90 Chapter 3 America in the British Empire
conducted their fur trading through tribes such as the
Algonquin and the Huron. This brought them into
conflict with the Five Nations, the powerful Iroquois
confederation of central New York. As early as 1609
the Five Nations were at war with the French and
their Indian allies. For decades this struggle flared
sporadically, the Iroquois more than holding their
own both as fighters and as traders. The Iroquois
brought quantities of beaver pelts to the Dutch at
Albany, some obtained by their own trappers, others
taken by ambushing the fur-laden canoes of their
enemies. They preyed on and ultimately destroyed
the Huron in the land north of Lake Ontario and
dickered with Indian trappers in far-off Michigan.
When the English took over the New Amsterdam
colony, they eagerly adopted the Iroquois as allies,
buying their furs and supplying them with trading
goods and guns.
By the last decade of the seventeenth century it
had become clear that the Dutch lacked the strength
to maintain a big empire and that Spain was fast
declining. The future, especially in North America,
belonged to England and France. In the wars of the
next 125 years European alliances shifted dramati-
cally, yet the English and what the Boston lawyer
John Adams called “the turbulent Gallicks” were
always on opposite sides.
In the first three of these conflicts colonists
played only minor parts. The fighting in America con-
sisted chiefly of sneak attacks on isolated outposts. In
King William’s War (1689–1697), the American
phase of the War of the League of Augsburg, French
forces raided Schenectady in New York and frontier
settlements in New England. English colonists retali-
ated by capturing Port Royal, Nova Scotia, only to
lose that outpost in a counterattack in 1691. The
Peace of Ryswick in 1697 restored all captured terri-
tory in America to the original owners.
The next struggle was the War of the Spanish
Succession (1702–1713), fought to prevent the union
of Spain and France under the Bourbons. The
Americans named this conflict Queen Anne’s War.
French-inspired Indians razed Deerfield, Massachusetts
(see the feature essay, American Lives, “Eunice
Williams/Gannenstenhawi,” p. 91). A party of
Carolinians burned St. Augustine in Spanish Florida.
The New Englanders retook Port Royal. In the Treaty
of Utrecht in 1713, France yielded Nova Scotia,
Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay region to
Great Britain.
If the colonies were mere pawns in these wars, bat-
tle casualties were proportionately high and the civilian
population of New England (and of Canada) paid
heavily because of the fighting. Many frontier settlers
were killed in the raids. Hundreds of townspeople died
during the campaigns in Nova Scotia. Massachusetts
taxes went up sharply and the colony issued large
amounts of paper currency to pay its bills, causing
an inflation that ate into the living standards of
wage earners.
The American phase of the third Anglo-French
conflict, the War of the Austrian Succession
(1740–1748), was called King George’s War. The
usual Indian raids were launched in both directions
across the lonely forests that separated the
St. Lawrence settlements from the New York and
New England frontier. A New England force cap-
tured the strategic fortress of Louisbourg on Cape
Breton Island, guarding the entrance to the Gulf of
St. Lawrence. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in
1748, however, required the return of Louisbourg,
much to the chagrin of the New Englanders.
As this incident suggests, the colonial wars gen-
erated a certain amount of trouble between England
and the colonies; matters that seemed unimportant
in London might loom large in American eyes, and
vice versa. But the conflicts were seldom serious. The
wars did, however, increase the bad feelings between
settlers north and south of the St. Lawrence. Every
Indian raid was attributed to French provocateurs,
although more often than not the English colonists
themselves were responsible for the Indian troubles.
Conflicting land claims further aggravated the situa-
tion. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia pos-
sessed overlapping claims to the Ohio Valley, and
Pennsylvania and New York also had pretensions in
the region. Yet the French, ranging broadly across
the mid-continent, insisted that the Ohio country
was exclusively theirs.The Great War for the Empire
In this beautiful, almost untouched land, a handful of
individuals determined the future of the continent.
Over the years the French had established a chain of
forts and trading posts running from Mackinac Island
in northern Michigan to Kaskaskia on the Mississippi
and Vincennes on the Wabash, and from Niagara in
the east to the Bourbon River, near Lake Winnipeg,
in the west. By the 1740s, however, Pennsylvania fur
traders, led by George Croghan, a rugged Irishman,
were setting up posts north of the Ohio River and
bargaining with Miami and Huron Indians, who ordi-
narily sold their furs to the French. In 1748 Croghan
built a fort at Pickawillany, deep in the Miami coun-
try, in what is now western Ohio. That same year
agents of a group of Virginia land speculators who
had recently organized what they called the Ohio
Company reached this area.