3
Beaver Wars
WHEN FATHER ANTOINE DANIEL, the Jesuit missionary of the Huron village of St. Joseph (present-day Port Huron, Michigan), heard the dull thunder of Mohawk moccasins pounding up the stockade, he sprinted for the rude wooden chapel, the biggest building in the walled town, in which the women, children, and old men had sought the refuge he had told them God would provide in time of need.
Daniel entered, surveyed his terrified charges, and pronounced a general absolution upon them. Upon those who had been reluctant to accept baptism in peaceful times, he hurriedly conferred the sacrament. These rites completed, he quietly urged all to save themselves, turned back to the doorway, and went out to meet the warriors as they tumbled over the stockade and into the town. Perhaps intending to create a diversion that would buy time for “his” Hurons to escape, Daniel took down a cross from the chapel wall, grasped it in his right hand, and ventured straight toward the enemy, icon uplifted. The sight of the black-robed figure, unafraid, advancing toward them with the symbol of his faith, froze the attackers.
For a moment only, however. Soon, several of them leveled their Dutch guns against Father Antoine Daniel, and they fired. Shot many times, he fell, even as other warriors killed or captured everyone they overtook. They shot, they brained, they gutted, they scalped, they made captive, pausing at intervals only to put each of the village buildings to the torch. As the chapel leaped into flame, some warriors flung Daniel’s lifeless body through its open door.
The Mohawk raiding party left St. Joseph ablaze as they withdrew with about seven hundred prisoners. From this attack, they went on immediately to another, striking the nearby mission village of St. Ignace. It was a place almost exclusively of women, children, and old men, and their slaughter or capture consumed but a few minutes. It, too, was followed by all-consuming fire. Once again, with their objective burning behind them, the Mohawks moved on, this time to the mission village of St. Louis, about three miles away.
A later generation would call the Mohawk raiding tactics “blitzkrieg,” and a still later one would use the phrase “shock and awe.” To those on the receiving end, the attacks seemed nothing less than a force of nature, overwhelming and irresistible. Even so, there was a tactical downside. Mohawk raiding doctrine was founded on speed rather than thoroughness, and haste left survivors. Three Huron refugees from the St. Ignace raid outran the advancing Mohawks and reached St. Louis in time to alert the village. Most of its seven hundred inhabitants evacuated, leaving only about eighty warriors behind, together with those too old or too sick to move. Awaiting the onslaught with them were the two Jesuit missionaries who had also escaped from St. Ignace, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lallemant.
If speed and ferocity were the essence of Mohawk raiding tactics, the doctrine of vastly superior numbers was common to virtually all Indian war making. The rule was this: Attack only when you enjoy a great numerical advantage. In the case of St. Louis, the ratio was a thousand Mohawks to eighty Huron warriors. Yet those eighty twice turned back the Mohawk attack, killing some thirty of the enemy. This prompted the attackers to change tactics. Instead of concentrating on a single entry point through the village stockade, they mounted their third assault from several directions simultaneously, wielding their hatchets against the walls of wooden palings woven together with stout grasses. They broke through in many places, and once the Mohawks were within the confines of St. Louis, it was all quickly over.
Survivors were few but included the two Jesuits. Taken captive, they were marched off from the blazing town back to St. Ignace, which was occupied by the Iroquois. Here, all were tortured to death, the greatest brutality accorded Brébeuf and Lallemant. The pair were tied upright to stakes, scalped alive, then “baptized” with boiling water. For each a “necklace” of linked hatchets was prepared by throwing it into the fire, then withdrawing it when the metal glowed red hot. These were put around their necks.
Both men endured their martyrdom as martyrs do—stoically—and it was said that Brébeuf, fifty-five years old at the time, uttered not the slightest sound throughout all the torture and even to the moment of his death. That his tormentors cut out his heart and ate it was a tribute accorded only to the most worthy of adversaries. The Mohawks, like a number of other eastern tribes, believed that by eating the heart of a courageous enemy they would partake of his courage.
The Mohawks used the remains of St. Ignace as a forward base of operations, from which they launched raids against all the smaller villages of the region, including, on March 17, Sainte-Marie-au-pays des Hurons, a fortress-village defended by a garrison of forty well-armed Frenchmen augmented by perhaps three hundred Hurons. No commander, whether a seventeenth-century Huron warrior or a twenty-first-century military officer, wants to fight defensively, even though defenders often benefit from significant advantages of cover and supply. The Hurons left the shelter of their stockade and launched a preemptive ambush on the leading edge of the Mohawk force as it approached the town. Despite finding themselves victims of surprise, the Mohawks not only repulsed the surprise attack but forced the Hurons into retreat.
Or so the Mohawk warriors believed.
Although historians generally credit Indian warriors with bravery—sometimes mythologizing this quality in them—they rarely acknowledge demonstrations of tactical sophistication even when they are quite evident. In this case, the withdrawing Hurons drew the Mohawks into a larger attack by their main force. The Huron retreat, therefore, had not been one of simple necessity but was genuinely tactical in its nature and intent. It worked. The Mohawks were routed.
They were not annihilated, though. Despite heavy losses, they retreated intact and were able to regroup to renew the assault against Sainte-Marie. By this time, the Huron defenders had been reduced to about 150 warriors, half their original number. In the fighting that followed, the French estimated that the Hurons killed at least another hundred Mohawks, though in the process lost all but twenty of their own number. No question that the Hurons and their French allies had been defeated, but the Mohawks were so unnerved by the resistance they had met with that, instead of capitalizing on their victory, they withdrew.
On June 16, 1649, Father Paul Ragueneau and other Jesuit missionaries returned to what was left of Sainte-Marie but decided that it was better to burn the mission rather than see it fall into Iroquois hands permanently. Ragueneau wrote, “We ourselves set fire to it, and beheld burn before our eyes and in less than one hour, our work of nine or ten years.” Ragueneau and the others were determined that the physical obliteration of Sainte-Marie would not erase its spiritual presence. The Jesuit Order had already decided that Brébeuf and Lalemant would be canonized, and hired a shoemaker named Christophe Regnault to find the missionaries’ burial places and recover their bones. After duly exhuming the bodies, Regnault immersed them into a strong lye solution, which separated the flesh from the bones. The skeletons he wrapped in linen to be preserved as relics. The flesh he collected and reburied in a dual grave.
* * *
Although the Hurons’ desperate stand at Sainte-Marie had dispirited the Mohawks, by the end of March 1649, they had forced their enemy out of fifteen principal towns. Indeed, by this time, the Huron nation ceased to exist as an organized community. Many refugees were adopted by allied tribes, large numbers finding refuge with the Tobacco—or Tionontati—tribe. As for the French Jesuits, suddenly lacking Indians to convert, they abandoned a number of their missions. The defeat of French rivals in the beaver trade greatly gratified the Dutch, who now looked on their sale to the Mohawks of four hundred guns as a very fine investment indeed.
Through November and December 1649, the Mohawks and Seneca raided Tobacco villages as punishment for harboring enemy refugees. As the Iroquois approached the Tobacco mission town of St. Jean, its warriors prepared for the inevitable onslaught—but the Iroquois did something unheard-of. They did not attack.
They were out there, the residents of St. Jean knew, but day after day passed without a raid. The Mohawks and the Seneca were infamous for their seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of torture, but this suspense was worse than any of their fiery torments. It was simply incomprehensible. Unable to endure the waiting any longer, Tobacco and Huron warriors sortied out of the St. Jean stockade to force the enemy into battle on the outside.
From their places of concealment, the Mohawks and Seneca saw the gate open and watched as the warriors moved out, but they resisted the temptation to attack them. Instead, at two o’clock on the afternoon of December 7, 1649, they stormed St. Jean, which was now wholly undefended. As they opened fire, one of St. Jean’s missionaries, Charles Garnier, passed rapidly from Indian to Indian, baptizing and absolving, absolving and baptizing. Against the din of war cries and musketry, he continued this work until he was cut down by a succession of three musket balls. At least one round severed his spinal cord, leaving him instantly paralyzed, prone and helpless as a warrior’s hatchet descended. He was found later, brains beaten out.
Again the hasty attackers failed to round up all prisoners, and a few survivors wandered westward. The Tobacco refugees mingled with the surviving Hurons and, after the passage of half a century, became known as the Wyandots of the Detroit and Sandusky region.
* * *
The raids against the Huron villages and missionary towns of French Canada were episodes in what white writers later called the Beaver Wars. The “Five Nations” of the Iroquois League had united in what they themselves denominated “the Great Peace,” essentially a mutual nonaggression pact among themselves and a defensive alliance against other tribes. Some historians have pointed out that a desire to impose this Great Peace on others led to a policy of conquest and tribal adoption in which the Iroquois made war on their neighbors with the object of either killing them or absorbing them. Indeed, the battle usually identified as the beginning of the Beaver Wars—a 1638 clash in which a war party of one hundred Iroquois was defeated by some three hundred Hurons and other Algonquian warriors—was typical of the earliest phase of the war: an intertribal conflict fought independently of any Euro-American interests. Because the Indian combatants kept no written records of such encounters, little is known about this phase of the Beaver Wars. Only when battles involved missionaries or were near missionary towns do we have significant documentation. By this time, the “Beaver Wars” moniker was pretty well justified, since the Iroquois’ immediate objective was to acquire fresh beaver peltries to exploit in trade with the Euro-Americans, principally the Dutch. The Beaver Wars were fought to dispossess the French-allied Hurons of the best peltry land.
Many perished in the Iroquois raids; however, it was the long-term effect of the raids rather than their immediate, albeit terrible, impact that amounted to a program of tribal genocide. Huron society was disrupted, the people transformed from a tribe into a clutch of refugees. To live alone in the wilderness was essentially impossible. The presence of a cohesive tribe, village, or community was essential to sustenance. For this reason, an attacker need not kill every last man, woman, and child to destroy a people. Death on a genocidal scale was a consequence of exile into the wilderness.
For example, early in 1650 a band of Hurons took refuge on St. Joseph Island (now Christian Island) in frozen Lake Huron. In March, after weeks on the island, the refugees were compelled to seek food and shelter on the mainland. They struggled to walk to shore across the softening ice. In many places, the ice gave way, people fell through, and they drowned. Those who did manage to make it across survived for a time by fishing, only to fall prey, piecemeal, to marauding Iroquois war parties. That these refugees were near starvation made them soft targets and in no way modulated the ferocity of the attackers. Jesuit missionary Father Paul Ragueneau had already laid eyes on all manner of Indian torture and cruelty. The fate of the St. Joseph Island refugees, however, left him speechless. “My pen,” he wrote, “has no ink black enough to describe the fury of the Iroquois.… Our starving Hurons were driven out of a town which had become an abode of horror.… These poor people fell into ambuscades of our Iroquois enemies. Some were killed on the spot; some were dragged into captivity; women and children were burned.… Go where they would, they met with slaughter on all sides. Famine pursued them, or they encountered an enemy more cruel than cruelty itself.”
* * *
Traditionally, students of colonial American history have assessed the Iroquois as remarkably successful in their genocidal campaign. The course of the principal phase of the Beaver Wars, from 1650 through 1655, is typically portrayed as beginning late in the fall of 1650 with an Iroquois campaign against the Neutral nation, who, as their French-bestowed name implies, unlike the Tobaccos, prudently attempted to remain neutral in the ongoing combat between Iroquois and Huron. In the initial attack, a great town of some three or four thousand persons was destroyed, and an assault on another town in the spring of 1651 prompted the Neutrals to abandon all of their settlements and disperse. Many—perhaps most—were adopted by the Seneca, westernmost of the Iroquois tribes. The magnitude of this conquest can be appreciated by noting that the Neutrals had numbered about ten thousand at the beginning of the seventeenth century; by 1653 no more than eight hundred could be found.
Between 1651 and 1653 the Iroquois harried the French and their Indian allies until all of the Iroquois nations except for the Mohawks concluded a peace treaty at Montreal late in 1653. The peace proved short-lived. In the spring of 1654, an Erie who was a member of a treaty delegation visiting a Seneca town quarreled with a Seneca and killed him. In retaliation, the Seneca killed all thirty members of the Erie delegation, touching off a series of reprisals and counterreprisals that escalated into war between the Eries and all the Iroquois. Although brief, the war spelled the end of the Erie nation by 1656.
Such is the traditional view of the main phase of the Beaver Wars: a genocidal Iroquois juggernaut. Indeed, it is true that by 1655 the Five Iroquois Nations held sway from the Ottawa River in the north to the Cumberland in the south, and as far as Lake Erie in the west. Yet the success of the Iroquois push westward was so thorough that their failures elsewhere are easily overlooked.
During 1651–52, the Mohawks had attacked a people known as the Atrakwaeronons, which may have been another name for the Susquehannocks or may have denoted a tribe closely allied with the Susquehannocks. In either case, the result was a quarter century of sporadic warfare between the Susquehannocks and the Iroquois, during which the Susquehannocks more often than not prevailed.
The Susquehannocks were an eastern tribe, concentrated, as their name suggests, along the Susquehanna River and its tributaries in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Similarly, the Iroquois failed to defeat the Sokokis, another eastern tribe, who lived in the upper Connecticut Valley, and the Mahicans of the Hudson River Valley, near Albany. Thus, while the Iroquois swept westward, they were unable to defeat key eastern tribes and, therefore, committed what is a cardinal strategic sin for an advancing army. They left enemies in their rear.
Why had the Iroquois failed against these tribes?
The Hurons, Tobaccos, and Neutrals were all allied with the French, which meant that they had missionaries aplenty but few guns, for the French were reluctant to trade firearms to Indians. The Iroquois, having established trading relations with the Dutch, had guns but no missionaries. The Susquehannocks, Sokokis, and Mahicans traded with the English and therefore also had guns but no missionaries. It seems that the Iroquois and those they failed to defeat had chosen more useful allies than the Hurons, Tobaccos, and Neutrals had.
* * *
By the seventeenth century, trade-based alliances between Indians and Euro-Americans determined the varied destinies of the tribes. Against the western, French-allied tribes, Dutch guns gave the Iroquois a sovereign edge. Against the eastern tribes, this advantage was more than offset by trading relations between the Susquehannocks and the Swedes (with some English trade as well), and between the Sokokis and Mahicans on the one hand and the English on the other. The Sokokis successfully repulsed a large Mohawk raiding party on one occasion, wiping it out nearly to a man. Both the Susquehannocks and the Mahicans invaded Iroquois lands, putting so much pressure on the Mohawks that at one point the tribe made a formal request to the Dutch for assistance.
For the Dutch, having the Mohawks as allies gave them a terror weapon to use against the French and their Indian trading partners. Yet the Dutch neither respected nor trusted the Mohawks and always had their ears attuned to rumors of conspiracy and treachery. This may have made the Dutch amenable to peace negotiations in 1653 between the Iroquois and the French. The very nature of these negotiations gives lie to the traditional picture of the Beaver Wars as an unstoppable Iroquois juggernaut. As it turned out, the Iroquois League was not the great Indian monolith that it is often portrayed to have been. The Mohawks were both the easternmost and most militant of the Iroquois Five Nations. They enjoyed success in the west, fighting alongside the Seneca, the league’s westernmost tribe, but in the east, fighting alone against the well-armed, European-connected Susquehannocks, Sokokis, and Mahicans, they suffered reverses. The Seneca, with some participation by the Onondaga and less from the Cayuga and Oneida, had reaped the rewards of the western genocide; however, as of 1653, the Eries, who lived in a territory stretching from western New York to northern Ohio on Lake Erie’s southern shore, were still very much a formidable presence. Perhaps it would have been worthwhile for the western Iroquois to continue fighting the Eries were it not for the Mohawks’ insistence on monopolizing access to the Dutch traders. Monopolize it they did, though, and so the Seneca led the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oneida in peace negotiations with the French and French-allied Indians at Montreal. This left the Mohawks isolated, effectively encircled by hostiles. So they also opened up negotiations with the French, albeit separately, at Trois-Rivières rather than Montreal. High-handedly, in an effort to undercut the other four of the Five Nations, the Mohawks also tried to make Trois-Rivières the only legitimate location for negotiations. Just as they had made themselves the sole conduit for trade with the Dutch, so the Mohawks now attempted to become the sole means of negotiation with the French.
Perhaps, at this point, the Dutch were more fearful of their Mohawk allies than of losing ground to the French, and so they approved of the peace negotiations. Yet it is difficult to determine the Dutch strategy, which, in the end, seems more ambivalent than prudent or even purposeful. Initially, the Dutch had used the Mohawks as terror weapons against the French. Yet they were never comfortably confident that this “weapon” would not backfire on them, and so they sanctioned the Iroquois-French peace of 1653—even as they presented the Mohawks with brand-new and very ample supplies of gunpowder, presumably to be used against the French and French-allied Indians.
As the Dutch-Mohawk alliance came to be marked by increasing ambivalence, so the integrity of the Iroquois League began to crack. The Mohawks had long acted with considerable autonomy from the rest of the Five Nations. Now it seemed that those four were cutting the Mohawks loose, making that tribe the odd man out.
This division was deepened in August 1654 when the Onondaga, with the consent of the other western tribes, invited the French to set up a trading post and mission at the village of Onondaga (in present-day New York state). Father Simon Le Moyne, a Jesuit, eagerly embraced the offer, presenting each of the four western Iroquois tribes with ceremonial hatchets—to be used against the Eries, the very tribe whose fierce presence had moved the western Iroquois to make peace in the first place.
Why would an agent of the French attempt to shatter the peace in this manner? The Eries were an Iroquoian tribe, not a member of the Iroquois League, but of the same linguistic and broad cultural group; therefore, the French may have perceived them as a likely potential ally of the Five Nations, which had generally aligned themselves with the Dutch and (at this point to a lesser extent) the English and had opposed themselves to the French and the French-allied Hurons, Tobaccos, and Neutrals. By sanctioning war between members of the Five Nations and another Iroquoian tribe, Le Moyne may well have intended to forestall the expansion westward of a potential English ally and French enemy.
His effort to foment a war was successful, and the Eries were largely destroyed. The outcome could be termed tribal genocide, although more individual Eries were absorbed into (adopted by) the western Iroquois tribes than were killed by them. Still, the result was that the Eries ceased to exist as an identifiable tribe.
Le Moyne had done even more than block an Indian alliance potentially harmful to the French. Picture the distribution of the five Iroquois tribes. The Mohawks were the easternmost, with the Oneida just to their west. The Seneca were the westernmost, with the Cayuga to their east. The Onondaga were in the middle, between the Oneida on the east and the Cayuga on the west. Each Iroquois village had a large longhouse at its center. It was a communal building and the site of village meetings. The Iroquois League referred to the entire territory of the Five Nations metaphorically as a longhouse, in which the Onondaga occupied the central place and, as such, were the tribe at whose council fire all collective Iroquois decisions were made. Yet, at the same time, Iroquois tradition designated the easternmost Mohawks as the “head” of the longhouse, effectively the leaders of the Iroquois League. Iroquois government has frequently been cited as a model for the founding fathers in the creation of the United States’ constitutional government. If so, the founding fathers must have overlooked the built-in conflict within Iroquoian government between the Onondaga central council fire and Mohawk leadership. In effect, Iroquois government was founded on a flawed principle of equality, in which all tribes were equal but one was more equal than the others. Evidently, unlike the future framers of the Constitution, Le Moyne did not overlook this, and by sanctioning the western tribes to war against the Eries, he made a move toward exploiting the conflict inherent in the structure of the Iroquois League to decapitate it, severing the western tribes from their eastern head.
For years, the Mohawks had made good use of their geographical proximity to the Dutch trading capital at Fort Orange to control access to Dutch trade, using their traditional role as “head” of the Iroquois League to justify this monopoly. Le Moyne’s encouragement of friendship between the western Iroquois and New France not only allowed the western tribes to bypass Mohawk control by transporting beaver and other furs through French-controlled territory rather than Dutch-Mohawk territory but also resulted in the French designating Onondaga as the only place at which French-Iroquois negotiations could take place. Thus, in a single stroke, the Mohawks lost their trade monopoly and were foiled in their attempt to monopolize treaty making with the French.
* * *
Doubtless dismayed, the Mohawks nevertheless did not passively roll over. Instead, they responded by threatening Le Moyne with war, arguing that only a thief enters the longhouse by its chimney (at the center of the building) rather than by its front door (the easternmost position occupied by the Mohawks). The implication? There is only one way to deal with a thief.
The French took the threat seriously enough to delay for more than a year acceptance of the Onondagas’ invitation to erect a trading post and mission at their main village. Even when they finally did so, on July 11, 1656, they set up shop—fifty French traders accompanied by four Jesuit missionaries—five “short leagues” (a little over ten miles, assuming the French “short league” was the unit of measurement) distant from the village. Despite this act of prudence, violent outbreaks between the French and the Mohawks were frequent, and Louis d’Ailleboust, who became acting governor of New France in 1657, decreed a get-tough policy of what might be termed preemptive defense against the Mohawks. This, predictably, moved the Dutch to overcome their habitual ambivalence and renew their overtures of outright friendship with the tribe.
Thanks to the Dutch, the Mohawks’ fortunes now looked up. In 1655, Dutch forces had overrun New Sweden, the always tenuous Swedish settlement on the Delaware. This cut off the Susquehannocks, the Mohawks’ most formidable eastern rivals, from their principal source of trade firearms and forced them to come to terms with the Dutch, which, under the circumstances, also meant coming to terms with the Mohawks.
For their own part, the Dutch, now under the stern leadership of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, found themselves menaced by bands of Lenape (Delaware) Indians—like the Hurons, an Algonquian tribe—in a conflict known as the Peach War, because it had begun when a Dutch farmer killed a Delaware Indian woman for picking peaches in his orchard. In retaliation, the slain woman’s family ambushed and killed the farmer. As word of the incident spread, other Lenape bands struck. Several settlers were killed at New Amsterdam, and 150 were taken captive. Governor Stuyvesant called out the militia, which freed most of the captives and destroyed some of the Indians’ villages. Following this, Dutch-Lenape violence sporadically continued, debilitating the Indians as well as settlers through about 1657. This motivated Stuyvesant to further strengthen the Dutch alliance with the Mohawks.
The Mohawks wasted little time in exploiting their renewed alliance. Having addressed major threats in the east—actual hostility from the Susquehannocks and potential hostility from the Dutch—they moved against the French at Onondaga, which meant that they also moved against a member of the Iroquois League. Yet they apparently did so in the knowledge that the presence of the French missionaries near the village of Onondaga had deeply divided the tribe. A sizable faction of Onondaga made it known that they intended to side with the Mohawks, and so the French prudently abandoned their mission/trading post before the arrival of the attackers. The Onondaga had come to fear the Mohawks far more than they feared the French; however, the presence of missionaries among them—even ten miles distant from their principal village—had touched off an epidemic (either of measles or smallpox; perhaps both). Presumably, this tipped the scales in the Mohawks’ favor, making them appear as the lesser of evils.
* * *
Two years after the Peach War had ended, a much larger conflict erupted between the Dutch and another Lenape tribe, the Esopus, who lived along the Hudson in what is now southeastern New York. By the 1650s, Dutch farmers were settling along the Rondout and Esopus creeks, tributaries of the Hudson River. They purchased land from a group of Esopus Indians, and relations were cordial at first but deteriorated in the late 1650s, as local Esopus became increasingly dependent on alcohol, which they purchased from illicit Dutch traders operating in the vicinity of Fort Orange. In 1658, a young warrior deep in his cups killed a settler and burned his farm, prompting Governor Stuyvesant to meet with Esopus leaders to demand reparations. He also pressured them into selling more land to New Netherland. Having secured these concessions, Stuyvesant strengthened New Netherland’s militia, a move that brought a short-lived measure of peace—broken when the Esopus grew impatient over the long delay in receiving payment for the land they had ceded.
The Dutch who had settled on the purchased but unpaid-for land were acutely aware of the Indians’ ugly mood and, on September 21, 1659, acted preemptively. They ambushed a band of warriors who had been drinking brandy in the woods near the Dutch settlement. One Esopus was killed. On the following day, a number of young warriors exacted revenge by attacking some settlers, killing a few and capturing a few others. This triumph encouraged a major assault, as some five hundred Esopus warriors laid siege to a newly built Dutch stockade, in which local colonists sought refuge.
Traditional Indian battle tactics did not favor protracted siege warfare, and by the time Stuyvesant arrived on the scene with reinforcements—October 10—the attackers had already walked away. Nevertheless, Stuyvesant recognized that he did not command the military strength to wage an offensive against the Indians. Accordingly, he ordered the commander of Fort Orange, Johannes La Montagne, to negotiate a peace.
It lasted less than a year. In the spring of 1660, Ensign Dirck Smith, commanding the Dutch militia garrison at Wiltwyck, New York, took it upon himself to launch a number of assaults against various local Indians. Under pressure from neighboring tribes, the Esopus agreed to a new treaty on July 15, 1660. Yet, as was more often than not the case with treaties between Euro-Americans and Indians, the fighting fitfully continued. When a second Dutch settlement, Nieuwdorp (New Village), was founded near Wiltwyck, Esopus sachems complained to Stuyvesant that he had yet to deliver the promised payment for much of the Esopus land that had been ceded. At last, on June 7, 1663, the frustrated Indians attacked Wiltwyck as well as Nieuwdorp, starting the Second Esopus War.
The attackers waited until most of the men had left the two villages to work the outlying fields. The Indians, arms concealed, then entered Wiltwyck and Nieuwdorp on the familiar pretext of trade. Once inside, they attacked, immediately taking control of the streets and putting various buildings to the torch. They took numerous women and children hostage and sniped at the men as they returned to the villages. Nieuwdorp fell, but as more men returned from the fields, the tide turned in favor of the settlers. By the end of the day, the Battle of Wiltwyck was over. Wiltwyck remained in Dutch hands, but some forty-five settlers had been captured, and twenty or more slain. A band of sixty-nine settlers, including a handful of refugees from Nieuwdorp, hunkered down in Wiltyck and awaited a siege.
It did not come. Just outside the walls of the fortified town, skirmishing was sharp and frequent over the next several weeks. At length, Stuyvesant marched into Wiltwyck and, by the end of June, reinforced the settlement with a contingent of sixty militiamen. The Dutch forbore taking the offensive, however, and instead tried to negotiate for the release of prisoners. Over the next several weeks, a few captives were surrendered, but by the end of July the Dutch resolved to counterattack. For this, they turned to the Mohawks, who contributed warriors to a force that also included militiamen, civilian settlers, and slaves—210 troops in all. Their objective was the Esopus stronghold, which they reached only after a difficult trek over rough terrain. Once arrived, they found the Esopus “fort” deserted.
The Dutch occupied the fort, using it as a base from which they dispatched a smaller force, including Mohawks, to give chase to the Esopus warriors. In the meantime, those who remained at the stronghold set about destroying the Esopus’ food caches. Still, the Esopus resisted, releasing only a few more hostages as they quickly fortified a new position. The Dutch commander at Wiltwyck assembled a mixed force of fifty-five men, Dutch militia and Mohawk warriors, to attack the new Esopus stockade on September 5. The Esopus were routed, and the Dutch destroyed the guns and provisions they had left behind. Thirty Esopus had been killed or captured, and twenty-three Dutch captives were recovered. Losses to the Dutch force were slight, at six wounded and three killed.
Three more Dutch expeditions were launched in the fall but resulted in few Indian casualties. Nevertheless, the military action and the demonstrated threat posed by the Dutch-Mohawk alliance prompted the Esopus to sue for peace in May 1664. They ceded much of their territory.
The victory ratified the Mohawks’ monopoly on trade with the Dutch. All Indian trade to Fort Orange had to pass through them. Moreover, they had largely destroyed French-Huron commerce. Yet, beyond this, they had not gained any control over trade with the French via Montreal, and whereas the Dutch had identified no significant alternatives to trading with the Mohawks, the French saw many alternatives to doing business with either the Iroquois or the Hurons. They turned westward, to the Ojibwa family of tribes (Chippewas, Missisaugas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis) and the Miami, all peoples who occupied regions still rich with beaver. This gave French traders and trappers access to the best peltries for many years and motivated successive governors of New France to support their Ojibwa and Miami trading partners in turning the tide of the Beaver Wars against the Iroquois, whose campaigns against these Indians, especially those living along the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, resulted in heavy Iroquois defeats after some initial victories. By the 1680s Iroquois forces had also failed in confrontations with the Miami, in the present-day states of Wisconsin and Michigan.
* * *
The two Esopus Wars had taken their toll on New Netherland, which emerged from them victorious yet weakened. When English warships sailed up the Hudson on September 8, 1664, to claim New Netherland, the Dutch colonists simply declined to resist. Peter Stuyvesant had no choice but to surrender, although he managed to negotiate the retention of important trading privileges for the Dutch West India Company, including its right to trade with the Mohawks.
The English became the beneficiaries of the Dutch-Mohawk alliance, which would prove crucial in the coming wars with New France, but with the collapse of Dutch political influence came an end to much of the special power the Dutch-Mohawk alliance had conferred upon the Mohawks. This loss, combined with the long years of defeat that followed the shorter period of triumph in the Beaver Wars, initiated the long decline of the Mohawks and of the entire Iroquois League. In the long run, the Beaver Wars drained the resources of all the Indians involved in them and consequently aided the powers of Europe in their conquest and colonization of North America. Euro-American alliances with Native peoples, almost always facilitated by the fur trade, would continue to be the central feature of warfare on the continent; however, as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, the Indians lost the initiative, and the alliances served Euro-American rather than Native American ends.