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Louis XIV sought to humble the pride of the Iroquois in 1687, but instead set the stage for 76 years of bitter war and the ultimate loss of New France
IN 1687 the new governor general of France's Canadian colony, Jacques-René de Brisay, marquis de Denonville, invaded the quiet hills of what would one day be New York state. Leading a French army of three thousand men, he defeated the Sénecas in one battle, burned four Indian towns and all the food in them, and leveled whatever crops were in the fields. He then led his army back across Lake Ontario before the Sénecas, reinforced by warriors from the rest of the Iroquois Confederacy, could retaliate.
An Iroquois who was a Christian convert had told Denonville before his departure that if he overset a wasps' nest, he must crush the wasps or they would sting him. Denonville left the wasps alive, and they lived to sting him and the French who followed him to New France. For the next seventy-six years, French militia and regulars clashed with Iroquois warriors beneath the canopy of trees that covered New York.
What was at stake was the future of North America. Although the fighting was nominally about beaver fur, it was in fact about whether the French or the English would come to dominate the continent and shape the government that would take form there.
The French had been in what is now Canada since 1534, when Breton sea captain Jacques Cartier discovered the St. Lawrence River. They settled along that great waterway. New France was an agricultural colony, as King Louis XIV wanted, spread between and around the large settlements at Québec and Montréal. In the seventeenth century, however, lured by the clamor for beaver and the wealth it promised, New France began to expand to the west. The architect of this expansion was Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac, governor general of the colony. (A triumvirate led New France, each appointed by the king: the governor, the bishop, and the intendant, who was responsible for finance, economic development, and the administration of justice.) Frontenac changed the direction of New France-without royal approval-steering it from settlement and agriculture to fur gathering.
The English, however, also had...