The goal of this “high altitude” episode is to establish a framework for forthcoming episodes covering the period between roughly 1640 and 1670. We look at the geopolitical landscape in the territories of today’s northeastern United States and eastern Canada in the middle 17th century. The key players are the European settlers – English, French, Dutch, and Swedish – and the most important Indian nations – the Susquehannocks, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Leni Lenapes, and the Hurons. They fiercely competed over the trade in fur, from the European point of view, and manufactured consumer products and weapons, from the Indian point of view. There would be blood.

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Selected references for this episode

Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America

Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

Francis Jennings, “Glory, Death, and Transfiguration: The Susquehannock Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophic Society, February 1968