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Prior to the 17th century, the Haudenosaunee "longhouse" extended from the Hudson River in New York to the Finger Lakes on the state's western edge. But during that century, they would expand to become one of the more formidable economic and political Native powers in North America. There are many reasons for this. Foremost may have been their great military and diplomatic skills, but another major factor was (and still is) the Haudenosaunee's great ability to adapt within a changing environment. "Prior to 1492, the major Indian trade network worked its way west, not east. And great cultures in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys far outnumbered the Haudenosaunee; that's where Indian America was at its heart. The Haudenosaunee were on the eastern frontier of those larger cultures and they developed a society to cope with that larger set of cultures, plural. The Iroquois used their white roots of peace -- they used their Great Law -- as the way of bringing in peoples that they had been at war with. They used diplomats to follow the trends of what was going on in the territory. But once you came under the white roots of peace, you were allowed to carry out your own religion, your own language. When the Europeans showed up, those cultures in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys had long since declined. But the Haudenosaunee still had the philosophical beliefs that enabled them to survive -- and they used all the accumulated knowledge from previous centuries to deal with the Europeans. It had evolved into an entirely complex culture that the French, Dutch, and the English found amazing to deal with."
Robert W. Venables, Ph.D.
"It's also true that there were a few people who for strange reasons didn't understand or accept the great message of peace and power. And for those people, there was a prescription: they could accept the message, or accept war. And that war would continue until either the message was accepted, or the nation resisting the message was annihilated, or adopted, or incorporated. And the Haudenosaunee were, man for fighting man, more efficient, more terrible than anything certainly the Americas have known. In modern terms, we would use the word terror. These people weren't just stealthy men who liked to kill, they also took ritual and unending revenge on the enemies of their clans. It wasn't just an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth; it was 10 lives for the loss of every warrior, 30 lives for the loss of a Sachem, and if, heaven help us, a Clan mother was actually killed, 50 lives! And those lives weren't just mere killings, they were tortuous executions and consumptions. The result was a reign of political supremacy backed by military and even psychological terror. So, taking this all into account, the traditional explanation of the incredible expansion of the League beginning in the early 17th century is supposedly related to trade, particularly trade in Iron Age technology, and most especially, muskets. Remember, despite the great league of peace, this was a world at war. Survival depended on getting access to European Iron Age technology. In the next 20 years, the Confederacy of Nations armed themselves for an enormous war of expansion, the so-called Beaver Wars. As a result of that, the Iroquois found themselves masters of a territory extending north to the Ottawa River, south behind the barriers of the Appalachians, west to the Illinois River, and southwest to Tennessee."
Stephen Saunders Webb, Ph.D.
"And in that sense, it's a tragedy because it became like an arms race. In the 17th century, if you didn't get fur-bearing animals to trade to the Europeans, you wouldn't be able to buy the guns. If you couldn't buy the guns, your enemies, both white and Indian, would destroy you. The beaver trade changed the Haudenosaunee's world view. As soon as they looked at the fur-bearing animals as part of a market economy, their religious beliefs were diminished -- they had come to see animals and other beings much in the same way whites were seeing them. The Haudenosaunee were always trying to keep things in balance -- the roles of men and women, their political alliances, their environment. They began to think as the Europeans, that the environment was there for the taking."
Robert W. Venables, Ph.D.
Several other factors led to the Haudenosaunee's decline. As the 18th century dawned, European diseases (smallpox worst among them) continued to devastate the Confederacy. More lives were lost to trade wars; and, less concretely measured, yet just as severe, was the impact of Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. "As they diminished in population because of the wars and because of the smallpox, the European population increased. And as that happened, the temptation on the part of Haudenosaunee young people was to look toward a missionary and say, well, our old system seems to be shaking, and we're not succeeding as a people any longer. And some of the young people would be attracted to Christian missionary efforts. That's a crisis that occurs to all human societies when they've been devastated with a terrible war or terrible epidemic. The major issue I believe that world Jewry faced after the Holocaust against them in the Second World War was, where was God? And that's a question non-Jews can ponder too, where was God in all of this? American Indian people went through this when they were devastated by war and smallpox, when they saw treaties being broken."
Robert W. Venables, Ph.D.
"Then, the beaver trade collapsed. Beaver hats went out of fashion in Europe and the most valuable product that the Haudenosaunee people had to offer Europeans was lost. And they only had one thing left to sell, and that was land. So there had been 250,000 colonists, say, in 1690; at the time of the American revolution there were two and a half million, but there's still only an estimated 20,000 of the Haudenosaunee. They're outnumbered, and these land-hungry, multiplying farmers are on their doorstep!"
Stephen Saunders Webb, Ph.D.
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