I am not talking of imaginary horrors—I am speaking with all the soberness which the contemplation of such things will permit—of a deliberate system of policy pursued by the French, Dutch, and English, in these regions for a full century, and which eventually terminated in the destruction of the greater part of these Indian nations, and in the expulsion of the remainder. We shall see that even the English urged their allies—the Five Nations—continually to attack and murder the French and their Indian allies; and in all their wars with the French in Canada, hired, or bribed, or compelled these savages to accompany them, and commit the very devastations for which they afterwards upbraided them, and which they made a plea for their extirpation. But of that anon; my present business is with the French; and though the facts which I have now to relate regard their conduct rather in our colonies than their own, yet they cannot be properly introduced anywhere else; and they could not have been introduced impartially here without these few preliminary observations.
The French were soon stripped of their other settlements in this quarter by the English. It was from Canada that they continued to annoy their rivals of New York and New England, till finally driven thence by the victory of Wolfe at Quebec; and it was principally on the northern side of the St. Lawrence that their territory lay. On that side, the great tribe of the Adirondacks, or, as they termed them, the Algonquins, lay, and became their allies; with tribes of inferior note. On the south side lay the great nation of the Iroquois, so termed by them; or “The Five Nations of United Indians,” as they were called by the English. These were very warlike nations—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senekas—whose territories extended along the south-eastern side of the St. Lawrence, into the present States of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire—a country eighty leagues in length, and more than forty broad.
To drive out these nations, so as to deprive them of any share in the profitable fur trade which the Algonquins carried on for them, and to get possession of so fine a country, Champlain readily accompanied the Algonquins in an expedition of extermination against them. The Algonquins knew all the intricacies of the woods, and all the modes and stratagems of Indian warfare; and, aided by the arms and ammunition of the French, they would soon have accomplished Champlain’s desire of exterminating the Iroquois, had not the Dutch, then the possessors of New York, furnished the Iroquois also with arms and ammunition, for it was not to their interest that these five nations, who brought their furs to them, should be reduced.