French-Indian Relations (1672-1701) : An Economic, Political and Military Study

This paper concentrates on the political, economic, and military policies of New France (French Canada) towards the Indian tribes inhabiting and bordering New France during the period 1672-1701. It was a period of intensive exploration coupled with the fur trade, principally beaver, both of which activities spurred France to compel its “province” of New France to make alliances with the Indians and to block penetration of the French-claimed area by the English colonists to the south (New York and New England) and to the north (Hudson’s Bay area). Any research must be concerned with many interacting and conflicting factors: the policies of the French and English monarchs combined with the personalities and interests of the governors and officials in their colonies. The involvement of merchants and coureurs de bois often conflicted with the civil authorities, the various Catholic orders (Often in conflict with each other), and with the English colonies. In the midst of these conflicts were the Indian tribes with their shifting interests and alliances among themselves and the European traders and missionaries intruding into their territories. The research had several problems that seemed almost insurmountable. The first was the anti-Indian bias exhibited by nearly all writers. Added to this difficulty was the fact of scholars taking sides according to their nationality, American, English, or French. With the exception of The Fur Trade in Canada by Harold Innis, originally published in 1930, there was not a good general account of the French fur trade. There seemed to be misleading information, even inaccuracies, in the location of French forts in modern maps of this period. The sequence of events had to be ferreted out and combined in a cohesive manner from many sources. The first term of Governor Frontenac (1672-82) had conflicting and fragmentary records, while most of his second term was adequately researched; however, there was not a single adequate account of King William’s War during Frontenac’s second term of office. The missionaries left adequate records (i.e., the Jesuits), but they looked upon the Indians solely for conversion to their form of Roman Catholicism and, at the same time, blackened the Iroquois (New France’s main Indian enemy) and the “illegal” coureurs de bois (French traders to the Indians). The latter opened vast areas of beaver trade territory with “new” Indian customers and, because of high monopoly prices, would trade with New France’s main trade enemy, the town of Albany

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