Iroquois (Cromwell the Great)

The Iroquois, also known as the Haudenosaunee, are a powerful and important northeast Native American confederacy.

They are known to the French as the Iroquois Confederacy, and to the English as the Five Nations comprising the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples. The League is governed by the Grand Council of the Six Nations that is an assembly of Hoyenah (chiefs) or sachems.

The Iroquois have absorbed many other peoples into their cultures as a result of warfare, adoption of captives, and by offering shelter to displaced nations.

Diplomacy, Trade and Wars
The Two Row Wampum Treaty, also known as the Tawagonshi Agreement of 1613 or the Tawagonshi Treaty, is an agreement made between representatives of the Five Nations of the Iroquois and representatives of the Dutch government in 1613. It declared peaceful coexistence and trade between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers in the area. The factory of Fort Orange-Beverwijck is the main trade center for furs and manufactured goods and weapons between the Iroquois and the Dutch of New Netherland.

Beginning in 1609, the Iroquois engaged in a decades-long series of wars, the so-called Beaver Wars, against the French, their Huron allies, and other neighboring tribes. The Iroquois sought to expand their territory and monopolize the fur trade and the trade between European markets and the tribes of the western Great Lakes region. The Iroquois Confederation, led by the dominant Mohawk, mobilized against the largely Algonquian-speaking tribes of the Great Lakes region. The Iroquois were armed by their Dutch and English trading partners; the Algonquian were backed by the French, their chief trading partner.

The Beaver Wars
During the Beaver Wars, they defeated and assimilated the Huron (1649), Petun (1650), the Neutral Nation (1651), Erie Tribe (1657), and Susquehannock (1680). After the Beaver Wars the Iroquois became dominant in the region and enlarged their territory, realigning the tribal geography of North America. The Iroquois took as prisoners women and children, that were brought back to the Iroquois homelands and adopted into the nations.

During the Wars the Iroquois strengthened their confederacy to work more closely and create an effective central leadership. By the 1660s the five Iroquois nations ceased fighting among themselves. They also easily coordinated military and economic plans among all five nations. In so doing, they increased their power and achieved a level of government more advanced than those of the surrounding tribes' decentralized forms of operating.