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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