Champlain’s Iroquois war of 1609-15 had gradually subsided into an armed peace, but in the 1640s new Iroquoian wars—which remain among the bloodiest ever fought in Canada—destroyed the Native alliances that had been central to New France’s existence since 1608. Rivalries between the Native nations were longstanding, but the coming of European alliances, European goods, and European weapons had greatly raised the stakes. Each now saw its rivals as threats to its survival and obstacles to its prosperity and prestige. As a result, the powerful Five Nations Iroquois confederacy sent its warriors, now familiar with European weapons, on a wide-ranging and astonishingly successful military campaign. Between 1645 and 1655, they destroyed all their Iroquoian rivals. In ten years, the Huron, the Petun, the Neutral, and the Erie nations, each numbering at least ten thousand people and each a powerful force in previous wars and skirmishes, were all destroyed. In the aftermath of these conflicts, the survival of the French community in the St. Lawrence valley was itself placed in question.
It was 1648 when the Iroquois invaded the Huron country itself. Under their attack the Huron nation, already weakened hy its terrible losses to disease, was further beset by internal disagreements. Some Huron saw in Catholicism, the missionaries, and the French alliance the only hope of survival, and for the first time many of them began to accept baptism. Others blamed the French for the epidemics and the dissension among them. Unable to muster an effective defence, the Huron were overrun in 1648 and 1649. Father Antoine Daniel died in the attack; Jean de Brebeuf and Jerome Lalemant’s nephew Gabriel, along with many Huron, suffered the terrible death by torture that was a standard part of Iroquoian warfare. The priests had won the martyrdom they sought, but the Jesuits’ most important Canadian missionary enterprise collapsed. One small remnant of exiles founded a Catholic Huron community at Lorette near Quebec, but the once strong Huron confederacy ceased to exist, its people killed, dispersed among allies, or absorbed into the victorious Iroquois population. The warriors of the Five Nations moved on to attack other rivals. New France, with both its missionary endeavours and its commercial alliances in ruins, was reduced to the position of an impotent spectator as the Confederacy destroyed one nation after another. Finally, the French colonists felt the power of the Iroquois armies directly, as they turned their attack from the defeated Native nations to the French settlers in the St. Lawrence valley.
In 1660 and 1661, Iroquois raiding parties struck at every part of New France. They put Montreal under siege, pillaged the He d’Orleans near Quebec, and continued downriver as far as remote Tadoussac. The colony’s farm families, terrorized by war parties that lay in ambush at the edge of their fields, had to retreat into palisaded forts. Workers headed back to France in greater numbers than ever, and the fur trade remained dangerous and unprofitable. Still, the Iroquois probably never threatened the total destruction of New France, although two hundred settlers may have died at their hands. Weakened by their own losses and seeking less to destroy the French than to make them pliable, the Iroquois never mounted a full-scale invasion against Montreal or any of the other settlements. Even the fur trade did not collapse completely. The loss of the Huron middlemen created an opportunity for Algonquian tribes to become traders. Indeed, the exploit of Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, a soldier who died with all his men in 1660 during a futile attempt to seize furs directly from the Iroquois, indicated that the French themselves were ready to go in search of furs.
Yet if the Iroquois did not intend to destroy the colony, they certainly played a crucial role in bringing down the Cent-Associes. The company had been in financial difficulties ever since its losses to the Kirkes in 1628 and 1629. In the crisis of the Iroquoian wars, the colony’s inability to pay its way or even defend itself became plain. In 1663 Louis xiv—king since 1643 and now, at twenty-five, emerging from the shadow of his advisers to begin the personal rule that would last until 1715— ordained a new start for New France. He dissolved the Cent-Associes. No longer would the colony depend on a company constrained by the profit-and-loss columns of a commercial balance sheet. New France would be a royal colony under the direct authority of royal ministers and the Sun King himself. Champlain’s colony, a settlement uneasily wedded to a commercial enterprise, became Louis xiv’s royal province.
World History
