The Iroquois Confederacy had become involved in the European fur trade in the 17th century, and depended on trading beaver pelts to Dutch and, later, to English partners in exchange for firearms, tools, blankets and other goods.

They had exhausted the beaver supply in their own territories and began to aggressively push north and west, into the lands of their traditional enemies, the Huron and Algonquin -- trading partners and allies of the French -- to seek new hunting and trapping grounds.

This rivalry over the beaver pelt trade led to a series of Iroquois attacks and raids on enemy native and French settlements in New France throughout the 1600s in the St. Lawrence and Ottawa valleys, which prompted the French to build a chain of forts as far upriver as Montreal. They also provided their native allies with firearms, but the Jesuits urged them to only arm Christian converts.

It was frontier war and both the French and Iroquois would burn enemy villages or food stores and commit atrocities. There were sporadic peace treaties with France in this era, but conflicts continued until the French made a more substantive peace treaty with all Iroquois groups in 1667.

By the latter half of the 1600s, the Iroquois had expanded into the Ohio Valley, effectively dispersing every native group that had surrounded them. But they didn't reap the expected rewards. The result of peace meant that France could now expand north, into the Great Lakes region and as far west as the Mississippi Valley.

As Britain and its colonies began to encroach on the frontiers of New France, the native peoples soon found themselves aligned with one or the other imperial power in various conflicts. In the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, the Iroquois pledged to remain neutral in wars between Britain and France, in exchange for trading rights. This ended nearly a century of bitter conflicts in the region, allowing New France to expand militarily for the next half-century until the Seven Years War. But this also caused problems for the Iroquois and its system of alliances with the Thirteen Colonies, worsening relations with American colonists.