purchased land from the Delaware, and built Ft. Christina for trade, and to block Dutch access to the Delaware Valley. It should be noted that the Delaware needed permission to sell, and two “Mingua” representatives attended the signing of their treaty with the Swedes.
1640s

1640s. Trading with all four European powers during the 1640s required that the Susquehannock produce a lot of fur. They were skilled hunters and trappers, but the huge demand kept them so busy hunting they had little time left to continue their war of conquest against the Delaware and Chesapeake Algonquin tribes. In west, however, it may have been different. One can only wonder where and how the Susquehannock got so much fur, and it is likely that, as the Susquehannock exhausted the beaver in central and western Pennsylvania, they were forced to look beyond their territory for more. Some was obtained from trade with the ERIE Erie and Shawnee SHAWNEE, but the remainder probably came at the expense of encroachment and warfare with unknown tribes in the Ohio Valley. 1640AD. The expansion of hunting for trade with Europe accelerated the decline of the beaver population. By 1640 the animal had largely disappeared from the Hudson Valley. Historian-editors of American Heritage Magazine have argued that the growing scarcity of the beaver in the lands controlled by the Iroquois in the middle 17th-century accelerated the wars. The center of the fur trade shifted northward to the colder regions of present-day southern Ontario, an area controlled by the NEUTRALS Neutrals as well as by the HURONS Hurons—the close trading partners of the French. The Iroquois, displaced in the fur trade by other nations in the region, and threatened by disease and with a declining population, began an aggressive campaign to expand their area of control. 1640AD. With these more sophisticated weapons, the Five Nations (Iroquois Confederacy) nearly exterminated the Huron, and all of other Native Americans living immediately to their west in the Ohio country in the Beaver Wars. Historians consider the Beaver Wars to have been one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of North America. 1640AD. THE DUTCH SELL GUNS TO THE IROQUOIS. At first Europeans had been reluctant to trade firearms to natives and restricted the number and amount of ammunition. This restriction dissolved as the competition increased. When English traders from Boston attempted to lure the Mohawk from the Dutch by selling firearms, the Dutch countered by providing them in unlimited amounts. Suddenly much-better armed than the Huron and their allies, the Iroquois began a major offensive, and the level of violence in the Beaver Wars escalated dramatically. In the arms race that followed, no tribe had a more advantageous position than the Susquehannock. By playing on the fears of the rival European traders, they had access to whatever weapons in any amount they wished. To say they were well-armed would be an understatement. One of the Susquehannock villages even had a cannon to defend itself, and so far as is known, they were the only Native Americans ever to use this type of heavy armament. For as far into the past as can be determined, the Susquehannock were friends of theHURON Huron, and enemies of the Iroquois. Susquehannock alliances and trade also extended to the ERIE Erie and Neutrals NEUTRALS, with the result that the Iroquois were surrounded by hostile tribes. Having exhausted the beaver in their homeland, the Iroquois were running out of the fur they needed to trade for Dutch firearms. Otherwise, with European epidemics decimating their villages, it was only a matter of time before they were annihilated. Their enemies, of course, were well-aware of this problem and refused permission for Iroquois hunters to pass through their territories. Faced with a blockade, the Iroquois were forced into a war where they needed to either conquer or be destroyed. 1640. The epidemics struck with frightening regularity throughout the 1640s to which Nipissing shamans, despite their reputation, had no answer. This continuing tragedy, however, provided an opportunity for the French priests to make their first converts among the Huron and Nipissing. Unfortunately, French medical knowledge was limited, and Christianity conferred no special immunity to disease. The Nipissing steadily lost population, but the Huron who were concentrated in their large fortified villages were especially vulnerable. After epidemics decimated their population during the 1640s, the Huron lost their ability to resist the Iroquois who were expanding northward to take hunting territory needed for their trade with the Dutch. French firearms initially had helped the French trading partners stem the tide, but in 1640 the Dutch had begun providing large quantities of firearms and ammunition to the Iroquois. With this, the Beaver Wars suddenly became very deadly. Better armed than the French themselves, the Mohawk attacked the Algonkin and Montagnais along the upper St. Lawrence River. The Montagnais were soon forced to retreat east towards Quebec, and the Algonkin were driven from the south end of the Ottawa Valley.

1640AD (after). The Iroquois, now armed with Dutch guns, concentrated their attacks on the Huron after 1640.

1640-1645. While the trade with the English slowed between 1640 and 1645, the Swedes more than made up the difference. The Susquehannock were also able to continue trade with Dutch by using the portages between the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson Rivers to New Amsterdam.

1641AD. In 1641, the Mohawks traveled to Trois-Rivières in New France to propose peace with the French and their allied tribes. They asked the French to set up a trading post in Iroquoia. Governor Montmagny rejected this proposal.

1641-1645. The Huron Genocide by the Iroquois (Seneca and Mohawk, predominantly). Between 1641 and 1645 the Mohawk and Seneca engaged in systematic genocide against the Huron. The early Iroquois campaigns were more than simply the mourning war system, as they resulted in the wholesale slaughter of entire Huron villages. The few Huron not killed were adopted into Iroquois villages.

1642AD. The French built a new trading post at Montreal in 1642, but Iroquois war parties moved into the Ottawa Valley, cutting access from the west. By 1642, the British English Redcoat governor of Maryland had declared the Susquehannock were enemies of the colony to be shot on sight.

1642AD. Galileo Galilei dies. (Italian pronunciation: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), often known mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian physicist, mathematician, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics”, the “father of science”, and “the Father of Modern Science”.

1643. The Dutch-Indian War of 1643 along the Hudson River.

1643AD-1649. The 1643 Iroquois (Mohawk and Seneca) War on the Hurons (Wendat). The Iroquois League comprised five nations located between Lake Erie and the northern edge of Lake Ontario: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. The Iroquois desired to displace the Mohegan Nations as trade partners with the Dutch and to displace the Huron as trade partners with Quebec. As the volume of Mohegan furs declined, the Dutch turned to the Mohawk for pelts. The Mohawk extended their beaver trapping into Huron territory, leading to increasingly violent battles for trade. Seeking to displace their traditional rivals as the trading partner to the Europeans, the Iroquois Nations, led by the Mohawk and Seneca, went to war with the Hurons in 1643. The Mohawk went to war against the Huron to supplant them as the main French trade partner.

1644-1646. Virginia. Powhatan War.

1644AD. Trade Stops. Attempts at peace in 1644 failed, and Susquehannock trade with the English temporarily sputtered to a halt.

1645AD. Peace w/ Iroquois and French. For a Brief Moment. 1645 AD. In the early 1640s, the war began in earnest with Iroquois attacks on frontier Huron villages along the St. Lawrence River; their intent was disruption of the trade with the French. In 1645 the French called the tribes together to negotiate a treaty to end the conflict. Two Iroquois leaders, Deganaweida and Koiseaton, traveled to New France to take part in the negotiations. The French agreed to most of the Iroquois demands, granting them trading rights in New France. The next summer a fleet of eighty canoes carrying a large harvest of furs traveled through Iroquois territory to be sold in New France. When the Iroquois arrived, the French refused to purchase the furs, and told the Iroquois to sell them to the Huron, who would act as a middleman. Outraged, the Iroquois resumed the war. The French decided to become directly involved in the conflict. The Huron and the Iroquois had similar access to manpower, each tribe having an estimated 25,000–30,000 members.

1645AD. A Peace Treaty. The Susquehannock ended their hostilities with British Colony Maryland, and signed a treaty ceding their claims in Maryland between the Choptank and Patuxent Rivers.

1645AD. The French had clung to their precarious truce signed with the Mohawk in 1645. By 1645 the French were forced to ask for peace, but the treaty they signed that year with the Mohawk did not extend to their native allies. After a brief period of peace, fighting resumed between the Iroquois and the French trading partners. While the French stood by maintaining a nervous neutrality, the Mohawk and Oneida decimated the southern bands of the Algonkin. A hasty alliance forged out of necessity between the Nipissing, Montagnais, and Algonkin had little effect. Meanwhile, the western Iroquois (Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca) had concentrated their attacks on the Huron Confederacy.

1645AD. The Iroquois had succeeded in isolating the Hurons from the Algonkin, Montagnais, and French in the east. There was a two-year lull in the fighting following a truce that year, but in 1647 the Iroquois launched massive attacks into the Huron homeland and destroyed the ARENDARONON Arendaronon villages. Sensing that the situation was becoming serious, Susquehannock warriors fought as Huron allies, while their ambassadors sent to the Iroquois council flatly demanded a halt to the war.

1646. October 18. AD. Jesuits were captured and killed by the Mohawks. In 1646, Jesuit missionaries at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons went as envoys to the Mohawk lands to protect the fragile peace of the time. Mohawk attitudes toward the peace soured while the Jesuits were traveling, and their warriors attacked the party en route. The missionaries were taken to the village of Ossernenon (near present-day Auriesville, New York), where the moderate Turtle and Wolf clans recommended setting the priests free. Angered, members of the Bear clan killed Jean de Lalande and Isaac Jogues on October 18, 1646. The Catholic Church has commemorated the two French priests as among the eight North American Martyrs.

1647-1648AD. To gain the upper hand, in 1647 the Huron and Susquehannock formed an alliance to counter Iroquois aggression. Together their warriors greatly outnumbered those of the Iroquois. The Huron tried to break the Iroquois Confederacy by negotiating separate peaces with the Onondaga and the Cayuga. When the other tribes intercepted their messengers, they put an end to the negotiations. During the summer of 1647 there were several small skirmishes between the tribes. In 1648 a more significant battle occurred when the two Algonquin tribes attempted to pass a fur convoy through an Iroquois blockade. Their attempt succeeded and they inflicted high casualties on the Iroquois. During the following years, the Iroquois strengthened their confederacy to work more closely and create an effective central leadership.

1648AD. “The Ohio Valley may have been the center for the main body of Shawnee into the early seventeenth century. But by mid-century it is apparent that they were spread over a wide area from present-day Ohio to the Cumberland River and quite possibly even as far west as the Mississippi River. As early as 1648, there were Shawnee residing with the MASCOUTINs! Mascoutins in Illinois.” ~Jerry Clark.

1648-49AD. “The 1648-49, Iroquois war parties shattered the once-powerful and prosperous confederacy of the Wendat or Huron people who lived in the Georgian Bay region of Lake Huron. They killed French missionaries, destroyed Huron villages, killed hundreds of people, and adopted hundreds more. Survivors fled in all directions; some moved eventually to northwestern Ohio, where they became known as Wyandots. Iroquois raiding parties struck into New England, the Susquehanna Valley, and the Ohio country. Many peoples fled from Ohio to the western Great Lakes to escape the onslaught. Outgunned and outnumbered, the Shawnee scattered.” (Calloway, pg. 10). 1648-1649AD. In a second campaign between 1648 and 1649, the Iroquois razed numerous Huron villages and French missionary towns, killing and capturing hundreds of Huron. They occupied their territory and effectively destroyed them as a political and economic entity. Many Huron simply retreated into Canada to settle around Quebec while others joined the ERIE Erie and Neutral NEUTRAL Republic. Other fragments of nations defeated by the Iroquois combined to form the WYANDOT Wyandot Nation. For some inexplicable reason the Huron refused further offers of help from the Susquehannock, and were overrun by the Iroquois during the winter of 1648-49.

1649AD. In 1649 during the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois used recently purchased Dutch guns to attack the Huron, who were allied with the French. These attacks, primarily against the Huron towns of TAENHATENTARON Taenhatentaron (St. Ignace SAINT IGNACE) and St. Louis SAINT LOUIS in Michigan, were the final battles that effectively destroyed the Huron Confederacy. 1649AD. With their enemies in the east subdued, the Mohawk joined with the western Iroquois to finish off the Huron. Huronia was overrun during 1649, and the Tionontati, who were Huron allies, suffered a similar fate that winter. The western Iroquois then turned on the Neutrals, leaving the Mohawk to deal with the remaining Algonkin and Nipissing.

1649AD. The Petun Tobacco People were attacked, destroyed and dispersed by the Iroquois, raiding from their base in present-day New York in 1649. The remnants joined with some refugee Huron to become the Huron-Petun Nation, who were later known as the WYANDOT Wyandot. French traders called these First Nations people the Pétun (tobacco), for their industrious cultivation of that plant. Pétun as a word for tobacco became obsolete; it was derived from the early French-Brazilian trade, and comes from the Guarani language. In the Iroquoian Mohawk language, the name for tobacco is “O-ye-aug-wa”. French colonial traders in the Ohio Valley transliterated the name as Guyandotte, their spelling of how it sounded in their language. Later European-American settlers in the valley adopted this name. They named the Guyandotte River in south-western West Virginia for the Wendat people, who had migrated to the area during the Beaver Wars. Later the Wendat were forced to move west to Ohio, and finally most removed to Indian Territory in present-day Kansas and Oklahoma. Two tribes are federally recognized in the United States: the Wyandotte Nation and the Wyandot Nation of Kansas.

1649. March. AD. The Iroquois Imperial Army Conquers The Huron Republic. In March 1649, a force of 1,000 SENECA Seneca and Mohawk MOHAWK, two tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, descended on a group of Huron towns east of Georgian Bay near present-day Toronto, Canada. The attackers burned outlying settlements and overwhelmed the towns of Saint Ignace and Saint Louis, killing or capturing their defenders and burning the towns. The Iroquois were repulsed at the town of Sainte Marie by Huron warriors and some French soldiers stationed at the town. However, the Iroquois retreated with supplies and prisoners. The Huron who survived fled. By the end of March, 15 Huron towns were empty as a result of the fighting. This Iroquois invasion destroyed the Huron Nation. Huron survivors fled into the wilderness, and scattered westward, taking refuge with tribes along the shores of Lakes Huron and Erie. Many Huron asked for adoption into the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, and became part of the Mohawk, Seneca, and Onondaga peoples, as per Iroquois tradition. It was customary among the Iroquois to adopt children and young men and women into the tribes to make up for Iroquois losses in warfare. With the destruction of the Huron Nation, the Iroquois turned to other tribes in the Great Lakes region.

1649. December. AD. The Iroquois Invade, Murder, Pillage, Break, and Destroy the Tobacco People. After the Hurons, the First to fall were the TOBACCO Tobacco people, who were crushed by a force of MOHAWK Mohawk and Seneca SENECA in December 1649.

1650s

1650. Of these, about 1,000 Huron and TIONONTATI! Tionontati (Petun) managed to escape the Iroquois in 1650 and reach temporary safety on Mackinac Island (Upper Michigan). The remainder of the Tionontati were either killed, or captured and later adopted into the Iroquois. The mixed Huron-Tionontati group that escaped became known afterwards as the Wyandot.

1650AD. Edward Bland, an explorer who accompanied Abraham Wood's expedition in 1650, wrote that in OPECHANCANOUGH Opechancanough's day, there had been a falling-out between the CHAWAN Chawan chief, and the Weroance of the Powhatan POWHATAN (also a relative of Opechancanough's family). The latter (Weroance of the Powhatan) had murdered the former (a Chawan Chief).

1,650. The first recorded Imperial British crown explorations of the mountains were those of Abraham “Abram” Wood, which began around 1650. Later, Abraham Wood sent exploring parties into the mountains.

1650AD. The Iroquois Imperial Confederate War Against The PETUN, wipe the Petun off the map, conquering them, their lands, resources, women, children, men, and force those few Petun survivors to become Iroquois. 1650AD. The Iroquois would complete the process during the 1650s and force Nipissing across Lake Michigan into Wisconsin. While the Nipissing certainly prospered from their trade with the French, they suffered as well. Competition for fur quickly disrupted what had been, for the most part, a relatively peaceful region. Disturbed that most of the French trade had shifted west to the Great Lakes, the Algonkin living in the Ottawa River Valley began to collect tolls for passage through their territory and occasionally robbed Nipissing trading parties enroute to Quebec and Montreal. Even worse were the epidemics which followed the fur trade west, and since they were located on the main trade route, the Nipissing missed very few of these.

1650AD. During 1650 a large Mohawk war party moved into the upper Ottawa Valley. Besides the Algonkin, it also attacked and massacred many of the Nipissing. During the next three years of war and death, the Nipissing held their ground against the Iroquois juggernaut, but by 1653 the survivors were forced to abandon their homeland and flee west to the Ottawa and Saulteur Ojibwe near Sault Ste. Marie. Already dominating trade with the Dutch along the Hudson River in New York, the Iroquois had similar ambitions for a similar status with the French on the St. Lawrence, and to accomplish this, they were determined to drive any potential rivals as far west as possible away from the French trading posts. Iroquois attacks near Sault. Ste. Marie in 1653 and 1655 forced the Ottawa to leave and move south near Green Bay, Wisconsin.

1650AD. The French encouraged the native fur traders to come to Montreal, but Iroquois war parties roaming along the length of the Ottawa River made this very dangerous. Few dared, but after the Ottawa and Wyandot found a refuge on the south shore of Lake Superior, they were willing to try. Having maintained their trading ties with the Cree to the north, they had a lot of fur and a taste for European goods. Supported by the Ojibwe and Nipissing, they formed large canoe flotillas which forced their way past the Iroquois blockade on the Ottawa River and reached Montreal. This activity brought renewed Iroquois attacks to the northern Great Lakes, but the shores of Lake Superior stretched Iroquois military power just a little too far.

1650AD. The Tionontati met a similar fate a year later, and as the Iroquois absorbed 1000s of captured warriors into their ranks, the Susquehannock were in grave danger. In 1650 the western Iroquois (Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga) attacked the Neutrals, and the Susquehannock entered the war against the Iroquois. Whatever help they could have given the Neutrals was cut short when the Mohawk attacked the Susquehannock villages in 1651. With the Susquehannock unable, and the Erie unwilling to help, the Neutrals were quickly defeated. The Mohawk, however, found the well-armed Susquehannock a dangerous and stubborn foe.

1650s. During historic times, the Miami were known to have migrated south and eastwards from Wisconsin from the mid-17th century to the mid-18th century, by which time they had settled on the upper Wabash River in what is now northwestern Ohio. The migration was likely a result of their being invaded during the protracted Beaver Wars by the more powerful Iroquois, who traveled far in strong organized groups (war parties) from their territory in central and western New York for better hunting during the peak of the eastern beaver fur trader days. MIAMI: Early Miami people are considered to belong to the Fischer Tradition of Mississippian culture. Mississippian societies were characterized by maize-based agriculture, chiefdom-level social organization, extensive regional trade networks, hierarchical settlement patterns, and other factors. The historical Miami engaged in hunting, as did other Mississippian peoples. 1650s AD. In the early 1650s, the Iroquois began to attack the French. Some of the Iroquois Nations, notably the Oneida and Onondaga, had peaceful relations with the French, but were under control of the Mohawk. The latter were the strongest nation in the Confederacy and were hostile to the French presence. After a failed peace treaty negotiated by Chief Canaqueese, Iroquois war parties moved north into New France along Lake Champlain, and the Richelieu River. They attacked, and blockaded Montreal. Typically a raid on an isolated farm or settlement consisted of a war party moving swiftly, and silently through the woods, swooping down suddenly and without warning. In many cases, prisoners, especially women and children, were brought back to the Iroquois homelands, and were adopted into the nations.

1650-1651 AD. The Iroquois break, and destroy the Neutral Republic (Niagara Peninsula) in 1650, and force the Neutral Nation to become Iroquois. By the end of 1651, the Iroquois had completely driven the tribe from traditional territory, killing or assimilating thousands. At the time, the Neutrals inhabited a territory ranging from the present-day Niagara Peninsula, westward to the Grand River valley.

1651-1652AD. From 1651 to 1652, the Iroquois attacked the Susquehannocks, located to the south in present-day Pennsylvania, without sustained success.

1652AD. English “Peace” Land Cession Treaty with Susquehannock Republic. Not able to fight two wars at the same time, the Susquehannock in 1652 signed a treaty with Maryland ceding MUCH of the lower Susquehanna Valley to secure peace and trade with English.

1652AD. The Dutch and French traders and, after 1652, the British fueled demand. The warfare and social disruption contributed to the decimation of Native American populations, but the major factor were fatalities from infectious diseases for which they had no immunity.

1653AD. The Onondaga Nation (1 of 5 Nations in the Iroquois Confederacy) extended a peace invitation to New France. 1653. The Iroquois then made peace with the French in November 1653, compelling them to surrender all of their Huron refugees. During the Beaver Wars, they were said to have defeated, and assimilated the Huron (1649), Petun (1650), the Neutral Nation (1651), Erie Tribe (1657), and Susquehannock (1680)... Huron, and their allies: Petun, Erie, and Susquehannock. [The Lenape or Delaware... the Anishinaabe peoples of the boreal Canadian Shield region, and not infrequently fought the English colonies as well.] “Mourning Wars” are an integral part of Iroquois culture. This view suggests that the Iroquois launched large-scale attacks against neighboring tribes in order to avenge or replace the massive number of deaths resulting from battles or smallpox epidemics.

1654. Virginian Colonel Abram Wood surveyed Kentucky, probably crossing New River valley, in the midst of the 100 Year French-Iroquois Beaver War. KENTUCKY!

1654AD. Smallpox hit their villages during 1654, but this affected the Mohawk as much as the Susquehannock, and slowed the fighting on both sides.

1654-1656AD. The Iroquois-Erie Indians War. 1654. The Iroquois wiped out, murder most, assimilate some, of The Erie Indians. The Erie were destroyed by the Iroquois in 1654 over competition for the fur trade. The war between the Erie and the Iroquois lasted for two years. The Erie people suffered the same fate as the other tribes when a force of 1,800 Iroquois attacked an Erie town near present-day Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1654. Although the town fell, the Erie regrouped and fought the Iroquois for two years until they too were conquered. By 1656 the Iroquois had almost completely destroyed the Erie confederacy, whose members refused to flee to the west. The Erie territory was located on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie and was estimated to have 12,000 members in 1650. Greatly outnumbered by the tribes they had subdued, the Iroquois had been able to achieve their victories through the use of firearms purchased from the Dutch DUTCH.

1655-1740. When the English took Jamaica from Spain in 1655, they inherited the problem of the Maroons. Until 1740, the Maroons were involved in slave revolts against the British. Just like the Maroons in North America, the Jamaican Maroons raided the Jamaican plantation houses by night whenever they had need of supplies, or whenever British encroachments upon their hunting grounds grew unbearable. The Maroons of Jamaica formed the first Free Negro society in the New World.

1655. May. AD. Martin Chartier, a glovemaker, is born in France. Peter Chartier was born Pierre Chartier, and was the son of Martin Chartier (1655-1718), a glovemaker born in St-Jean-de-Montierneuf, Poitiers, Vienne, Poitou-Charentes, France. 1655. Martin Chartier. Birth: 1655 in St-Jean-de-Montierneuf, Poitiers, Vienne, Poitou-Charentes, France; Baptism: 1 JUN 1655 St-Jean-de-Montierneuf, Poitiers, Vienne, Poitou-Charentes, France; Death: 1718 in Dekanoagah, Indian village around current Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA. Martin Chartier and Robert Cavellier de La Salle sailed together in the same ship. Martin Chartier was a woodrunner and trader. Martin Chartier was the founder of the site of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Martin Chartier is the “Greatest French explorer on his own in North America”, a distinction to be shared with his half-breed son, Pierre. Martin Chartier, one of the old French Indian traders, had his trading post and lived for many years adjoining the farm afterwards owned by James Patterson, the Indian trader, and also the Susquehanna Indian town, three miles below the Columbia. The Penns gave Chartier a large tract o f land on Turkey Hill, in Lancaster County.

1655. September-1656. AD. For the Susquehannock, the major blow came in September, 1655 when the Dutch seized the Swedish colonies. Without their primary supplier, the Susquehannock were forced to ask the Mohawk for peace. Equally exhausted, the Mohawk agreed in 1656. The war dragged on until 1656 with the Mohawk (at great cost to themselves) slowly pushing the Susquehannock down the eastern branch of the Susquehanna River.The Susquehannock were suddenly alone. The French were powerless after Iroquois victories over the Huron and Neutrals, and the Erie soon had their own war of survival against the western Iroquois (1653-56). Hard pressed by the Mohawk, the Susquehannock tried to strengthen their ties to the Dutch in 1651 by selling them some land on the Delaware River, but the Dutch remained neutral. The Swedes continued to supply them with anything they wanted, but the Susquehannock had become involved in fighting with Virginia Puritans that had settled in northern Maryland in 1649.

1656AD. Vandernock's map of 1656 locates a village of “Sauwanoos” SAUWANOOS between the upper Schuylkill SCHUYLKILL and the Delaware.

1,656AD. By 1656, the Imperial Iroquois marauders conquered and assimilated their Iroquian-speaking rivals except the Susquehannock, and had started to clear the Algonquin tribes from the Ohio Valley, and lower Michigan. Most of these enemies ended up as refugees in Wisconsin, but some of the Shawnee apparently were able to hold on for a few years as Susquehannock allies.

1656. Peace... a second, equally fragile, peace with the western Iroquois during 1656. At the time, there were fewer than 300 French in all of North America, so their reluctance to intervene while the Iroquois were destroying their trading partners and allies is somewhat understandable. Aware of their danger, the French carefully avoided any travel to the western Great Lakes which might offend the Iroquois, but they still wanted to trade for fur and did not wish to become subservient to the League to do so.

1656-1658AD. A Smallpox Epidemic. An expedition of Jesuits, led by Simon Le Moyne, established Sainte Marie de Ganentaa in 1656 in their territory. The Jesuits were forced to abandon the mission by 1658 as hostilities resumed, possibly because of the sudden death of 500 native people from an epidemic of smallpox, a European infectious disease to which they had no immunity. American natives were not fans of biological warfare.

1657AD. The The Democratic Iroquois Imperial Confederates War on The Erie Republic, and wipe the Erie Republic, as well as their Nation, off the face of the planet.

1658AD. Meanwhile, the French peace with the Iroquois had collapsed in 1658 following the murder of a Jesuit priest acting as a French ambassador.

1658-1663AD. The Iroquois-Susquehannock War. The Mohawk and their Oneida allies never fought the Susquehannock again, but peace with them did not extend to the rest of the Iroquois League. From 1658 to 1663, the Iroquois were at war with the Susquehannock and their Lenape and Province of Maryland allies. After finishing with the Erie, the western Iroquois turned their attention to their only remaining Iroquian-speaking enemy. Besides the fact the Susquehannock had aided the NEUTRALS Neutrals, there was continuing aggravation since the Susquehannock had given refuge to small groups of Neutrals and Erie that had eluded them. This simmered and finally erupted into open warfare in 1658. Badly outnumbered, the Susquehannock drew their Shawnee trading partners into the fighting and enlisted the support of their tributary Algonquin and Siouan tribes (Delaware, Nanticoke, Conoy, Saponi, and Tutelo). The Iroquois first attacked the Susquehannock's allies: dispersing the Shawnee and scattering them to Illinois, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Then they struck the LENAPE (Delaware) throughout the Delaware Valley during the 1660s, and effectively took them out of the war.

1658-1675. The Iroquois War Against The Susquehannock. In 1658 the western Iroquois (Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga) attacked the Susquehannock in what would be the final chapter of many years of warfare between them. It took the Iroquois until 1675 to defeat the Susquehannock, but the Shawnee lacked firearms and were forced to move. Rather than retreat enmass to Wisconsin, they dispersed into four groups.

1659AD. The Iroquois-Neutral Tribe War. In 1659, the Neutral tribe was broken when the Iroquois destroyed two large towns north of Lake Erie. Those who escaped abandoned their villages and scattered.

The 1660s (300 years before the Hippies)

1660s. “After the English defeated the Dutch on the Hudson River, near what became Albany, New York. After the English defeated the Dutch and took possession of New York in the 1660s, the Mohawks dealt with the British. Indian hunters killed beaver in unprecedented numbers for European markets that seemed insatiable. Beaver were less plentiful in Iroquois country than in the northern forests of their rivals, and as they depleted their own supplies of beaver, the Iroquois feared they would fall behind in the arms race.” (Calloway, pg. 9-10).

1660 AD. The Iroquois are at the Zenith of their Imperial Power, Wealth, and Might. With the tribes to the north and west destroyed, the Iroquois turned their attention southward to the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock.

1660 AD. Peter Chartier's mother, Sewatha Straight Tail (1660-1759), daughter of Straight Tail Meaurroway Opessa of the Pekowi Shawnee, was born.

1660. Shawnee have always lived in the Ohio Valley, so even if temporarily removed, the Shawnee loved their Dark and Bloody homeland.

1660. May. AD. Dollard des Ormeaux, died in May 1660, while resisting an Iroquois raiding force at the Long Sault, the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa Rivers. According to legend, he succeeded in saving Montreal by his actions.

1660. They began forming identifiable separate mixed communities when the first anti-African laws started restricting some of their freedoms by 1660. Until recently, not much has been known about the Melungeons' African ancestors. New evidence now indicates that the black ancestors of Melungeons were peoples of Kimbundu and Kikongo-speaking Angola and historic Kongo along Africa's lower west coast. The nation of Mbundu in Angola yielded more black ancestors for Melungeons than any other African people. MBUNDU!

By the 1660s, the five Iroquois ceased fighting among themselves. They also easily coordinated military and economic plans among all five nations. In so doing, they increased their power and achieved a level of government more advanced than those of the surrounding tribes' decentralized forms of operating. Although Indian raids were not constant, they terrified the inhabitants of New France. Initially, the colonists felt helpless to prevent them. Some of the heroes of French-Canadian folk memory are of individuals who stood up to such attacks. The Beaver Wars continued as the Iroquois moved farther west and north, pushing into the Ohio Valley in the 1660s. People of the Ottawa, Illinois, Miami, and Potawatomi tribes in the upper Ohio Valley fled north as Iroquois warriors raided their villages. Farther south, Shawnee bands were driven west to the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. The Iroquois now dominated tribes and territory from the Ottawa River in Canada south to the Cumberland River in Kentucky, and from Lake Erie to the east. The Iroquois, however, did not gain a monopoly of the fur trade in the western Great Lakes region, and the region east of the Mississippi River. Tribes in those areas, supported by the French, began fighting back, launching attacks and invading Iroquois lands. In the south the Iroquois lost major battles to the Susquehannock and the Lenni Lenape (Delaware).

1661AD. The Nipissing had also relocated farther west with the Amikwa Ojibwe on the northern shore of Lake Superior. Meanwhile, the Ottawa and Wyandot (Huron) had found their way to Chequamegon Bay on the south shore.

1661. The Susquehannock had become allied with the English in the Maryland colony in 1661. The English had grown fearful of the Iroquois, and hoped an alliance with Susquehannock would help block the northern tribes' advance on the English colonies.

1661. For the Susquehannock, the worst blow was a smallpox epidemic in 1661 that devastated their population to a point from which it never recovered. Still they managed to hold on. A treaty signed with Maryland ended the lingering hostility with the English. The agreement provided firearms and ammunition, since the Maryland colonists were well-aware of the value of the Susquehannock as a buffer against the Dutch-allied Iroquois.

1661-1662AD. The Jesuit Relations of 1661-1662 tell of Shawnee located some 1,000 miles west of the Iroquois along a beautiful river, probably the Ohio. ~Jerry E. Clark.

1662AD. In 1662 the Nipissing got a taste of sweet revenge, when they combined with Ojibwe and Ottawa warriors to annihilate a large Mohawk-Oneida war party just west of Sault Ste. Marie. Despite this setback, the Iroquois still dominated the area to the east, and Nipissing, Ojibwe, and Ottawa fur traders still had to fight their way to Montreal.

1662AD. Jermone JEROME Lalement LALEMENT, a French Jesuit, indicated that the Shawnee were already trading with the Spanish in Florida. SHAWNEE!!!

1662AD. According to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which British-Occupied Virginia incorporated into law in 1662, children were assigned the social status of their mother, regardless of their father's ethnicity or citizenship. This meant that the children of African slave mothers were born into slavery. But it also meant that the children of white women, even if fathered by enslaved African men, were born free. The free descendants of such unions formed many of the oldest free families of color. Estes and her fellow researchers theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, before slavery. They conclude that as laws were put in place to penalize the mixing of races, the various family groups could only intermarry with each other, even migrating together from Virginia through the Carolinas before settling primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee. Claims of Portuguese ancestry likely were a ruse they used in order to remain free and retain other privileges that came with being considered white.

            Here's Daniel Boone pretending he's not a Tory Loyalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eHqAnxyY7Y .

1662-1663AD. Iroquois War Against Ottawa and Abenaki. By 1663, however, the Iroquois had lost their weapons superiority. This and another smallpox epidemic weakened the Iroquois Confederacy as it attempted to expand hegemony over the Ottawa in 1662, and the Abenaki in 1663.

1663AD. The Iroquois launched unsuccessful campaigns against the Susquehannock and Delaware in 1663, but were repulsed by the Suquehannock's European-style fort. 1663AD. With English help, the Susquehannock were able to turn back a major Iroquois invasion in 1663. In 1663, a large Iroquois invasion force was defeated at the Susquehannock main fort. The Iroquois were at war with the SOKOKI Sokoki tribe of the upper Connecticut River. Smallpox struck again; and through the effects of disease, famine and war, the Iroquois were threatened by extermination.

1663-1674AD. The Iroquois-Susquehannock War. In 1663 the Iroquois sent an army of 800 warriors into the Susquehannock territory. They repulsed the army, but the invasion prompted the colony of Maryland to declare war on the Iroquois. By supplying Susquehannock forts with artillery, the English in Maryland changed the balance of power away from the Iroquois. The Susquehannock took the upper hand, and began to invade Iroquois territory, where they caused significant damage. This warfare continued intermittently for 11 years.

1664AD. Nipissing's trade convoy in 1664 was ambushed twice in the Ottawa Valley by Iroquois war parties. 1664. The English took New York from the Dutch, and shortly afterwards formed their own alliance with the Iroquois. Maryland, however, did not feel entirely assured by this, and in 1666 renewed its treaty with the Susquehannock. Coinciding with another outbreak of smallpox in 1667, the Iroquois made peace with the French and their native allies and this allowed them to concentrate on their war with the Susquehannock.

1664AD. About 1664, the Five Nations became trading partners with the British, who conquered the New Netherlands (renamed New York) from the Dutch. The Five Nations enlarged their territory by right of conquest. The number of tribes paying tribute to them realigned the tribal map of eastern North America. Several large confederacies were destroyed or relocated, including the Huron, Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock and Shawnee.

1664AD. A French colony establishes itself in Haiti. A major French settlement lay on the island of Hispaniola, where France established the colony of Saint-Domingue on the western third of the island in 1664. Nicknamed the “Pearl of the Antilles”, Saint-Domingue became the richest colony in the Caribbean before a 1791 slave revolt, which began the Haitian Revolution, led to freedom for the colony's slaves in 1794 and, a decade later, complete independence for the country, which renamed itself Haiti. France briefly also ruled the eastern portion of the island, which is now the Dominican Republic.

1664-1667. In 1664, an Oneida party struck at allies of the Susquehannock on Chesapeake Bay. The French decided they were not getting anywhere appeasing the Iroquois, and brought a regiment of French soldiers to Canada. Their subsequent attacks on the villages in the Iroquois homeland finally brought a lasting peace which was signed in 1667. Having learned from experience, the French also got the Iroquois to extend the peace to include French trading partners and allies. During the next thirteen years, the French resumed travel to the western Great Lakes eventually laying claim to the entire region and the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys to the south. For the Nipissing, this meant they could return (after almost 20 years) with a certain amount of security to their old homes near Lake Nipissing. Strangely enough, while men had been at war, THE BEAVER the beaver had been at peace, and the area had recovered to become once again the best fur-producing area in North America. The Nipissing came home gradually and in small groups, to which the French responded with trading posts and missionaries. This time, however, the priests met with more success and made numerous conversions.

1665AD. Three (3) of the Five (5) Nations of the Imperial Iroquois made peace with the French. 1665AD. Iroquois campaigns against the French in Canada were similarly rebuffed. The arrival of a regiment under the MARQUIS de TRACY Marquis de Tracy prompted the four western tribes to sue for peace in 1665. 1665AD. When the early French traders came into this area in the 1670s, the Shawnee had a principal village on the Cumberland River, near the present site of Nashville, which had been occupied as early as 1665. SHAWNEE!

1665. December 13. AD. Marquis De Tracy made peace with these tribes, but he excluded the Mohawk from the treaty of 13 December 1665, as punishment for their tardy arrival at the conference.

1666. The Canadian Governor sent the Carignan regiment under Marquis de Tracy to confront the Mohawk and the Oneida. The Mohawk avoided battle, but the French burned their villages and crops.

1666. May - 1666. October. The Mohawk sent a peace delegation to Quebec in May 1666, which de Tracy then accepted, although this did not prevent him from marching against the Mohawk in October 1666. Finding the country deserted, he burned a few villages and their crops and returned to Quebec.

1666AD. A group of Seneca captured some Shawnee near the Mississippi River probably south of the Ohio. If the Iroquois extended their hostilities for such great distances it is possible that their encounters with the Shawnee could have been in the Cumberland region or the lower Ohio Valley.

1667. 17 Year Peace. The remaining two Iroquois Nations signed a peace treaty with the French and agreed to allow their missionaries to visit their villages. This treaty lasted for 17 years.

1667AD. MARTIN Martin Chartier CHARTIER arrived in Quebec with father, brother and sister.

1667-1680AD. Martin Chartier, a glovemaker, arrived in Quebec with his brother and sister and his father René in 1667. He accompanied Louis Jolliet on his 1674 journey to the Illinois Territory and La Salle on his 1679-1680 journey to Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. He assisted in the construction of Fort Miami and Fort Crèvecoeur where, on 16 April 1680 he and six other men mutinied, looted and burned the fort, and fled.

1668AD. Martin Chartier meets a Shawnee boy turned over to the priests at Montreal who becomes his constant companion WOLF (Wolf, his future brother-in-law).

1669-1670AD. Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle goes to Detriot and Lake Erie. MARTIN Martin CHARTIER Chartier was with LA SALLE La Salle during his first trip of 1669-1670 to Detroit and Lake Erie. 1669AD. Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle set out to explore the Great Lakes region of North America. 1669AD. The Seneca warned Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle in 1669 of the ferocity of th Shawnee, and Galinee, La Salle's chronicler, said that the Shawnee lived about a month's journey from the source of the Ohio River. ~Clark. 1669AD. MARTIN Martin Chartier CHARTIER rode along with LOUIS Louis JOLIET Joliet's first expedition with his brother Pierre. The French claimed La Salle had reached the Ohio country in 1669.

1669. Fall. AD. With the support of Maryland, the Susquehannock fought on in an increasing bitter struggle, but by the fall of 1669, they were down to only 300 warriors and were forced to ask the Iroquois for peace. The Iroquois response to their offer was to torture and kill the Susquehannock ambassador who brought it.

1669. The account of the first European to visit the area, the French explorer, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in 1669, is disputed and not supported by facts. La Salle travelled along the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario, then to Lake Erie. The two priests travelling with his party departed the group at that point and the written documention of the expedition apparently ceased. Reports of what occurred differ, including abandonment of the journey due to illness, or travelling onward but not to the Ohio River. La Salle did not claim to discover the Ohio River on that voyage nor travel to the falls (of the Ohio). The discovery of the Louisville area in 1669 is perhaps better assigned to myth or legend than an actuality. Subsequently he explored areas of the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys from the Gulf of Mexico up to modern-day Canada, claiming much of this land for France.

The 1670s

1670s AD. Beginning in the 1670s, the French began to explore and settle the Ohio and Illinois Country from the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. There they discovered the Algonquin tribes of that region were locked in warfare with the Iroquois. The French established the post of Tassinong to trade with the western tribes. The Iroquois destroyed Tassinong. 

1670. AD. In 1670, an Englishman, Henry Woodward, journeyed inland from Charlestown, South Carolina to Cofitachequi. He called the chief "the emperor" and said the town counted 1,000 bowmen.
1670-1672. The "emperor" of Cofitachequi visited Charleston in 1670 and 1672. Sometime after that, Cofitachequi was abandoned.

1670. AD. “Up to 1670, the Monacan (Siouan) tribes had been but little disturbed by the whites, although there is evidence that the wars waged against them by the Iroquois were keeping them constantly shifting about. Their country had not been penetrated, except by a few traders who kept no journals, and only the names of the tribes living on the frontiers of Virginia were known to the whites. Chief among these were the Monacan proper having their village a short distance above (the present) Richmond.”

1670 AD. Sometime before 1670, a group of Shawnee migrated to the Savannah River area. The English based in Charles Town, South Carolina were contacted by these Shawnee in 1674. They forged a long-lasting alliance. The Savannah River Shawnee were known to the Carolina English as “Savannah Indians”. Around the same time, other Shawnee groups migrated to Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and other regions south and east of the Ohio country. The historian Alan Gallay speculates that the Shawnee migrations of the middle to late 17th century were probably driven by the Beaver Wars....The Shawnee became known for their widespread settlements from modern Illinois and New York to Georgia. Among their known villages were Eskippakithiki in Kentucky, Sonnionto (also known as Lower Shawneetown, aka Shannoah) in Ohio on the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, Chalakagay near what is now Sylacauga, Alabama, Chalahgawtha at the site of present-day Chillicothe, Ohio, Old Shawneetown, Illinois, and Suwanee, Georgia. Their language became a LINGUA FRANCA for trade among numerous tribes. They became leaders among the tribes, initiating and sustaining pan-Indian resistance to European and Euro-American expansion.

1670 AD. The Shawnee River in Kentucky. When the French began to explore the Ohio Valley in the 1670s, they first met the Shawnee on the Cumberland River, although they were told at the time the Shawnee had lived on the Ohio River. Two of these moved south towards the Cherokee in eastern Tennessee. Although relations between them had not always been friendly, the Cherokee were already beginning to have their own problems with the Iroquois and allowed one group of Shawnee (Chillicothe and Kispoko) to settle in the Cumberland Basin as a buffer against the Chickasaw (traditional Cherokee enemies).

1670. In June 1732, the Shawnee sent a letter to Governor Gordon of Pennsylvania in which they stated that about five years before, the 5 Nations of the Iroquois had ordered the Shawnee to return to Ohio, where they had come from. This can be interpreted to mean that around 1670 the Shawnee had lived on the Cumberland River, and on the Ohio between the mouths of the Muskingum and the Wabash.

1670. Most of the maps dating from 1670 call what is today the Cumberland River the “Riviere des Chaouanons.” In fact it was identified as the Shawnee River until nearly the end of the 1700s.

1670 AD. The Jesuit Relations of 1670 states that some of the French were driven out of Illinois and fled southeast, taking refuge with the Shawnee Indians at Eskippakithiki in George Rogers Clark County in central KENTUCKY (Woodring).

1671AD. The explorers Batts and Fallam in 1671 reported that the Shawnee were contesting control of the Shenandoah Valley with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (“Five Nations”) in that year, and were losing. 1671AD. In 1671, Abraham Wood commissioned Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam, professional explorers, to search the western lands for such a passage. One discovery that they made was the New River which led to their claim to the whole Ohio valley. Batts and Fallam marked four trees as they crossed the mountains to identify their claim. One for the King of England, one for the governor of Virginia, one for Abraham Wood and one for themselves.

1671AD. In addition the “Salt” Indians situated on the Kanawha River a little above present-day Charleston, West Virginia, as described by Fallows in 1671, are believed to have been Shawnee. This band may have been migrating south from the Ohio Valley when they established a temporary village and made a supply of salt.

1671. September 1. AD. The Batts-Fallam expedition reached the New River Valley (formerly known as Woods River, since Abram Wood was credited with its founding in 1654) in 1671.
Redcoat Virginia Major General Abraham Wood sent out Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam in 1671 to discover something of the west for the British King Charles, and for trade... Thomas Batte and Robert Fallom's records are used in negotiations to bolster England's claim to “the Louisiana Purchase” for the end of the 1754-1763 French and Indian War. Major General Abraham Wood, an Englishman interested in developing the western fur trade, had been directed by the British Imperial Governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, to mount the expedition. The leader of the mission, Captain Thomas Batts, was accompanied by an Indian guide, an indentured servant, Thomas Wood, and Robert Fallam, who kept a journal of the trip. The group left Fort Henry along the Appomattox River near present-day Petersburg, Virginia, on September 1. Within two weeks, it had reached Swope's Knob in what is now Monroe County in southeastern West Virginia. Batts and Fallam's discovery of the New River a day later was significant because they were the first Europeans to lay claim to a westward flowing river. The expedition continued along the New River for 3 days until it reached Peters Falls near the Virginia-West Virginia border. The French claimed the famous explorer La Salle had reached the Ohio country in 1669, two years before Batts and Fallam discovered the New River. The dispute brewed for nearly 100 years until the British defeated the French in the French and Indian War and established control over present-day West Virginia.

1672AD. The Iroquoian tribe, the powerful Cherokee nation, succeeded the Siouians in the control of their former territory in Southwest Virginia. The Cherokees, although of Iroquoian stock, were hostile to the northern Iroquois and to the great Southern Iroquois tribe, the Tuskaroras, who lived along the Neuse River in North Carolina. The original territory of the Cherokees included “all of North Carolina and Virginia west of the Blue Ridge, as far north at least, according to their tradition, as the Peaks of Otter near the headwaters of the James River, together with the upper portion of South Carolina and the mountain section of Georgia and Tennessee”. The Cherokee were driven from the greater portion of their holdings, around 1672, by the northern Iroquois, and settled upon the Savannah River and in the territory south of the Tennessee River. The Cherokees apparently permitted the remnants of the Siouians to live undisturbed in Southwest Virginia, but the Siouians constantly attacked by the northern Iroquois, kept on moving their villages.

1672AD. Martin Chartier rode along on Louis Joliet's second expedition with his brother Pierre Chartier.

1673AD. Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet exploring the Mississippi River in 1673.

1673. Abraham “Abram” Wood sent Gabriel Arthur and James Needham to the Overhill Cherokee of modern Tennessee for the imperialist greed of the British Imperial Crown and Redcoats. The purpose was to try to make direct contact with the Cherokee for trade, so as to bypass the OCANEECHEE Ocaneechee “middlemen” traders. The expedition did reach the Overhill Cherokee area, and James Needham was killed on their return trip. Gabriel Arthur was almost killed, but was rescued by being adopted by a Cherokee chief. For his own safety, Arthur was then sent with one of the chief's raiding parties. For about a year, he traveled with the CHEROKEE Cherokee, throughout the Appalachians. He was probably the first European to visit modern West Virginia and cross the Cumberland Gap.

1673. Jesuit Missionary Jacques Marquette mentioned Shawnee-Spanish trade in 1673, and that Spanish trade beads were found among the Shawnee who settled near Fort Saint Louis agreed to abandon the Spanish trade. 1673. “When the French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette traveled down the Mississippi River in 1673, he passed the mouth of the WABASH-OHIO Wabash-Ohio River. His Indian guides told him that its waters flowed from the east, “where dwell the people called Chaouanons [Shawnees] in so great numbers that in one district there are as many as 23 villages, and fifteen in another (38 total Shawnee villages), quite near one another.” French maps in the late seventeenth century located the Chaouanons on the Ohio and Cunberland Rivers, and some label the Cumberland as the “Riviere des Chaouanons.” From their Ohio and Cumberland Valley villages, the Shawnees appear to have traveled widely. They participated in far-reaching exchange networks that funneled European goods through Indian country, and some likely traded directly with the Spaniards in Florida. Illinois Indians told Marquette that Shawnees came to their villages “laden with glass beads.” (Calloway, pg. 7). Trailer for The Black Robe (1991): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVfMsZMiSzY

1673AD. In 1673, Major General Abraham Wood sent two men, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, to the Cherokees' Overhills capital of Chota for the purpose of establishing trade. Needham's letter book gives a description of CHOTA Chota:

“This towne is seated on ye river side having ye clifts [sic] of ye river on ye one side, being very high for its defense, the other three sides trees of two feet in diameter, pitched on end, twelve feet high and on ye tops scarfolds [sic] placed with parrapits [sic] to defend the walls and offend theire [sic] enemies which men stand on to fight. Many nations of Indians inhabitt [sic] downe this river which runs west upon ye salts which they are at war withe [sic] and to that end keepe [sic] one hundred and fifty cannoes under ye command of their forte [sic]. The least of these will carry twenty men, and made Sharpe at both ends like a wherry [sic] for swiftness. This forte is four sqoare [sic] 300 paces over and ye houses setting in streets.”

1673. May. AD. “Father Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, and Joliet had left from French-held Lake Michigan in May 1673, with five men aboard two birch bark canoes. Their task was to explore the Mississippi River.” … “The French explorers discovered the mine after they paddled past the nearby junction of the Mississippi and the “Ouabouskigou,” which Marquette described as the river that flowed “from the lands of the East.” The Ouabouskigou is the Ohio River, Robertson said. “But about fifteen miles upriver at Wickliffe, close to where the Ohio and Mississippi join, another historical marker on US Highway 51 says that the Frenchmen “stopped on this bank in 1673, according to The Jesuit Relations.” Indeed, Jacques Marquette wrote that the explorers encountered Native Americans evidently determined to fight. He admitted he was mistaken. “They were as frightened as we were,” Jacques Marquette explained, “and what we took for a signal for a battle was an invitation that they gave us to draw near, that they might give us food. We therefore landed, and entered their Cabins, where they offered us meat from wild cattle [buffalo] and bear's...” (Berry Craig). http://books.google.com/books?id=XKR9w4I2SOsC&pg=PA106&lpg=PA106&dq=jesuit+relations+kentucky&source=bl&ots=NR-EvTq8Pg&sig=ytFIPS3BC-qvC2Z8NHtpzRbAnZQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WnP1U9WiBIGVyATTl4DADQ&ved=0CEcQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=jesuit%20relations%20kentucky&f=false Somewhat wary because of Hernando De Soto's encounter with the Chickasaw was well-known in Europe, Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet merely noted their location at the bluffs near Memphis, Tennessee. Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette and French fur trader Louis Joliet paddled the Mississippi down to the mouth of the Arkansas River. There they turned back, fearful of the Spanish in the region, unaware that they were only ten days away from the Gulf of Mexico. They also lost most of their notes.

1673. May 17. AD. Arthur ARTHUR Gabriel GABRIEL was a young Englishman, just nineteen year of age, when he was brought to America by Abraham Wood to Fort Henry as an indentured servant. Arthur Gabriel was described as uneducated but highly intelligent. Major General Abraham Wood promoted an expedition by James Needham and Gabriel Arthur to establish direct trade relations between the Colony of Virginia and the Cherokees. This meant breaking the control of the Occaneechi Indians who had been serving as middlemen between the English colony and the Cherokees. Its second purpose was to discover a possible passageway by water to the southwest. The plan sounded good to Abraham Wood who soon started them on a trip to the west; the group consisted of James Needham, Gabriel Arthur, and a few Indians as porters and guides. They were soon stopped; however, by the Occaneechi Indians who had their Fort on an island in the Roanoke River and controlled the trade through their territory. On May 17, 1673, James Needham and Arthur Gabriel, along with eight (8) Indians and four (4) horses, were sent out again. Somewhere along their trail to the west they met a party of TOMAHITAN Tomahitan Indians, (Cherokee) who helped them secure passage through the Occaneechi territory. An agreement was made in which James Needham and a group of hired Occaneechi Indians were to return to the east, and secure a load of goods which would be traded to Cherokee trappers for their beaver furs, then to carry the furs back to Fort Henry. 1673. James Needham went back to Virginia to procure trade goods, leaving Gabriel Arthur behind to learn the Cherokee language. Leaving Arthur to learn the language, Needham returned to General Wood's and on his way out again was killed by an Occoneechee, Indian John, whom he had hired as a porter, a little beyond the Yadkin River in North Carolina. “So died,” wrote General Wood, "this heroick Englishman, whose fame shall never die if my pen were able to eternize it, which had adventured where never any Englishman had dared to atempt before him, and with him died one hundred forty four pounds starling of my adventure. I wish I could have saved his life with ten times the value." On the return trip, Needham NEEDHAM was killed after an argument with his Occaneechi guide, “Indian John.” Indian John then encouraged the Cherokees at Chota to kill Arthur Gabriel but the Cherokee Chief prevented it. In their second attempt, they made it across the Blue Ridge Mountains and the headwaters of the New River. They then entered the valley of the Tennessee River. After securing a treaty with the Cherokee, James Needham returned to Fort Henry to report and prepare for the 3rd Expedition. Arthur was left with the Cherokee to learn their language and customs. Upon Needham's return to the village he was murdered by his guide, an Occaneechi Indian. Ponka Tribe. Arthur Gabriel was to stay at the fort and learn the customs and language of the Indians. The Cherokee king, AMATOYA Amatoya Moytoy MOYTOY, liked Arthur Gabriel and gave him the freedom to both teach the Indians many things as well as to learn the ways of' the Indians. He soon found a pretty young Indian maiden named NIKITI Nikiti and was allowed to marry her, as well as to become a member of the Cherokee tribe. Some of the Indians disliked Gabriel and one day when the King was away from the fort some of the braves tied Arthur Gabriel to a stake and was about to set fire to the wood piled around him. It appeared that they would succeed when King AMATOYA MOYTOY returned just as the Indian was applying the flame to the wood so he raised his gun and shot the Indian, killing him instantly. Before long Arthur Was dressing like the Indians and even painted himself and joined a war party to the north, not far from the Ohio River where they met a group of Shawnee warriors. Arthur Gabriel was wounded and taken prisoner and led to the Shawnee Camp in Ohio. When they scraped the paint and ashes from him, they discovered that he was a white man. The chief soon became a friend to Arthur Gabriel and invited him to become a member of their tribe. When they learned that Arthur Gabriel had married one of the Cherokee in Tennessee, he released him to return to his family. Arthur Gabriel, disguised as a Cherokee, accompanied the chief of Chota on raids of Spanish settlements in Florida, Indian communities on the east coast, and Shawnee towns on the Ohio River.

1673AD. The fort where Arthur Gabriel lived was called CHOTA Chota by the Indians. Soon after Arthur Gabriel was left with the Cherokee in Tennessee, King AMATOYA MOYTOY planned a long trip which was to punish the Spaniards who lived in north-west Florida. Some time previously a party of 20 Cherokee visited the Spanish fort with a view of establishing a trade with them. They were taken prisoner and 10 of them were killed. Two of them escaped later and brought news of the treachery of the Spanish. It is said the a number of Shawnee Indians accompanied them on this trip. They started South and skirted the western ends of the Appalachian Mountains and the Blue Ridge. Before long they came upon a settlement of white people who had long white beards and whiskers and who wore clothing and all lived in wooden houses. Eight days into this trip they came upon a settlement of Negroes also living in wooden houses. “Here they hastened to the Negro town where they had the advantage to meet with a lone Negro. After him ran one of the Tomahittans with a dart in his hand, made with a piece of the blade of James Needham's sword, and threw it after the Negro, struck him through between his shoulders so he fell down dead. They took from him some toys, which hung in his ears, and bracelets about his neck, and so returned as expeditiously as they could to their own homes.” A day or two later they came to a road which they called a vehicle road. They soon came to the Spanish fort which was made of brick and all buildings within high brick walls... Here they lay hidden in ambush for eight days. Finally a lone Spaniard came along the road and was shot dead. In his pockets they found two small gold coins and a short length of gold chain all of which they gave to Arthur Gabriel. Each day they heard the huge bell that the dwellers rang. “...stay but drew off and the next morning layed an ambush in a convenient place near the cart path before mentioned and there lay almost seven days to steal for their sustenance. The 7th day a Spaniard in a genteel habit, accoutered with gun, sword, and pistol. One of the Tomahittans, spying him at a distance, crept up to the path side and shot him to death. In his pocket were two pieces of gold and a small gold chain, which the Tomahittans gave to Gabriel, but he unfortunately lost it in his venturing as you shall hear by the sequel.” They soon gave up their siege of the Spanish town and started back home, going west to the Mississippi River and following it north to their homes on the Tennessee River and the Scioto in Ohio. They rested but a short time before another party was commanded out again and Gabriel Arthur was commanded out again, and this was to Port Royal. Here he refused to go, saying those were Englishmen and he would not fight against his own nation. He had rather be killed. King AMATOYA MOYTOY told him they intended no harm to the Englishmen, for he had promised Needham at his first coming to him that he would never do violence against any English more but their business was to cut off a town of Indians which lived near the English. I but said Gabriel, what if any English be at that town, a trading? King AMATOYA MOYTOY swore by THE FIRE which they adore as their god they would not hurt them. So they marched away over the mountains and came upon the head of Port Royal river in six days. Sometime later Gabriel was asked to accompany a group of warriors who were planning an attack on an Indian settlement at Fort Royal. He refused to go with them, because,he said that there would be Englishmen there and that he would rather die himself than to kill another Englishman. Finally they agreed to spare any Englishmen that they might find there, so Arthur Gabriel agreed to go with them.Sure enough, the first house that they came to was that of a single Englishmen who feared for his life. Arthur Gabriel told him to run for his life. The man then asked Arthur Gabriel which direction be should run, as they were surrounded by fierce looking Indians. Arthur Gabriel told him to run in any direction that he wished and that the Indians would not harm him. The Indians then opened a gap in their ranks and allowed him to escape. They later found the enemy and killed a great number of them. In fourteen (14) days they were back to their fort on the Tennessee River. When summer came, King AMATOYA MOYTOY decided to take a trip to visit his old friends, the MONETON Moneton Indians in western Virginia. The Indian name was said to mean "Mon" for water and "ton" for "great". A party of some sixty (60) braves with King AMATOYA and Arthur Gabriel started by going north to the Ohio River, then up the Ohio to the mouth of Big Sandy River. Here they left the river and traveled into what is now West Virginia. They came to a river which flowed to the east which they followed to the Great Kanawha near present St. Albans. It was what we now call Coal River.

1674AD. Martin Chartier lived with the Shawnee in Illinois on the Wabash River. 1674AD. Three maps were published in 1674, all of which place the “Chaouanons” near the mouth of the Ohio River. Jacques Marquette locates several Shawnee villages east of the mouth of the Ohio, but does not extend the Ohio far enough east so that the relationship of these villages to the river can be determined. Both Randin and Joliet place the Shawnee south of the Ohio River, the former on the Mississippi and the latter in the vicinity of a tributary, probably the Cumberland, which flows north to the Ohio near its mouth. Based on the accounts of La Salle, the maps of Franquelin in 1684 and 1688 contain much more detail. The information on the Kentucky-Tennessee area undoubtedly came from the Shawnee who had settled at Starved Rock by 1683. 1674. In 1674, the English in Maryland changed their Indian Policy, and negotiated peace with the Iroquois. They terminated their alliance with the Susquehannock. 1674AD. “One of the latest accounts that may refer to the Shawnee on the Ohio River in the seventeenth century comes from Gabriel Arthur, who as a captive of the Cherokee in 1674 traveled some three days from the Great Kanawha River to strike a blow against a powerful nation to the west, believed to have been the Shawnee. This may have been a group pushing north and east from the Cumberland land region.” (Clark, pg. 11). In 1674, Arthur Grabriel was captured by the Shawnee who discovered that under his coating of clay and ashes he was a white man. Surprisingly, the Shawnee did not kill Arthur but allowed him to return to Chota.

1674. June. AD. In June of 1674, Chief King Amatoya Moytoy escorted Gabriel Arthur back to Virginia. Gabriel Arthur's name when first found described him as a young Englishman, 19 years of age, with little or no education, however highly intelligent. In Virginia, he met and became the partner of James Needham and both were intent on entering the fur trade business. They soon met with Major General Abraham Wood and became involved in his plans for opening up the west to exploration and settlement and to cash in on the trade for beaver furs from the Cherokee Indians in the Tennessee area. British Redcoat General Abraham Wood was also interested in finding a water route across the continent.

1675AD. Martin Chartier marries SEWATHA Sewatha, a Shawnee Princess.

1675AD. The Iroquois Confederacy defeat the Susquehannock, ending the 17 Year Iroquois and Susquehannock War, and expanding the Iroquois Confederacy in population, culture, land, resources, and power. 1675. It took the Iroquois until 1675 to defeat the Susquehannock. Driven from Pennsylvania, the survivors settled on the upper Potomac River at the invitation of the Maryland's governor. There was no refuge for the Susquehannock. The location may have been acceptable to a royal governor, but it was deeply resented by the local colonists. After several depredations (probably Iroquois), a 1,000 man army (actually an armed mob) assembled under Colonel John Washington (great-grandfather of George). In direct defiance of the orders of British Redcoat Virginia's governor, Colonel John Washington's militia besieged the Susquehannock in an old fort on the Potomac which they had occupied to defend themselves against the Iroquois. Eventually the Susquehannock were able to assure the colonists they were peaceful, and even offered six of their sachems as hostages as proof. Satisfied, the English took the hostages and left, but on the way home, they learned of other attacks in the area and Colonel John Washington killed the hostages. The Susquehannock abandoned the fort, but launched a series of retaliatory raids on the Virginia and Maryland frontier. Most of the blame for these raids fell on the Virginians' Pamunkey and Occaneechee allies and led to their near annihilation by the colonists during Bacon's Rebellion the following year. Afterwards, the Susquehannock moved north but were attacked by Maryland militia near Columbia, Maryland where many were killed. Some managed to reach safety with the Meherrin in North Carolina, but the remaining Susquehannock had little choice but to surrender to the Iroquois in 1676. Under the circumstances, they were treated well. Under the terms of the peace agreed to, the Susquehannock were settled among the MOHAWK Mohawk and Oneida ONEIDA, became members of the Iroquois “Covenant Chain,” and their dominion over the Delaware and other former allies was also surrendered to the Democratic Imperial Iroquois League. During the years following, several Susquehannock rose to leadership as Iroquois war chiefs.

1675-1677 AD. In 1675, the militias of British Redcoat Virginia and Maryland captured and executed the chiefs of the Susquehannock, whose growing power they feared. The Iroquois made quick work of the rest of the nation. They drove the warriors from traditional territory, and absorbed the survivors in 1677. During the course of this conflict, in 1670 the Iroquois also drove the Siouan-speaking Mannahoac MANNAHOAC! tribe out of the northern Virginia Piedmont region. The Iroquois claimed the land by right of conquest as a hunting ground. The English Redcoats acknowledged this claim in 1674 and again in 1684. They acquired the land from the Iroquois by a 1722 treaty.

1675-1678AD. Metacomet's War. Aka King Philip's War, sometimes called the First Indian War, Metacom's War, Metacomet's War, or Metacom's Rebellion, was an armed conflict between Native American inhabitants of present-day British New England and English-speaking colonists and their Native American allies in 1675–78. The war is named after the main leader of the Native American side, Metacomet, known to the English as “King Philip”. The British Redcoats put the Wampanoag leader's head on a pike in the middle of town, for 24 years, so that all who entered their town would see the skull of King Metacomet, on a pike, in the middle of town. The Wampanoags were the natives who helped the Puritans raise crops, and survive that first harsh Winter, and Metacomet's War is how the British corporations paid the Wampanoags back. 

1676AD. On a 1676 map of New Netherlands by Roggeveen the “Sauno” had a village near the mouth of the Schuylkill.

1676. Bacon's Rebellion. However, at times Blacks joined whites in exploiting the indigenous peoples. For example, Bacon’s Rebellion, the uprising of Black and white poor in 1676 in Virginia and Maryland, was actually sparked by the planters refusal to allow them to expand into Native American lands. And the Buffalo Soldiers, Black US cavalrymen who patrolled the far West after the Civil War, many of partial Native American ancestry, at various times protected or fought against the indigenous peoples as their white commanders directed.

1676. August 12. AD. British Redcoat Major Benjamin Church emerged as the Puritan hero of the war; it was his company of Puritan rangers and Native American allies that finally hunted down and killed King Chief Metacomet (“Philip”) on August 12, 1676.

1676-1776. Most black slaves were imported into Virginia in the 100 year period between 1676 and 1776, though they were present as early as 1619. Slaves began to outnumber the white indentured servant workforce in the late 1600s. The majority were brought into the colony from Africa and the Caribbean. In particular, the African regions of the Bight of Biafra (modern Nigeria), Senegambia (modern Senegal and Gambia), West Central Africa (modern Angola and Congo), and the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) were hotspots for Virginia slave traders. Smaller numbers came from the Windward Coast (modern Ivory Coast), Sierra Leone, Bight of Benin (modern Togo and Benin), and Southeast Africa (modern Madagascar and Mozambique) according to surviving shipping registers. There was a strong Muslim presence in Senegambia during the period of the slave trade. Many Tidewater Virginia slaves must have been influenced by Islam before their arrival in America. Slaves were usually renamed once they arrived in English-speaking colonies. They were given English Christian names to replace names from their native languages (some of which were Muslim names like Mohammad).
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Internet site contains references to 35,000 slave voyages, including over 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships, using first name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation. The database documents the slave trade between Africa, Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and what is now the United States. They settled in Virginia one year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They sparked a major conflict between the Engllish Crown and American colonies one hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. They lived free in the South nearly two hundred and forty years before the American Civil War.. Yet the African ancestors of the American Melungeons have remained elusive ghosts for the past four centuries; the missing characters in the developing saga of America's largest mixed community. Now finally, though stridently denied by some descendants and misunderstood by others, the African fathers and mothers of Melungia are beginning to emerge from the dim pages of the past to take their rightful places of honor in American history.
One misconception over Melungeon origins comes from confusion over the status of these African-Americans who, along with whites and Indians, gave birth to this mixed community. Modern scholars mistakenly assume that the African heritage of Melungeons derives from the offspring of white plantation owners and black female chattel slaves in the years 1780 to 1820. Wrong on two counts. In fact: 1. The very first black ancestors of Melungeons appeared in tidewater Virginia, not in the 18th century, but in 1619. 2. Not one single Melungeon family can be traced to a white plantation owner and his black female slave. The vast majority of the African ancestors of Melungia were freeborn for more than three hundred years.

1677AD. Covenant Chain is formed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_Chain . 1677. By 1677, the Iroquois formed an alliance with the Royal British Redcoats through an agreement known as the Covenant Chain. Together, they battled the French, who were allied with the Huron, another Iroquoian people but a historic foe of the Confederacy.

1677AD. The Shawnee began to move from this region, in 1677, owing to dissatisfaction over their treatment by the whites, and continued their migration for more than 20 years, the main body first settling on the Delaware River at the mouth of the Lehigh River, Pennsylvania, then, after allying themselves with the French, passing to the north bank of the Ohio River, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, extending from the Alleghany River down to the Scioto River.

1677-1701AD. However, there had been a steady outmigration from South Carolina long before the trouble with the Catawba began. In 1677 or 1678, a group approximately seventy families left Carolina and made their way north, settling near the Conestoga Indians on the Susquehanna River by 1701. It is perhaps this group which settled for some time in the vicinity of Winchester, Virginia; Shenandoah County, Virginia; and Oldtown, Maryland, all of which date from this period.

1678. April. The war continued in northern New England (primarily in Maine at the New England and Acadia border) until a treaty was signed at Casco Bay in April 1678. The war was the single greatest calamity to occur in seventeenth-century Puritan New England and is considered by many to be the deadliest war in American history. In the space of little more than a year, twelve of the region's towns were destroyed and many more damaged, the colony's economy was all but ruined, and its population was decimated, losing one-tenth of all men available for military service. More than half of New England's towns were attacked by Native American warriors...

1679AD. Martin Chartier goes with Rene-Robert-La-Salle to build Fort Crevecoeur on the Illinois River (with Wolf).

1679-1680. Winter. AD. In the winter of 1679-80, according to Margry's, Rene's son, Martin MARTIN Chartier CHARTIER was among La Salle's companions when they built Fort Crevecoeur somewhere along the Illinois River (2000 miles from Montreal).

1680s

1680s. 1680-1685. Basing his estimate on the time required to deaden and completely remove by burning the great oaks, hickories, sycamores, gums, and maples from such an area, Willard Jillson, noted Kentucky historian and naturalist, set the founding of the village at 1680 to 1685. Such an early date is possible in that Shawnee groups escaping the Iroquois down the Great Warriors Path would have passed through this area. (Clark, 1993).

1680 AD. Then, in 1680, the Iroquois retaliated with an all-out war against French-allied bands along the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. However, after some initial victories, the Iroquois were driven back. In the north, the Chippewa took Iroquois lands north of Lake Ontario, and the Miami moved back towards their lands in Indiana. 1680. Susquehannock defeated.

1680. The Pueblo Rebellion. In 1680, a native leader named Popé organized a massive rebellion that included more than 17,000 Indians from many villages across hundreds of miles. The Indians drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, killing missionaries, burning churches, and destroying relics of Christianity. It took the Spanish military fourteen years to reestablish control over the region. Except for a few sporadic Indian raids, the mission system continued to grow and prosper throughout Florida, Texas and California. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop%C3%A9 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/470012/Pope

1680AD. By 1680, the principal locations of the Shawnee were in the Cumberland Valley and along the Savannah River in South Carolina. They had migrated either to the mouth of the Ohio and up the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers or over the Great Warriors Path southward across Kentucky. Some had gone north into the territories of the Miami and Illinois Indians in the vicinity of Lake Michigan. 1680. “The Shawnee appearance in South Carolina was fortunate for the new colony. The Westo Indians were raiding colonists in the more remote areas. WESTO! Unable to handle the Westos by themselves, the struggling colonists engaged the Shawnee, who by 1680 had a considerable group in the area, to attack the Westos and bring them to Charles Town for the slave trade. By fighting the Westos the Shawnee acted as a buffer for the colonists and gained an important trade outlet for themselves, which included among other things, among other things, the sale of slaves. (Clark, 1993). 1680. Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle conquers the Mississippi River, and declares all land adjacent to the Mississippi River as land for the French Imperial crown. Napoleon will sell this “Louisiana Purchase” to Thomas Jefferson in 1803. 1680. “Shawnees had built homes along the Savannah (some speculate it was from the Savannah basin that the earliest Shawnees came), where they resided until 1715; the Yamasee Wars drove them to the river's end, where they pushed out the Westos and served as slave catchers for Englishmen who swapped guns for humans. Shawnees traded at St. Augustine, bartering deerskins for cloth, yaupon leaves, egret and crane feathers, BLUE and WHITE duffels, for miquelet muskets and powder and lead to war against Catawbas.” (Belue, pg. 11).

1680AD. At its maximum in 1680, the Imperial Iroquois Empire extended west from the north shore of Chesapeake Bay through Kentucky to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; then north following the Illinois River to the south end of Lake Michigan; east across all of lower Michigan, southern Ontario and adjacent parts of southwestern Quebec; and finally south through northern New England west of the Connecticut River through the Hudson and upper Delaware Valleys across Pennsylvania back to the Chesapeake. With two exceptions—the Mingo occupation of the upper Ohio Valley and the Caughnawaga migration to the upper St. Lawrence—the Iroquois did not, for the most part, physically occupy this vast area but remained in their upstate New York villages.

1680-1685. Eskippakithiki is Established. Willard Jillson, noted Kentucky historian and naturalist, set the founding of the village at 1680 to 1685. (Clark, Jerry). One report said it was an Irishman that set up a trading post there, though, he may have just partaken in the civilization that had already existed before he got there.

1681 AD. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle negotiated a treaty with the Miami and Illinois tribes. The same year France lifted the ban on the sale of firearms to the native tribes. Colonists quickly armed the Algonquin tribes, evening the odds between the Iroquois and their enemies.

1682. AD. La Salle's The Belle. Frenchman Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, set up trading posts down the Mississippi River. Reaching the mouth of the river, he claimed the entire river basin for King Louis XIV (the 14th aka “the King Louis who got to keep his head”). La Salle had reached the Illinois country, establishing trading posts along the way. From the mouth of the Illinois River, he began a journey of more than a thousand miles, following the Mississippi River to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. There he laid claim, in the name of Louis XIV, king of France, to roughly one-third of the territory of today’s continental United States. In light of such monumental successes and the hope of conquering more territory—including the Spanish silver mines in northern Mexico—the king was persuaded to back La Salle’s grandiose plan, providing ships, supplies, and personnel to carry out his vision. The king’s largesse, however, had limits. Whereas La Salle saw a need for four ships, the monarch agreed to provide only two: the small frigate Belle and the escorting warship Joly. With the settlement complete, La Salle loaded THE BELLE the Belle in readiness for making a sea search for the Mississippi. He placed on board items that would be needed if he should find his river and fulfill his plan to move the settlement there. He then embarked on a mysterious journey westward, leaving the Belle in an insecure anchorage in the charge of the ship's mate, Tessier, who was often in a drunken state. In La Salle’s absence, misfortune plagued The Belle. Already the ship’s complement of 27 men had been reduced by the death of the Captain and five (5) members of his crew who were caught away from the ship and murdered by the vengeful Karankawa KARANKAWA! Six (6) others, including the most experienced sailors who gone ashore in the ship’s lifeboat for water, either drowned in the bay while returning to the ship at night or were slain by Indians. Loss of the lifeboat proved crucial. Without water, the remaining crew suffered severe hydration—all except Tessier, who took charge of the store of sacramental wine. At last anchor was weighed to seek a more favorable location, but too late. A fierce northernly wind arose, and the unskilled and enfeebled crew was unable to work the rigging. In desperation, they dropped the bow anchor, but it failed to hold. As the ship was driven southward across the bay, the anchor dragged until the ship plunged stern first into the reef of barrier sand known today as Matagorda Peninsula. Still some distance from shore, the crew was unable to free the ship. Lacking the lifeboat, two men attempted to reach the shore with a poorly constructed raft. The raft came apart; one man swam ashore, but the other drowned. At last a more solid raft was built, and the crew was able to set up camp on the beach and ferry supplies from the wreck until the ship began to settle into the bottom and the cargo became submerged. For three months The Belle’s castaways remained isolated on the peninsular strip of sand, lacking the leadership of a resolute captain and a boat for crossing the bay. For sustenance, they supplemented provisions saved from the ship by fishing, gathering oysters, and shooting ducks. At last, however, they began to feel the pinch of hunger and set out to look for the means of escape. By good fortune, a canoe that had escaped the French on the far side of Pass Cavallo turned up at the water’s edge. Thus, the castaways were finally able to cross the bay to reach the settlement. Of all those whom La Salle had left on board the Belle—including the original crew of 27 and several men he had placed there in irons—only half a dozen (6) survived: the mate Tessier, the Abbé Chefdeville, the useless Marquis de Sablonnière, a soldier, a young lad, and a servant girl from Saint-Jean-d’-Angély. Meanwhile, La Salle himself, with a few followers, had marched eastward, hoping to reach the post on the Illinois River. When nearing the country of the “Cenis,” or Hasinai, in eastern Texas, La Salle was brutally murdered by his own men.

1682 AD. Martin Chartier's Mutiny. In a letter of 1682, La Salle stated that Martin Chartier “was one of these who incited the others to do as they did.” MUTINY!!! In 1682, La Salle completed Fort Saint Louis on the Illinois River at Starved Rock; and the Illiniwek, who had earlier abandoned this location because of Iroquois raids, returned. The Shawnee, including one group called by that name and others called by La Salle the Chaskepe, Ouabano, and Cisca (names of the various Shawnee villages or bands), also settled the area near the fort. This involved a considerable movement to the Illinois River from the lower Cumberland region in Tennessee and Kentucky. But less than ten years (b4 1692) later this large group had moved eastward to Maryland and Pennsylvania.

1682. “An archaeological site near Starved Rock on the Illinois River was occupied in historical times by a group of Shawnee, who with other Indians, joined La Salle after he constructed Fort Saint Louis at this location in 1682. This site contained material very similar to Fort Ancient material, and may be attributable to the Shawnee, though some anthropologists have identified the Fort Ancient-like material as Miami or Illinois.” (Jerry E. Clark, 1993: pg. 8).

1682. La Salle reassembled a party for another major expedition. In 1682 he departed Fort Crevecoeur with a group of Frenchmen and Indians and canoed down the Mississippi River. He named the Mississippi basin La Louisiane in honor of Louis XIV (14th) and claimed it for France. At what later became the site of Memphis, Tennessee, La Salle built the small Fort Prudhomme.

1682. February and April. AD. Actual contact came in February, 1682 during the expedition of Robert La Salle and Henri Tonti. Stopping at the Chickasaw Bluffs because Rene-Robert De La Salle was ill, and the expedition armorer, Pierre Prudehomme, wandered off into the woods and became lost. While searching for him, the French built a small fort (Fort Prudehomme) as a supply base for their push south. They also encountered two Chickasaw, who were given presents and asked to help. Prudehomme was finally found almost starved 9-10 days later, and after recovering his strength, La Salle left for the Gulf in March. On his return that April, La Salle chose to stop at the Quapaw villages (Chickasaw enemies) on the opposite side of the river.

1682. April 9. AD. At the mouth of the Mississippi River near modern Venice, Louisiana, Rene-Robert De La Salle buried an engraved plate and a cross, claiming the territory for France.

1683AD. In 1683, on his return voyage, La Salle established Fort Saint Louis of Illinois, at Starved Rock on the Illinois River, to replace Fort Crevecoeur. He appointed Tonti to command the fort while La Salle traveled to France for supplies.

1683AD. There were almost 3,000 of this western group of Shawnee living in the vicinity of the French trading post at Fort St. Louis on the upper Illinois River. Allied with the Miami and Illinois, the Shawnee Imperial Confederacy continued their war against/with the Iroquois Imperial Confederacy.

1683AD. “In 1683, several hundred Shawnees arrived at Fort St. Louis, a post Robert Cavelier de La Salle had built at Starved Rock on the Illinois River. Others migrated to the Southeast and took up residence on the Savannah River in Georgia.” Calloway, pg. 10.

1683AD. “In 1683, the inhabitants of Cisca and other Shawnee joined the French at Fort Saint Louis on the Illinois River. On this same map, the village of “Meguatchaiki” is situated on the north bank of the Skipakicipi River, probably a village of the Mequachake division. The Skipakicipi River is undoubtedly the Green River, named, perhaps, after the Kispogogi division, but the identity of the Misseoucipi is not clear. It is probably the Red or the Licking River.” “Historian John R. Swanton suggests that the Shawnee may have been attracted to the Cumberland region partly by the Spanish post in Saint Augustine, Florida, which they visited in order to trade. This explanation would certainly account for the settlement in the Savannah River valley of South Carolina. Shawnee knowledge of and expeditions to the Spanish trading posts may have come quite early.” ~Jerry E. Clark.

1683AD. With the renewal of hostilities, the local militia of New France was stiffened after 1683 by a small force of regular French navy troops, the Compagnies Franches de la Marine. The latter were to constitute the longest-serving unit of French regular troops in New France. Over the years, the men identified with the colony. The officer corps became completely Canadian. Essentially, these forces can be considered as Canada's first standing professional armed force. Officers' commissions, both in the militia and in the Compagnie Franches, became coveted amongst the upper class of the colony. The militia together with members of the Compagnie Franches, dressed for woodland travel similarly to their Algonquin Indian allies, and grew to specialize in the swift and mobile brand of warfare termed la petite guerre. It was characterized by long expeditions through the forests and quick raids on enemy encampments —the same kind of warfare practiced by the Iroquois and other Natives.

1683. Although treated with respect, the Susquehannock were not free. In 1683 William Penn attempted to sign a treaty with them only to learn that the Susquehannock (like the Delaware) first needed Iroquois approval to sign. Subsequent dealings by the Pennsylvania government concentrated on the Iroquois and ignored the subservient tribes.

1683-1684. From 1683-84, Martin and his brother Pierre Chartier were fur trading associates, and they had a settlement in Fort St Louis, although they had no trading permit. 1683 - Martin Chartier found trading with the Shawnee at Fort St Louis with his brother P ierre.

1684 AD. The Seneca attacked the Miami, because they had allowed some of these hostile Shawnee to settle near their villages in northwest Indiana.

1684AD. On the map of 1684, the main river emptying into the Mississippi from the east is the Casquinampogama (Tennessee), and it has several tributaries including the Wabash and Ohio rivers. The westernmost river to flow into the Tennesse is the Misseoucipi (not to be confused with the Mississippi) and the next is labeled “Skipaki-cipi, ou la Riviere Bleue.” Between these rivers is the Shawnee village of Cisca, with a path leading to Saint Petro on the coast of Florida and a legend that translates: “Path by which the Shawnee trade with the Spanish.”

1684AD. Algonquian tribes beat Iroquois.

1684. However, the Mosopelea identification is based on a 1684 map by Franquelin, who at La Salle's request showed 8 Mosopelean villages located in this region, while Marquette and Joliet had found the Mosopelea well below the Ohio River on the Mississippi. Archaeologist James B. Griffin believes that the Madisonville site is probably Shawnee. Erminie Voegelin disagrees and places the center of the Shawnee well to the east, in New York and eastern Pennsylvania, but most other anthropologists feel that the weight of linguistic, ethnohistorical, archaeologicals feel that physical evidence indicates that the Shawnee were indeed the descendents of the Fort Ancient populations.” (Clark, pg. 7).

1684AD. In 1684, the Iroquois justified an attack on the Miami on the grounds that the latter had invited the Shawnee into the country for the purpose of making war on the Iroquois.

1684 AD. In 1684, the Iroquois attempted and failed to take the Illinois Indians' town of Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River. This defeat marked the end of the Beaver Wars and the Iroquois' military operations to gain a monopoly of the fur trade. The powerful Iroquois Confederacy remained intact, but the devastation of the wars weakened most of the tribes to the west, making them vulnerable to later white expansion westward. The wars also forged the Indian-European alliances that would continue through the French and Indian War (1754–63), and the American Revolution (1775–83). The area of Kentucky was inhabited by Native Americans in prehistoric times, and French explorers in the Modern Era. 1684, the Iroquois invaded Virginia and Illinois territory again and unsuccessfully attacked French outposts in the latter. Trying to reduce warfare in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, later that year the Virginia Colony agreed in a conference at Albany to recognize the Iroquois' right to use the North-South path, known as the Great Warpath, running east of the Blue Ridge, provided they did not intrude on the English settlements east of the fall line.

1684AD. Martin Chartier was living in Lachine, Quebec in 1684.

1684. July 24. Rene-Robert-La-Salle departed France and returned to America with a large expedition designed to establish a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River. They had four (4) ships and 300 colonists. The expedition was plagued by pirates, hostile Indians, and poor navigation. One ship was lost to pirates in the West Indies, a second sank in the inlets of Matagorda Bay, and a third ran aground there. They founded Fort Saint Louis, on Garcitas Creek in Victoria County, Texas. La Salle led a group eastward on foot on three occasions to try to locate the mouth of the Mississippi.

1685-1692. From 1685 to 1692, Martin Chartier made the incredible trip from Montreal to Lake Michigan, then from there to the Cumberland River in Kentucky, then to the site of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then across the Alleghenies and along the Susquehanna River to Maryland where for a time he ran his own trading post.

1685AD. Martin Chartier was living with Shawnee in Illinois territory in 1685.

1685AD. Fort Saint Louis was established in Texas in 1685, but was gone by 1688. France lost New France to the British through six colonial wars (see the four French and Indian Wars as well as Father Rale's War and Father Le Loutre's War).

1685. There are also indications that the Shawnee had a village near the Creek Indians in Alabama before 1685.



1686 AD. When one of La Salle's ships—La Belle—had sunk during a storm in 1686 off the coast of what is now Texas in 1686, she took a would-be colony's worth of goods to the seafloor. On a cold winter day in 1687?, the small French ship Belle ran aground on the Texas coast, the victim of a run of bad luck and a howling north wind. The Belle was the last of four ships of the expedition led by Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle. Sieur De La Salle had come to establish a colony near the mouth of the Mississippi River with multiple aims that included providing a warm-water port to serve the fur trade and a base for invading Mexico. France and Spain were then at war, and La Salle, with the backing of his King, intended to challenge Spain's domination of the Gulf of Mexico.

1687. Rene-Robert-Cavelier-De-La-Salle returned to America with four ships and 300 colonists. He missed the mouth of the Mississippi by over 400 miles, and landed near present-day Corpus Christi, Texas. Shipwrecks, smallpox and hostile natives nearly destroyed the colony. As 36 survivors struggled north to reach established French trading posts, La Salle was murdered by his own men.

1687AD. In 1687, Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, Marquis de Denonville, Governor of New France from 1685 to 1689, set out for Fort Frontenac with a well-organized force. They met with 50 hereditary sachems from the Onondaga council fire, who came under a flag of truce. Denonville recaptured the fort for New France and seized, chained, and shipped the 50 Iroquois chiefs to Marseilles, France, to be used as galley slaves. 1687AD. Frenchman Martin Chartier gets arrested in Montreal. http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/relations_71.html 1687AD. January. Rene-Robert-Cavelier-De-La-Salle, with 17 men, left the fort for the last time in an attempt to reach Canada.

1687. March 19. Rene-Robert-Cavelier-Sieur-De-La-Salle was ambushed, and assassinated by Pierre Duhaut, one of four attacking him, "six leagues" from the westernmost village of the Hasinai Tejas Indians, probably in the vicinity of present day Navasota in Grimes County.1687. March 19. La Salle Killed By His Own Men. During a final search for the Mississippi River, some of La Salle's remaining 36 men mutinied, near the site of present Navasota, Texas. On March 19, 1687, La Salle was slain by Pierre Duhaut during an ambush while talking to Duhaut's decoy, Jean L'Archevêque. They were "six leagues" from the westernmost village of the Hasinai (Tejas) Indians. Duhaut was killed to avenge La Salle. 1687. March 19. At last realizing that the bay he was on lay west of the Mississippi, he made two easterly marches, to the Hasinai, or Tejas, Indians, hoping to find the river and proceed to his Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. On the second of these he was slain in an ambush by a disenchanted follower, Pierre Duhaut, six leagues from one of the Hasinai villages, on March 19, 1687. The bloodletting, already begun in a hunting camp, claimed the lives of seven others.

1687AD. June. Frenchman Pierre de Troyes commanded a company under Governor Denonville for his attack against the Seneca. This attack resulted in the destruction of Ganondagan, the Seneca's largest village.

1687. September. AD. In September 1687, the French used 3,000 militia and regulars to attack the Iroquois in a punitive raid on their territory. They proceeded down the Richelieu River, and marched through Iroquois territory, but did not find many warriors. They burned their villages and stored crops, destroying an estimated 1.2 million bushels of corn. Many Iroquois died from starvation during the following winter. 1687, Denonville set out with a well-organized force to Fort Frontenac, where they met with the 50 hereditary SACHEMS of the Iroquois Confederacy from their Onondaga council fire. These 50 chiefs constituted the entire decision-making strata of the Iroquois. They had been lulled into meeting under a flag of truce. Denonville seized, chained, and shipped the 50 Iroquois chiefs to Marseilles, France, to be used as galley slaves. He then ravaged the land of the Seneca. Before he returned to New France, he travelled down the shore of Lake Ontario and created Fort Denonville at the site where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario. This site was previously used by La Salle for a FORT named Fort Conti from 1678 to 1679, and was later used for Fort Niagara, which still exists to this day.

1688-1689. The colony lasted only until 1688, when Karankawa-speaking Native Americans killed the 20 remaining adults and took five children as captives. Tonti sent out search missions in 1689 when he learned of the settlers' fate, but failed to find survivors

1688-1697. At the same time along the St. Lawrence, there was growing confrontation between the French and British. Two wars resulted: the King William's War (1688-97) and Queen Anne's War (1702-1713). The first 1st Intercolonial War, fought in North Amerika, the British King William's War, coincides w/ the “War of the Grand Alliance of the League of Augsburg Nine Years' War” in Europe, begins. During King William's War (1689?–1697), the French created raiding parties with native allies attack English colonial settlements, as the English had used the Iroquois against the French. During King William's War (North American part of the War of the Grand Alliance), the Iroquois were allied with the English.

1689AD. Frenchman Martin Chartier found fur trade on the Cumberland River in Tennessee.

1689 AD. During a raid into the Illinois Country in 1689, the Iroquois captured numerous prisoners, and destroyed a sizable MIAMI settlement. The Miami asked for aid from others in the ANISHINAABEG Confederacy, and a large force gathered to track down the Iroquois. Using their new firearms, the Confederacy laid an ambush near modern South Bend, Indiana. They attacked, and destroyed most of the Iroquois army. Although a large part of the region was left depopulated, the Iroquois were unable to establish a permanent presence. Their own tribe lacked the manpower to colonize the large area. After their setbacks and the local tribes' gaining firearms, the Iroquois' brief control over the region was lost. Many of the former inhabitants of the territory began to return. 1689. The Illinois-Shawnee War of 1689 begins. Despite the common threat posed by the Iroquois at the time, the crowded conditions near the French trading posts in Illinois eventually provoked a violent confrontation between the Shawnee Imperial Confederacy and Illinois Imperial Confederacy in 1689. The Shawnee soon left the area to join their relatives in Tennessee, but forever afterwards, they had a strong dislike for the Illinois, and often returned to raid their villages.

1689. January – April 22. Those remaining at La Salle's fort in Texas were attacked by Indians. Six of the seventeen who had left the settlement site with La Salle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xn8h7lsDjE) continued to Canada and, eventually, France. Among them were La Salle's brother, Abbé Jean Cavelier, Anastase Douay, and Henri Joutel, each of whom later wrote of the expedition. Six other Frenchmen, including two deserters who had reappeared, remained among the East Texas Indians.A few survivors were rescued by the Alonso de Leon expedition, which reached the ruins of the fort on April 22, 1689. One or two others joined Indian tribes and lived out their lives as savages.

1689. August 4. AD. The destruction of the Seneca land infuriated the Iroquois Confederacy. This, coupled with the dishonourable loss of their sachems, demanded they set out to terrorize New France as never before. The French's Denonville's regulars were dissolved, and dispersed to towns across the land, attempting to protect New France's homes and families. Forts were abandoned. The Iroquois destroyed farmsteads, and whole families were slaughtered or captured. On August 4, 1689, Lachine, a small town adjacent to Montreal, was burned to the ground. Fifteen hundred Iroquois warriors had been harassing Montreal defences for many months prior. Denonville was finally exhausted, and defeated.
The 1690s!

1690s. Some Shawnees move to Pennsylvania. They establish a large village on the Delaware River in the 1690s, and built other villages along the Susquehanna. 1690. AD. Peter Chartier, a Shawnee-half breed, is born. WACANACKSHINA. Wacanackshina is his Shawnee name. Peter Chartier's father is the famous Martin Chartier, who mutinied La Salle, and Peter's mother is SEWATHA STRAIGHT TAIL Sewatha Straight Tail (1660-1759), daughter of STRAIGHT TAIL MEAURROWAY OPESSA Straight Tail Meaurroway Opessa of the PEKOWI Pekowi Shawnee. PETER CHARTIER: Son of the French-Canadian trader Martin CHARTIER and his Shawnee wife. Peter, brought up among the Shawnees, married a Shawnee wife, and engaged in the trading business at Shawnee settlements in Lancaster County, at Paxtang, at the mouth of Shawnee (Yellow Breeches) Creek across the river from present Harrisburg, and on the Conodoguinet near the site of Carlisle. Peter Chartier later went south among the Creek Indians where he was known by the colonies in the south as "Peter Shirty". The father of Tecumseh PUCKSHINWAH and the Shawnee Prophet TENSKWATAWA was a member of his band. The name was Pierre Chartier and his father, who had traveled with La Salle from Canada before deserting, was Martin Chartier. Martin had married two Shawnee ladies. “I am currently writing a novel based on the lives of the father and son, the research for which was gathered for my Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University.” ~somebody on some random message board. Peter was born on the Cumberland River in northern Tennessee where his father ran a trading post for a short time. Peter's Shawnee name was Wacanackshina which means "White One Who Reclines". http://books.google.com/books?id=sNYLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA194&lpg=PA194&dq=peter+chartier+shawnee&source=bl&ots=xOXrtEsXIS&sig=Zt0n5rLgP-cPH5gRZ5DHTlnPNXQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xzfyU7_WMIyAygTCxIGABQ&ved=0CFoQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=peter%20chartier%20shawnee&f=false http://boards.ancestry.com/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=469&p=topics.ethnic.natam.indiancaptives

1690. Martin Chartier stopped in a Shawnee village in eastern Tennessee. 1690AD. Chartier came to the Province prior to 1690, and is sometimes referred to as 'the French glover of Philadelphia.' His trading post was on the Susquehanna, near the present city of Columbia. 1690. The Iroquois Fur Wars, is just a continuance of the nearly 100 year Beaver Wars that engrossed most of the eastern portion of the United States, most especially around the Great Lakes region, during the 1600s. Kentucky felt reverberations of the Beaver Wars, and probably, similar hostilities existed in Kentucky, between the Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Lenape, and other native Americans whose also native to Kentucky, for control of land, resources, rivers, creeks, ponds, streams, trees, plains, etc.

1690. Doherty lived with the Kentucky Cherokee in 1690. “"As early as the year 1690," says Abbott, " a trader from Virginia named Doherty crossed the mountains into what is now Kentucky, where he resided with the Indians. He visited the friendly Cherokee nation within the present bounds of Georgia and resided with them for several years." https://archive.org/stream/cu31924028846074/cu31924028846074_djvu.txt

1690-1692 AD. Some of the most notable of the French-sponsored raids in 1690 were the Schenectady massacre in the Province of New York; Salmon Falls, New Hampshire; and Falmouth Neck (present-day Portland, Maine). The French and their allies killed settlers in the raids and carried some back to Canada. Settlers in New England raised money to redeem their captives, but some were adopted into the Native tribes. The French government generally did not intervene when the Natives kept the captives. Throughout the 1690s the French and their allies also continued to raid deep into Iroquois, destroying Mohawk villages in 1692, and later raiding Seneca, Oneida, and Onondaga villages. The English and Iroquois banded together for operations aimed at New France, but these were largely ineffectual.

1691 AD. The most successful incursion resulted in the 1691 Battle of La Prairie. 1691. Martin Chartier reunited on the Potomac River with old acquaintances from Fort S t Louis (LeTorts, Basillons, Godin, and Dubois). Martin Chartier, a trader at the mouth of the Susquehanna.

1691-1694. The representatives of Albany and Esopus had urged upon the New York General Assembly that communications and peace be made with the Indians to the west, with the view of increasing the fur and peltry business. Led by Arant Vielle, representatives spent fifteen months in Shawnee country, undoubtedly in the Cumberland region; and in 1694, the party returned with about 700 Shawnee. This large group established the village of Pechoquealin on the Delaware River where today we find the town of Shawnee-on-Delaware.

1692AD. Martin Chartier living with the Shawnee on the Potomac in Maryland; next in Balt imore County, Maryland, was jailed in Ste Marie & Ann Arundel Counties as a French spy but escaped. 1692. Martin Chartier was a French outlaw who sought and found refuge among the Shawnee, with whom he married and raised a family. A son, Peter Chartier became a chief among them, a hunter wise in the trading ways of whites, who led them west to escape the encroachment of civilization. Martin Chartier's only crime was that he had gone among the Shawnees that owed him some beaver without the permission of the colonial authorities, and when he came back, the Governor put him in prison, and in irons, where he continued for several months; but at last got loose, made his escape, and ever since hath used the woods. He told it this way before the Maryland Provincial Council in 1692, at which time he resided t here with his Shawnee wife.

1692 AD. HERO [MADELEINE DE VERCHERES] Madeleine de Verchères, who in 1692 at age 14, led the defense of her family farm against Iroquois attack. Viewing the Iroquois as pawns of the Dutch and English, their traditional Protestant enemies, the super-ultra-devout-faithful Catholic French refused to make peace with the Natives.

1692. There is no direct evidence of Shawnee settlement in Pennsylvania, however, until 1692.

1692. In 1692, Martin Chartier led a group of these Indians north to Maryland, settling at a place known as Old Town. Several years later, they moved to the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, an area then under the o fficial dominion of the Iroquois Indians. They then asked a local trib e, the Conestoga, to take them under their protection.

1693AD. Martin Chartier traveled with Shawnee leaving Virginia to go to Ohio. 1693. Martin Chartier married a Shawnee wife in Maryland in 1693.

1693. The Total Population of Chickasaw in America at this time is 10,000. The depopulation of the region's native populations by epidemics left by the Hernando De Soto expedition reduced the Chickasaw, but because of their small, scattered villages, the Chickasaw appear to have suffered less than their neighbors. In 1693 the French (Tonti) estimated the total population of the Chickasaw at 10,000. Iberville's later report in 1702 (based on figures provided by the Chickasaw) gave 580 cabins and 2,000 warriors, also which is about 10,000.

1693 AD. Martin Chartier went east, and married a Shawnee woman in either Illinois or Maryland in 1693. Peter Chartier's mother was Sewatha Straight Tail (1660-1759), daughter of Straight Tail Meaurroway Opessa of the Pekowi Shawnee.

1693. In 1693 twenty Cherokee chiefs visited Charles Town to complain to Governor Thomas Smith of attacks by the Catawba, Congaree, and Shawnee, who made slave raids upon them.” (Jerry E. Clark, 1993).

1694. After making peace with the Iroquois in 1694, the Shawnee in eastern Pennsylvania joined the Covenant Chain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_Chain

1694AD. Kakowatchiky Shawnee chief Chief as early as 1709, significant leader in 1694. 1694. KAKOWATCHIKY - A Shawnee chief of the Pequea division. It is possible that it was he who led the Shawnees from the Illinois country to the upper Delaware in 1694. “Shawnee relations with other Indian groups were reflective of patterns in Shawnee society. Their dependency and conservatism served as guidelines in defining their reaction to the peoples with whom they came in contact. It is therefore not surprising that their ties with the Creek, Cherokee, and Delaware were long lasting. The reciprocating relationship developed with these tribes was combined with a mutual respect for tribal autonomy. The hostile nature of the Shawnee's relationship to the Chickasaw, Catawba, and Iroquois can be understood in the same manner. Contacts with these groups were not established on the basis on mutual need, and neither the Chickasaw nor the Iroquois respected the autonomy and independence of the Shawnee. These patterns undoubtedly determined the relationships with other tribes as well, even where contacts were brief.” (Jerry Clark, pg. 70).

1695AD. Martin Chartier, the white leader of some Shawnee Indians, in the year of 1695, migrated to the Ohio River from Virginia. This tribe arrived on the great East-West Trail at Alliquippa's Gap, by the Warriors' Trail.

1695-1712. There is good evidence to support the belief that the Saluda Indians, situated on the Saluda River in central South Carolina, were also Shawnee. The Saluda occupied this area from approximately 1695 to 1712, when they moved to the Conestoga River in Pennsylvania.

1697. Peter Chartier. Before 1697. Moved with Opessa Band to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

1697AD. The Treaty of Ryswick ends British King William's War, with France, but it doesn't provide peace for the native Americans. The Ryswick Treaty is signed at the end of King William's War. Territories remain the same as before the War. Because France claimed dominion over the Iroquois, the French offensive against the American Indians was not halted by the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick that brought peace between France and England, and ended overt English participation in the conflict. The rivalry between France and England in America was left unresolved by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697.

Around 1697, Martin Chartier (with 7 year old Peter) moved with his family to Pequea Creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

1698AD. The Shawnee were described as a restless people, who were constantly engaged in war with some of their neighbors. The tribe originated in the South, near the Suwaney River in Florida. Around 1698, they first appeared in Pennsylvania, at Montour’s Island, six miles below Pittsburgh.
Some advanced to Conestoga and others settled on the head waters of the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers.

1698. October. AD. Denonville's tenure was followed by the return of Frontenac, FRONTENAC! who replaced Denonville as governor for the next nine years (1689–1698). Frontenac had been arranging a new plan of attack to mollify the effects of the Iroquois in North America, and realized the true danger the imprisonment of the sachems created. He located the 13 surviving leaders, and they returned with him to New France in October 1698. Finally in 1698, the Iroquois began to see the English as becoming a greater threat than the French. The English had begun colonizing Pennsylvania in 1681. The continued colonial growth there began to encroach on the southern border of the Iroquois territory. The French policy began to change towards the Iroquois. After nearly 50 years of warfare, they began to believe that it would be impossible to ever destroy them. They decided that befriending the Iroquois would be the easiest way to ensure their monopoly on the northern fur trade and help stop English expansion. As soon as the English heard of the treaty they immediately set about to prevent it from being agreed to. It would result in the loss of Albany's monopoly on the fur trade with the Iroquois and, without their protection, the northern flank of the English colonies would be open to French attack. Despite English interference, the Treaty was agreed to.

1699 AD. “During their stay in the Cumberland region the Shawnee came under the influence of British traders from South Carolina, and in 1699, led by these traders, made an attack on a group of CAHOKIA Cahokia Indians on the Mississippi River fifteen miles below the mouth of the Illinois River. It was very possibly this British alliance that caused the Cherokee and Chickasaw to expel the Shawnee from the Cumberland in 1714.” ~Jerry E. Clark. By the end of the 17th Century, the whites had got the natives to war on their biggest Civilization: Cahokia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia


1699 AD. The name “Taogria” appears on at least one map as a village on the Cumberland River quite near seven Shawnee villages. In 1699, Gravier, a Jesuit explorer, encountered a party of Taogria on the Mississippi River above Memphis, Tennessee, and identified them as belonging to the Loup Nation. Swanton believes they were Yuchi. However, they spoke the Chaouanon tongue and may have been Shawnee. Other maps of the period locate Taogria villages along the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, usually near Shawnee villages. Galinee, La Salle's chronicler, may have provided a clue to the identity of the Taogria when he reported that in 1669 the Seneca warned him of a bad and treacherous people on the Ohio called the Toagenha. The Iroquois referred to the Shawnee as the Ontwaganha, and it is probable that Toagenha is a corruption of this term. The similarity of the names Toagenha and Taogria suggests a possible link.

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alex hamilton repn hte US while gw was away gave France $$$ for US repayment of Revolutionary War loans from the US treasury, which amounted to about $400,000 and 1,000 military weapons. N the period b/t Sept 1791 - June 1793, 22 months … US gave $726K to French white colonists. GW was a slave owner. He joined the US rev to protect his slaves from Lord Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation; GW loved havn slaves, too much. That's why he helped France fight their rebelling slaves. Escargo & frog eatn French. French kiss... french fries... frenches mustard & ketchup french toast deja vu; cest la vie; jena ce qua; ew-lala vis a vis … viola! sacrabeau! ; a propos; au courant; au contraire; blasé blasé blasé Bon yovage! Bourgeouis!; cache cafe! Chueffer! Clique! Cliché! Critique croissant; cul de sac escusez moi; extraordinaire; facade; faux, faux pax; hot shots, part duex; gaffe, genre Grand Prix voyeur boutique cause celebre, laisse faire; madam malaise

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A Great Books Canon “To ignore the leaps and bounds we've advanced in the fields of technology and science is to forever play patty-cake to the cavepeople of yesteryear.” Podcast Explanation for the first few Great Books of the Freedom Skool: http://youtu.be/7jD_v4ji1kU This is the Freedom Skool's 2015 list of the 100 Greatest Works Humanity Has Ever Made in the order of most important to least. Books are too limiting in their scope for what ideas can cloud the brain, and folks from all over the world, yesterday, today, men, women, atheist, spiritual, white, black, straight, gay, transvestite, have all helped in the collaboration in the making of this list. Out of the great pool of ideas, the best ideas should prevail. Thus, the 100 greatest works ever are nothing more than the 100 greatest ideas ever constructed. For all intensive and respectful purposes, consider this my own personal 100 “great books” list. For all kinds of culture, things which please the eyes, su