Iroquois Allant a la Decouverte, Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, ca. 1797.

Intrinsic Ferocity vs. Military Strategy: The Historiography of Iroquoian Warfare in the Seventeenth Century

Danielle Mead Skjelver University of North Dakota

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The study of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois, or People of the Longhouse, has long been a source of

polarizing debate. The discussion of warfare has been particularly charged. The Haudenosaunee Iroquois,

as opposed to the Huronic Iroquois, are unique in that their position as English allies in the colonial period

has afforded them an arguably celebrated place in Native American historiography. Even so, within this

largely celebratory discussion of the Iroquois, dissent has been the norm. This paper will examine the

historiography of explanations for Iroquois success in seventeenth century warfare. Beginning in 1609 with

their response to Champlain's attack and continuing throughout the seventeenth century, the Iroquois

participated in a great number of military actions. Among the larger conflicts were the continuation of

conflicts with the Huron from the pre-contact period; the Beaver Wars, which are also known as the

Iroquois Wars or the French-Iroquois Wars; the Susquehannock War, King Philip's War; the Iroquois-

Ojibwa War; and King William's War. The conflicts themselves are not the focal point of this paper, but

rather the historiography of the reasons for Iroquois success in this period. In the mid-nineteenth century,

one explanation was that Iroquoian success in war had its roots in the famous Iroquois League. In this same

period, the seeds for contention were sown in the form of an argument that the Iroquois possessed an innate

ferocity, that there existed something different in an imagined pure Iroquois gene pool that allowed them to

hold sway wherever they went. While the intrinsic ferocity of the Iroquois would have to wait a few

generations for its rebuttal, a new argument emerged in the early twentieth century: the effects of disease

on their enemies. Later scholars have argued for a more complex explanation that included most of these

factors. This paper will demonstrate that all of these interpretations of Iroquoian success bring something of

value to the academic table, and that a middle road is the best path to understanding Iroquoian military

success and motives.

Woven through all of the above discussions, one sees several major shifts in the overall

historiography of Native history in toto. First, from a belief in the inevitable triumph of European

civilization over the darkness of the wilderness, the trend has been toward a view of Indians as hapless and

noble victims of the inexorable, cruel, and dishonest rapacity of white civilization. From this perspective

emerged a view of Indians as people with agency, people who affected America's formative history, and

people who played a major role in Native-European relations. Second, while writers of the late nineteenth

century discussed Indian nations as separate groups possessing varied traits, discussions of these traits were

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rooted in ethnocentric ignorance and often racist pseudoscience. Later, most scholars in the nineteenth

century and in much of the twentieth century did not see variation in Indian nations at all. Indians were

supposedly a homogenous group where plains Indians were little different from eastern woodland Indians.

Through the efforts of archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians, scholars are now

arriving at a view of Native Americans as human beings with agency, as coming from many diverse

cultures and possessing institutions and skills of value to the Europeans whose suzerainty in North America

was by no means a foregone conclusion. Third, there had long stood a view that Indian culture and

technology were static in the pre-contact period. Anthropologists are largely responsible for dispelling this

myth, successfully illustrating that long before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans innovated as

they responded and adapted to changing environments, food supplies, and military encounters. Fourth,

through the influence of anthropologists, the historiography of Native Americans has moved from a linear

view of history as marching inexorably toward a kind of progress, to a more relativistic view of cultures.

Fifth, the view of the frontier as the line between civilization and savagery, between light and darkness, has

for many scholars transformed into a view of the frontier as a place of frequent contact and cooperation.

Finally, there have in the latter part of the twentieth century emerged many notable attempts to discuss

North American History from the Native American perspective.

Most scholars accept the idea of Iroquoian military superiority among Native peoples. Most

scholars also agree that the Iroquois' early access to firearms played a major role in their success in the

early contact period. There are, however, those who disagree, and they too will have their say in this paper.

Confining the discussion now to those who accept the notion of Iroquoian military might, the 1851 work of

Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-Dé-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois, offered an interesting theory. Morgan

argued that it was League of the Hodenosaunee or the League of the Longhouse that accounted for

Iroquoian success. Today, the League has its own historiography replete with much disagreement including

whether or not it was a model for the United States Constitution and on the period of its founding.1 Dates

have ranged within a century on either side of Daniel K. Richter's 1992 dating of the League's founding in

the late fifteenth century.2 The longhouse, a symbol of clan life became a metaphor for a greater symbolic

clan comprising the Five Iroquois nations of the Seneca at the "western door," the Onondaga, Oneida,

Cayuga, and Mohawk at the "eastern door."3 Morgan saw the League as an organization with authority that

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could field hundreds of warriors from its federated tribes. Most historians place some level of importance

on the League in the Iroquois' success. While Richter would take great exception with much of Morgan's

romanticization and mythologizing of the Iroquois, he agreed that the League was instrumental in Iroquois

success in war. Richter went so far as to say, "As the violence spiraled in what historians have labeled the

Beaver Wars, the Great League of Peace might better have been described as a Great League for War."4

The League was formed to stop the mourning-wars which were wreaking havoc on Iroquoian

nations. Daniel Richter explained the mourning war as the avenue by which clan members restored the

spiritual power believed lost at the death of clan members. In mourning-war people of affiliated clans took

captives, tortured, enslaved, and/or killed them or, conversely, adopted them into their homes. All of these

options, adoption, torture, death, and servitude could restore the lost spiritual power.5 Ongoing mourning-

wars decimated whole villages, and it was out of chronic warfare that the Great League developed to ensure

peace among the Iroquois people. This intra-Iroquois peace then channeled those war-like aspects of

Iroquois society outward to neighboring peoples.

For Morgan, the League represented evidence of civilization among the noble savage:

In the drama of European colonization, they stood, for nearly two centuries, with an unshaken front, against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and capable of self-protection, long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions, and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth in our Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the League, and their courage in its defense.6

For Morgan, this League not only gave the Iroquois their independence and unparalleled position among

Native peoples. It produced the Iroquois Empire and served as a calm, reasoning force behind the superior

numbers the Iroquois achieved when they fielded their warriors.7

The next influential work to address the Iroquois in some depth was Francis Parkman's 1867

France and England in North America. Arguing that Iroquoian success came from an inborn, native

ferocity, Parkman was a believer in Anthropometrics and attributed Iroquoian success to biological

qualities. Discussing Iroquois and Huron cranial capacity, Parkman argued for the "superiority of this

stock."8 To support this view, Parkman cited the work of American professor of Anatomy, Samuel George

Morton. Parkman's footnote reads as follows:

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"On comparing five Iroquois heads, I find that they give an average internal capacity of eighty-eight cubic inches, which is within two inches of the Caucasian mean." - Morton, Crania Americana, 195. - It is remarkable that the internal capacity of the skulls of the barbarous American tribes is greater than that of either the Mexicans or the Peruvians. "The difference in volume is chiefly confined to the occipital and basal portions," - in other words, to the region of the animal propensities; and hence, it is argued, the ferocious, brutal, and uncivilizable character of the wild tribes. - See J.S. Phillips, Admeasurements of Crania of the Principal Groups of Indians in the United States.9

Thus, Parkman offers the Iroquois a back-handed compliment. His pseudoscience seemed to suggest that

the Iroquois were biologically superior to Meso- and South American Indians, that superiority was

questionable because it only rendered the Iroquois more prone to animal propensities. Parkman thus saw

the civilizing of Indians as an impossibility. He was a believer in Manifest Destiny and viewed Native

Americans as obstacles in the march toward progress. It bears noting that twentieth century scholar Francis

Jennings was probably Parkman's most vociferous critic, devoting an entire essay to criticism of Parkman

and calling him, "a racist of the venomous type who did not hesitate to falsify his source materials to make

them support his Social Darwinian preconceptions."10

J.S. Phillips' work referenced above in Parkman's footnote appears in Henry Schoolcraft's 1852

Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States,

which was prepared by Act of Congress under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This work was

a compilation of pseudoscientific studies declaring various attributes to be inherent to Indians in general.

For instance, "The Indian has a low, bushy brow, beneath which a dull, sleepy, half-closed eye seems to

mark the ferocious passions that are dormant within."11 This is the climate in which both Morgan and

Parkman wrote of the Iroquois. American Slavery was still alive when these scholars composed their work,

and their theories reflect one of the prevailing views of the period: Indians and all other races were the

inferior to Europeans. These were the roots of Social Darwinism, which would soon appear as a theory in

America. Now discredited both scientifically and morally in the wake of the Holocaust, which illustrated

the damage such pseudoscience can do, Parkman's was among the most widely accepted theories for

generations.12

The 1904 preface to the second edition of Morgan's work on the Iroquois attempted to rebut the

prevailing view of Indians as barbarous savages in the way of progress:

To encourage a kinder feeling towards the Indian founded upon a truer knowledge of his civil and domestic institutions, and of his capabilities for future elevation, is the motive in which this work originated.13

5

Here the linear philosophy of Morgan's history was evident. Even in Morgan's admiring, sympathetic

advocacy, it is clear that he too sought the "future elevation" of Indians. For Morgan and Parkman,

Europeans encountered Indians at an unacceptably primitive point on the linear trajectory of progress.

Returning to Parkman's theory for a moment, even if Social Darwinism had not been debunked, inevitably

scholars would have noticed that because the Iroquois were among the most liberal in adopting individuals

from other nations, the concept of a pure race of exceptionally ferocious North Americans would not have

held water. Iroquoian racial purity was an impossible concept. George T. Hunt would make this very

observation in 1940.14

A rather different school of thought was that, at least in the case of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois

dispersal of the Huron, disease was of far greater importance to Iroquois success than any military

advantage. Karl H. Schlesier argued that in 1640, French Jesuit Gabriel Lalement observed that the Huron

and Petun numbered only about 12,000.15 Here, the historiography of the Huron population bears noting

because the size of the original population impacts Schlesier's argument. Taking the example of the Huron,

between 1616 and 1635, Samuel de Champlain, Paul Le Jeune, and Jean de Brébeuf estimated a total

population of about 30,000. Gabriel Sagard similarly arrived at a number between 30,000 and 40,000.16

These men all lived among the Huron for at least brief periods, and thus historians had accepted French

estimates at least until 1950. Robert Popham's 1950 estimate appeared in Gary A. Warrick's 2008 A

Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500-1650. Popham based his figures on archaeological

evidence and an expanded area of Huron settlement beyond Huronia proper as between 45,000 and

50,000.17 In 1971 and 1976 respectively, Conrad Heidenreich and Bruce Trigger argued for numbers of

21,000 and 18,000 respectively within Huronia.18 While a number of historians continue to accept 30,000

as the best estimate, the issue is far from settled. Haggling over numbers may seem fruitless, but these

numbers are important, especially as they relate to death rates from epidemics. If 10,000 Huron survived

the epidemics up to 1640, and the beginning population was 20,000, the Huron population halved. If the

population was 50,000, the devastation was apocalyptic. Whether half or eighty percent of the population

perished, the effect is tragic, for people are not mere numbers. And yet, it does matter whether the figure

was half or eighty percent. In 1643, the Jesuit Relations recorded:

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....where eight years ago one could see eighty or hundred cabins, barely five or six can now be seen; a Captain, who then had eight hundred warriors under his command, now has not more than thirty or forty....19

It would seem from this observation that a higher original population would be accurate. The effect was so

great, the numbers so horrifically reduced that a reduction of half seems unlikely to produce the results

noted in the Jesuit Relations.

Schlesier's argument was that disease and French meddling, far more than Iroquois attacks,

dispersed the Huron. He argued that between 1635 and 1641, the period when the Iroquois were supposedly

most active in crushing the Huron, the Iroquois themselves were beset by disease.20 In fact, Schlesier

argued that many of the military conflicts of this period simply did not happen, "These wars have sprung

only from the imagination of scholars."21 He rejected those scholars who believed, "Iroquois power lay

over the whole land, from Lake Huron to Tadoussac," finding instead that, "After the smallpox, the

Iroqouois were in no condition to waste any of their remaining manpower toward Tadoussac or even the

Ottawa."22 Schlesier argued contrary to many scholars that the Iroquois were not responsible for pushing

Indians westward into what would become Wisconsin. It was, rather, disease that caused Native peoples to

flee west, carrying disease with them. "Already in 1644, the smallpox had reached the Winneago of Green

Bay where 'the rotting corpses caused great mortality. They could not bury the dead.'"23 Schlesier's

argument was not so simple as to see only disease as a cause of Huron demise. He acknowledged that the

Iroquois attacked the Huron in the Beaver wars, but he saw the Iroquois as reluctantly drawn into conflict

by French policy.24 And he played down Iroquois military attacks, arguing that the Iroquois attacks on only

"two of seventeen Huron towns in 1649" were not responsible for the Huron demise.25 Rather, the

"disastrous division of the Huron," triggered by the French demand that allied Indians could not enter into

treaties, which meant that the Huron could not traverse through Iroquoia to access Dutch and English trade,

combined with disease to wipe out the Huron.26 Schlesier claimed that what other scholars call the Iroquois

Campaign of 1649 amounted to only "two short Iroquois strikes in 1649," not a sustained effort, and thus

credits disease and resulting hunger with the devastation of the Huron and the western nations the Iroquois

supposedly destroyed.27 Those Huron opposed to the Jesuits particularly and to the French generally

subsumed themselves into Seneca, Onondaga, and the Mohawk. Some Huron with the Petun together

formed the Wyandot or Wendat people. Others went with the Jesuits to Lorette. While no one has disputed

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that the Huron dispersed after 1649, the primary cause remains disputed. Rather than claiming that

epidemic was the cause, that French meddling that involved a reluctant Iroquois was the case, or that

Iroquois attacks were the cause, it might be wiser to acknowledge that both of these phenomenon had

tremendous negative impact on the Huron, and that together they caused the dispersal of the Huron.

Along a similar line of thinking to Schlesier's was Leroy V. Eid's argument that, militarily

speaking, the Iroquois were not as successful as historians have believed. Eid's sources for his argument

illustrate an overall shift in the historiography of Native America. Eid's sources are Ojibwa, Chippewa,

Ottawa, and Huron oral traditions. Writing in 1979, Eid was following the practice of ethnohistorians and

anthropologists who had been taking oral tradition far more seriously than did historians. This scholarly

exploration of oral history had been going on for some twenty years. Drawing on the work of nineteenth

century Ojibwa writers like George Copway and Peter Jones who recorded the oral traditions of their own

people, Eid argued successfully that discussions of supposed Iroquois military success in the west have

long neglected the other side of the story. In his 1979 paper, "The Ojibwa-Iroquois War: The War the Five

Nations Did Not Win," Eid proposed that Iroquois and Ojibwa did not wage this war using stereotypical

small Indian war parties of "skulking" warriors.28 Rather, Eid finds a description of:

a great campaign mobilizing thousands of warriors on both sides, a great campaign in which Algonquian-speaking Indians combine in great numbers to crush their common enemy, a great campaign in which armies start at different sites, move along the Great Lakes waterway, clear the enemy from those bodies of water, and chase the foe down several rivers connecting numerous lakes. The loser, the Five Nations, never fully recovers. For numbers participating, for strategy employed, for importance of the consequences following from the war, there's absolutely no other Indian military campaign like it.29

Eid lays out what he calls the Ojibwa Thesis, which comes from the writings of,

"Ojibwa/Chippewa/Ottawa (Anishinabe) tribal stock."30 He argued that the Ojibwa Thesis was important

because it undermined the image of the, "ruthless and eminently successful Iroquois war machine."31 Eid

also saw those Huron who had merged with Algonquian peoples as playing a major role in this campaign.

Eid seemed to accept the dismissal of Ojibwa accounts by traditional historians. But he wondered at the

disregard Ojibwa oral tradition has received from modern scholars. Eid found that historians have largely

dismissed the Huron whom the Iroquois dispersed, and they have not explored the potential Huron role in

the later Algonquian trouncing of the Iroquois. While the eminent anthropologist Bruce Trigger was not

one to dismiss oral tradition, even he did not explore the Huron involvement in the Ojibwa-Iroquois War.32

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Eid argued that this war was a major factor in the weakened state of the Iroquois at the end of the

seventeenth century.

Eid was not alone in his view. Donald B. Smith and Edward S. Rogers, also writing in the 1970s,

employed Ojibwa oral tradition in their discussion of the conflict.33 Eid and other scholars who have not

dismissed oral sources in their study of the Iroquois through their enemies have found great consistency in

the oral traditions written down in the nineteenth century.34 Eid also found references to a "severe Iroquois

defeat in the northern wilderness in the late 1680s," among the writings of both English and French

observers.35 It has not been in dispute that as the eighteenth century dawned, the Iroquois were suffering

from a devastating final Beaver War and King William's War, neither of which saw the promised English

assistance.36 What has been in dispute is whether or not these two events were sufficient to produce an

eclipse of Iroquois power at the end of the seventeenth century or whether a number of Iroquois defeats

missing from the record might explain such an eclipse.37 Eid claimed that, "Iroquois historiography suffers

from a 'structural amnesia' in regard to the Iroquois-Algonquian war."38 The work of these scholars is

important not just for the light it sheds on a growing discussion but because it demonstrated that oral

tradition has merit. The historiography of the Iroquois, particularly in the area of warfare, has demonstrated

the need for sustained effort in this field. Thus far, ethnohistorians have seemed best equipped to do this,

although more and more scholars are following the lead of ethnohistorians in using a broad array of

sources.

Francis Jennings too saw Iroquois military prowess as more legend than reality. In his 1984 The

Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies

from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744, Francis Jennings argued that the "myth" of the

Iroquois Empire had its origins in a misconception of the Iroquois Covenant Chain, not to be confused with

the League. And he blamed Morgan for perpetuating this myth.39 For Jennings, the Iroquois Empire was an

English construct allowing them to justify claims to land that did not truly belong to the Iroquois: "the

British donated an empire to the Iroquois in order to claim it for themselves."40 He described the Chain as a

"bicultural confederation," of six English colonies and roughly double that number of Native nations.41

Jennings saw it as more of an economic and political association than any kind of empire.42 In Jennings'

view, from the Chain's inception in 1677, it was dependent primarily on Europeans, not on Iroquoians.

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Jennings argued against the prevailing view that the Iroquois adapted well militarily to European

challenges. Rather, "The great victories of the Iroquois took place only in the west, against opponents

lacking effective European support, and were confined to the brief span of 1649 to 1655. After that, the

Iroquois had nothing but exhausting, debilitating, inconclusive conflict."43 Jennings was part of a cohort of

scholars who viewed Indians as victims doomed from the start. He saw European colonization as invasion,

which he discussed thoroughly in the first book in his three part series, The Invasion of America: Indians,

Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest.

While that the Iroquois made calculated military, economic, and political moves to position

themselves to participate in European trade, Jennings saw the Iroquois as exploited in the hands of the

English. He did not see the Dutch as having the same power to exploit the Iroquois. Jennings exposed the

English use of the Iroquois as a military buffer against the French, and compared the Iroquois relationship

to the English as that of "vassals" to lords.44 Jennings discussed a reduction by half in the Iroquoian

population from their warring against the French on behalf of the English. He saw the Covenant Chain as

hollow and leaving the Iroquois virtually alone. In the broader overarching themes of Indian

historiography, Jennings' work marked a point at which Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis was

losing sway. Jennings rejected Turner's theory that the frontier was, "the meeting point between savagery

and civilization."45 Rather, he emphasized that conflict and separation did not characterize Iroquois-

European relations as much as cooperation and frequent contact did.46

While scholars have largely agreed that the English used the Iroquois, many have also seen the

Iroquois as using the English as well as adopting their tactics. Many of the scholars who have found the

Iroquois to be militarily powerful have also not seen them as doomed from the start. Some scholars have

embraced the notion of the "skulking way of war," while others have found direct assault and something

akin to European field warfare.47 In 1991, Patrick Malone argued that northeastern Indians were shocked by

what he described as "total warfare," meaning the total annihilation of a place and its population as

witnessed by Mohegan and Narragansett warriors at the Pequot Fort in 1637.48 He argued as have many

scholars that Indians adopted European tactics and that they adopted some aspects of total warfare.

Acknowledging that Indians never killed on the scale of Europeans, Malone stated, "Wars between Indians

had become bloodier as the weapons and attitudes of the Europeans influenced the native culture."49

10

Scholars have largely agreed that the early Iroquois access to firearms gave them an advantage.50 Malone

discussed the Native impact of European warfare in their adoption of the skulking way of war.51

Of tremendous interest is the new role of military history in the historiography of Iroquoian

warfare. Craig S. Keener and Keith F. Otterbein are among the many scholars who have adopted the

approaches of military historians and ethnohistorians to understand Iroquoian methods of fighting. These

scholars bemoaned the lack of attention paid to the specifics of Iroquoian military tactics. Citing the most

thorough and respected of modern scholarship on the Huron and Haudenosaunee Iroquois, Keener and

Otterbein have found that no one in the field has made a detailed attempt to understand the methods of

warfare among these nations. They acknowledged that Bruce G. Trigger devoted considerable space in his

1987 work, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of The Huron People to 1660, to warfare, but even there,

they found the tactical analysis lacking.52 Countering Schlesier's argument that disease did most of the

damage and that there were only two small battles between the Haudenosaunee Iroquois and the Huron in

1649 was Keith Otterbein's 1979 case study of this conflict. He described the Iroquois attacks on Huronia

as "the Iroquois Campaign of 1649," giving it a much more strategic feel that terms like "skirmish" or

"attack" that have been more common.53 Using maps and analysis of maneuvers in three battles and the

Iroquoian retreat, Otterbein found Iroquois military success in this particular campaign arising through

superior Iroquoian military sophistication and inferior defense methods among the Huron:

....the Huron were vulnerable because they had isolated villages, isolated in terms of space, communications, and military practices. Furthermore, the manner in which the Iroquois were able to use their forces was militarily more sophisticated. But perhaps most importantly, the Hurons made the serious error of committing their warriors piecemeal to battle. If they had been able to concentrate their forces and thereby take advantage of a tactical error made by the Iroquois, they might have been able to defeat the Iroquois both in 1649 and in subsequent wars.54

In battle-by-battle accounts, Otterbein analyzed maneuvers and tactics. Not only were Huron villages

isolated in terms of space, but there was no method of communicating from one village to the other the

need for reinforcements.55 Otterbein's was a completely different approach offering a much more thorough

study of Iroquoian warfare than other historians had offered. While descriptions of forces moving as a

whole seem a touch exaggerated, Otterbein successfully demonstrated that that the "Iroquois had one army

and the Huron had many armies," and that the Iroquoian army acted cooperatively.56

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Otterbein's overall theory of Iroquoian success in the seventeenth century, their success beyond

this campaign, boiled down to three things: "access to guns and ammunition....a strategic position between

the western fur supply and the eastern market....and superior tactics at critical times during the 17th

century."57 It is interesting that Otterbein did not credit the adoption of European tactics with Iroquoian

sophistication. This was quite possibly accurate, and while the work of Malone and many others who have

argued that Natives adopted European tactics has been persuasive, the sophistication of Iroquoian tactics

probably predated European contact. Certainly the pre-contact existence of the League would attest to that

possibility. Combined experience among the Five Nations would have been an asset in creating the success

the Iroquois enjoyed in the seventeenth century. Most important to the historiography is the manner in

which Otterbein analyzes these battles. At a glance, this study appears identical to any conventional study

of warfare, and upon closer examination, one finds that that is precisely what it was. Otterbein argued,

"Tactically, the ability to concentrate their entire force of 1,000 warriors for a surprise attack upon one

village, and then to follow this up with an attack upon a second village, leaving behind only a garrison to

secure the first village captured, meets every 'principle of war' identified by great generals and military

analysts."58 Treating Huron and Haudenosaunee Iroquois warfare as tactical, as planned and not as mere

unbridled ferocity, Otterbein brought fuller understanding to Native warfare as a whole and to the success

of the Iroquois in this campaign in particular. This was equally true of Craig S. Keener.

Where Otterbein relied primarily on European observations, Keener employed ethnohistorical

methods in his research. Relying especially archaeological evidence, Keener's 1999 work argued for a pre-

contact superiority of military sophistication among the Iroquois of the League. He explained, "that through

the process of trial and error, warfare acted as a selective process upon offensive strategies and assault

tactics used against fortification during the late prehistoric and early historic periods."59 While not

discrediting the role ambush tactics played in Iroquoian warfare, Keener contested the stereotype of the

"skulking Indian" firing "from cover of ambush only when he greatly outnumbers an enemy," that still

exists even in academia.60 Rather, Keener asserted that large, organized, direct assaults on fortified enemy

positions were also used in the seventeenth century.61 Keener argued that in the pre-contact period, Iroquois

forces indeed operated in small parties of five to twenty but also in forces of hundreds.62 Keener has not

been alone in arguing that large forces played a role in Iroquoian warfare in the pre-contact period. Bruce

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Trigger argued of the Huron that at times battle lines were drawn in an open field where something not

entirely alien to European ideas of warfare occurred.63

Archaeological and written evidence demonstrates that the Iroquois of the League and the Huron

had shifted from traditional circular palisades to European style fortifications. Forty to fifty foot high

double and triple walled fortifications in rectangular and trapezoidal shapes with bastions for keeping

watch and for firing on enemies had appeared by the 1640s. These fortifications also contained stores of

water for extinguishing fires from flaming arrows.64 Keener argued that in attacking these large

fortifications, particularly among the Huron where they were common, Iroquoian forces adapted pre-

contact tactics to meet the new challenge of European style fortifications. Siege warfare which had existed

in the pre-contact period continued, but what was most interesting in Keener's work and what was most

contrary to the prevailing view of a skulking style of warfare was the direct assault. While muskets had

rendered traditional native wooden armor obsolete, the Iroquois developed new forms of wood-construction

protection that would allow direct assault.65 "In the 1650s, the Iroquois constructed movable barriers or

walls and protective shields (called mantlets) to defend warriors on the approach to the outer wall."66 For

the purpose of approaching a fortification, the Iroquois reintroduced the hand-held shields they had

abandoned. These shields were, "made of thicker pieces of wood, capable of withstanding musket fire."67

Jesuits described the movable barriers as a, "mobile counter-palisade," that several warriors would carry,

providing cover for those behind them in the assault on the fortification.68 Keener observed clear changes in

Iroquoian assault tactics between 1640 and 1700, arguing that the pre-contact trial-and-error method of

honing approaches to warfare continued to serve the Iroquois well as they encountered new methods of

defense and assault.69 His larger contribution to the historiography of Iroquoian warfare, however, lay in his

contesting of the stereotypical skulking warrior. Keener demonstrated that fully fourteen percent of attacks

on enemies were direct assaults.70 This illustrated how narrow academic understanding of Iroquoian assault

tactics has been. One of the most important arguments Keener made was part of another overarching shift

in the historiography of Native America: that Native culture and technology were not static before the

arrival of Europeans.

13

As did those arguing for a pre-contact Iroquoian prowess, Allen W. Trelease stated in 1962, "the

Iroquois seem to have had an impressive list of enemies before the Dutch arrived on the Hudson or the

French on the St. Lawrence."71 Trelease offered a more complex set of factors explaining Iroquois success:

It was pure chance which put them athwart one of the few passes in the Appalachian mountain chain, giving equal access to the western fur supply and the eastern market. This in turn conferred an economic power and strategic importance which enabled them to acquire more and better armaments than most of their Indian rivals. The Iroquois' superior political organization enabled them to use this strength more effectively, and the stronger they became the more willing the English were to propitiate them with additional armaments. This willingness was further intensified by the increasing imperialist rivalry with France after 1680, when the Iroquois emerged as useful auxiliaries."72

Trelease's argument was for complexity. There have been a number of interpretations, including that the

Iroquois were not really that successful at all and that they were dependent first on the Dutch and then on

the English. It seems that a complex set of factors is the best argument but one that is still embraced by

surprisingly few historians, ethnohistorians, anthropologists.

Two scholars whose work this paper does not address are James Axtell and Elizabeth Tooker.

While Axtell's work was not directly related to the Iroquois, he has been a pioneer and vocal advocate in

the field of ethnohistory. Elizabeth Tooker has indeed done extensive work specifically on the Iroquois. It

is regrettable that her work finds no representation in this paper due to an oversight not noticed until the last

moment. However, her work appears here if only in its influence on Bruce Trigger who followed closely in

her footsteps and with whom he co-authored a 1967 ethnohistory of the Huron.73 The importance of

ethnohistory to advances in Iroquois history can not be overstated. In the historiography of the Iroquois, it

seems that ethnohistorians have been most likely to speak with a candid respect, neither hiding nor

sensationalizing those aspects of Iroquoian warfare that modern readers might find shocking. Though space

is running out, a word on these emotionally charged facets of war is in order.

It is largely because of ethnohistorians and anthropologists that serious, scholarly debate of a

detached nature has occurred in the most hotly contested areas in the field of Iroquoian warfare -

cannibalism, torture, and slavery. Slavery has not so much been denied in the historiography as ignored or

treated with minimal attention disproportionate to its significance as a motivating factor in waging war.74

Neal Salisbury and James H. Merrill have been working since the late 1980s to bring the history of Indian

slave trading and the experience of Indian slaves into the history of American slavery. Cannibalism and

14

scalping, however, have prompted strident debate. Both have been a source of embarrassment to Native and

sympathetic white communities alike, and have prompted denials that cannibalism happened at all and a

projection of the origin of scalping onto Europeans. In his 1979 work, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology

and Anthropophagy, W. Arens asserted:

Neither the producers nor the consumers of ideas are attracted by the possibility of diminishing the number of cannibals or incidence of cannibalism. The obvious preference runs in the direction of transforming those suspected of being cannibals into confirmed ritual endocannibals and then, in the twentieth century, into gustatory exocannibals on a grand scale....Only the fleeting quality of the documentation remains constant. In the deft hands and fertile imaginations of anthropologists, former or contemporary anthropophagists have multiplied with the advance of civilization and fieldwork in formerly unstudied culture areas.75

Arens rejected cannibalism as anything but an aberration in human history and certainly in North America.

He flatly rejected the practice among the Iroquois. However, Arens ignored archaeological evidence,

examining only written observations of Europeans.

In a thoughtful essay from the following year, Thomas Abler agreed that some of the evidence

used to argued for the existence of Iroquoian cannibalism was weak. However, he rejected Arens' sweeping

dismissal of cannibalism. He argued rather that such denials found strength in, "part of the contemporary

Native political movement's attempt to sanitize (remove all blemishes - blemishes as perceived in the light

of 20th century North American Indian values) from the aboriginal past."76 Abler argues that, taken

together, archaeological and written evidence are sufficient evidence to support the existence of the practice

among the Iroquois.

With regard to the debate about scalping, James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant offered a

thorough discussion in 1980, though not specific to the practice among Iroquois. Axtell and Sturtevant

traced the projection of the origin of scalping onto Europeans to an 1820 vision experienced by the

Allegany Seneca chief, Cornplanter. Axtell and Sturtevant paraphrased his vision:

The reason, as Cornplanter told it, was that before the whites came, the Indians "lived in peace and had no wars nor fighting." But then "the French came over," followed closely by the English, and these two nations began to fight among themselves. Not content to wage their own battles, each tried to involved the Iroquois. "The French," said Cornplanter, "offered to furnish us with instruments of every kind and sharp knives to take the skins off their [enemies'] heads."77

While this was not an explicit blaming of the French, by 1879 Susette La Flesch of the Omaha stated, "the

white man taught Indians" to scalp.78 She explained that, "It was practiced first in New England on the

15

Penobscot."79 Axtell and Sturtevant offered linguistic evidence to illustrate that scalping had not "precise

and economical words" in European languages, while "the Indian languages of the East contain many

specialized expressions referring to the scalp, the act of scalping, and the victim of scalping. Some of these

words were recorded quite early by European observers such as Gabriel Sagard."80 Their strongest evidence

for pre-contact scalping in North America, however, was archaeological. Axtell and Sturtevant offered a

great wealth of archaeological evidence from prehistoric sites to indicate that scalping occurred in North

America long before Europeans arrived.81

The purpose of Axtell and Sturtevant's discussion was not to disparage Native Americans. Axtell

and Sturtevant were following in the footsteps of Trigger. In his discussion of the challenges inherent in

combating stereotypes of the noble savage or the bloodthirsty savage, Trigger had the following to say:

Features attractive to white tastes are emphasized, while others, which are less attractive or even repugnant to them are either glossed over or suppressed. Polygamy, scalping, the torture of prisoners, and the abandonment of the elderly and ailing members of a band were all customs practised by various groups of aboriginal Canadians. They are customs which, when carefully examined, prove not to have been irrational or immoral in terms of the context in which they occurred. Under the influence of white culture, many present-day Indians have been made to feel ashamed of these ancestral practices to the point that they deny they ever existed. Yet surely to ignore or distort important aspects of aboriginal Indian life to make it more acceptable to European tastes is to fail in the understanding of Indian history. The bloodthirsty savage, the noble savage, and all the corollaries that are derived from these stereotypes are products of European imagination and wishful thinking, rather that delineations of real people.82

As did Trigger, Axtell and Sturtevant went out of their way to acknowledge that, "European soldiers were

guilty of countless barbarities in peace and war....hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and drawing and

quartering..."83 And certainly white men adopted the practice of scalping.84 Axtell and Sturtevant further

acknowledged that in the hands of Parkman and his like, torture and cannibalism supported tropes of

barbaric savages. However, in the hands of modern ethnohistorians and anthropologists, torture and

cannibalism have been merely one part of complex societies.

One can scarcely overstate the influence of anthropologists and enthnohistorians on the

historiography of Native Americans generally and the Iroquois specifically. These scholars have in some

ways given historians permission to move away from what Keener called "a unilinear evolution" of

humanity to a more complex understanding of aboriginal histories.85 For example, Trigger's writing of a

two volume history of the Huron alone has affected the field as a whole. That a single Native nation could

sustain a two volume history has given rise to many histories on specific nations. No longer confined to

16

broad overviews surveying a whole people, a wide array of monographs and papers have emerged to

discuss a whole range of topics related to Native History. While the barbarous savage has slipped into

memory for most academic historians, the noble and homogenous savage still appears in textbooks where

s/he is painted with a homogenous brush. Whole monographs and papers now address questions of empire,

slavery, witchcraft, diplomacy, taboo, warfare, law, cosmo- and ethnogenesis, law, population numbers,

crime and punishment, social value of conformity, methods of healing, religion, ritual, captivity, suicide,

marriage, divorce, child rearing, death, women's issues, agriculture, geographic movement, and even class

structure. It is a remarkable testament to the work of Bruce Trigger and other anthropologists and

ethnohistorians that Native nations are now receiving some of the focused attention necessary to understand

these widely diverse peoples of North America.

Because of their position as allies to the Dutch and English, many documents have survived to

offer scholars rich sources about the Iroquois. Because of their position as allies to the English, their

historiography has been in many ways positive. From the racist interpretations on a unilinear trajectory of

history to the ethnohistory of the last forty years of the twentieth century, Iroquoian military success has

prompted explanations from pseudoscience to the effectiveness of the League, the impact of early

acquisition of firearms, and tactical sophistication. As scholars have begun to question the veracity of a

phenomenal Iroquois war machine, the effects of disease as well as Ojibwa claims of their ignored victories

over the Iroquois have figured into the discussion. Throughout the historiography, one can observe major

shifts in thinking. Most modern scholars now view Indian cultures as diverse, not homogenous. Indians are

human beings with agency instead of hapless victims. They no longer represent savage obstacles to

civilization but a different kind of civilization. These shifts represent changes in American society as a

whole. From the pseudoscientific racism of the ante-bellum and even early twentieth century United States,

Americans moved toward the Civil Rights movement. This movement encouraged Americans to see

Indians differently but in some ways may have reinforced the notion of Indians as hapless victims. In part

through the American Indian Movement, it became apparent that Indians had not been solely victims but

that they had had agency too. Indeed, Native Americans had an enormous impact on Europeans,

particularly in the colonial period. As scholars have explored the wealth of more and more kinds of sources,

the understanding of pre-contact and historic era Native history has grown exponentially.

17

                                                                                                               

  1Elizabeth Tooker, "The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League," Ethnohistory 35, no. 4 (Autumn, 1988): 305-336; Philip A. Levy, "Exemplars of Taking Liberties: The Iroquois Influence Thesis and the Problem of Evidence," The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July, 1996): 588-604. 2Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 31. 3Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 381; William Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 225. 4Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 50.

5Ibid., 32-38.

6Lewis Henry Morgan, The League of the Ho-Dé-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois, 2nd ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1904), 3-4. This edition contained two volumes in one. 7Ibid., 107.

8Francis Parkman, France and England in North America: A Series of Historical Narratives, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1867), xliii. 9Ibid. 10Francis Jennings, "Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables," The William and Mary Quarterly, 42, no. 3 (Jul., 1985), 305-328; Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984),19. 11Henry R. Schoolcraft, Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States: Collected and Prepared Under the Direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Per Act of Congress of March 30 , vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Company, 1852), 323. 12Allen W. Trelease, "The Iroquois and the Western Fur Trade: A Problem in Interpretation," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49, no. 1 (Jun., 1962): 32. 13Morgan, ix.

14George T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in Intertribal Trade Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 158.

15Karl H. Schlesier, "Epidemics and Indian Middlemen: Rethinking the Wars of the Iroquois, 1609-1653," Ethnohistory 23, no. 2 (Spring, 1976), 141. 16Ibid., 141.

17Warrick, Gary A. A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500-1650. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 83. 18Ibid, 82.

18

                                                                                                               

19Schliesier, 141.

20Ibid.

21Ibid.

22Ibid., 142.

23Ibid., 143.

24Ibid., 131-142.

25Ibid., 136.

26Ibid.

27Ibid., 143.

28Leroy V. Eid, "The Ojibwa-Iroquois War: The War the Five Nations Did Not Win," Ethnohistory 26, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979): 298. 29Ibid.

30Ibid.

31Ibid., 306.

32Ibid., 307.

33Ibid., 308.

34Ibid., 297, 309.

35Ibid., 312.

36Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 189.

37Eid, 315.

38Ibid., 316.

39Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, viii.

40Ibid., 11.

41Ibid., xviii.

42Ibid.

43Ibid., 112.

44Ibid., 194.

45Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 3.

46Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 59.

19

                                                                                                               

47Patrick Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Lanham: MD: Madison Books, 1991), 6. 48Ibid., 79-80.

49Ibid., 80.

50Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 62.

51Malone, 100.

52Keith F. Otterbein, "Huron vs. Iroquois: A Case Study in Inter-Tribal Warfare," Ethnohistory 26, no. 2 (Spring, 1979): 141-142; Craig S. Keener, "An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Iroquois Assault Tactics Used against Fortified Settlements of the Northeast in the Seventeenth Century," Ethnohistory 46, no. 4, (Autumn, 1999): 777-778. 53Otterbein, 141.

54Ibid.

55Ibid., 150.

56Ibid., 149-150.

57Ibid., 150.

58Ibid., 146.

59Keener, 777.

60Ibid., 778.

61Ibid., 778.

62Ibid., 787.

63Bruce G. Trigger, The Huron: Farmers of the North (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winton, 1969), 54; Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of The Huron People to 1660, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987), 70. 64Keener, 786.

65Ibid., 791.

66Ibid.

67Ibid., 792.

68Ibid.

69Ibid., 799.

70Ibid.

71Trelease, 51.

72Ibid.

20

                                                                                                               

73Elizabeth Tooker and Bruce G. Trigger, An Ethnohistory of the Huron Indians from 1615-1649 (Washington, D.C.: Huronia Historical Development Council and the Smithsonian Institute, 1967).

74Neal Salisbury, "The Indians' Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans," The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (Jul., 1996): 457; James H. Merrell, "Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians," The William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 1 (Jan., 1989): 101-104, 110. 75W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 165. 76Thomas S. Abler, "Iroquois Cannibalism: Fact Not Fiction," Ethnohistory 27, no. 4 (Autumn, 1980): 310. 77James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, "The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?" The William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July, 1980): 451. 78Ibid., 452.

79Ibid.,

80Ibid., 463-464.

81Ibid., 467.

82Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, vol. 1, 10.

83Axtell and Sturtevant, 463.

84Ibid., 471.

85Keener, 779.  

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0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed 10 Dec., 2010). Otterbein, Keith F. "Huron vs. Iroquois: A Case Study in Inter-Tribal Warfare." Ethnohistory 26, no. 2 (Spring, 1979): 141-152. http://www.jstor.org/stable/481089 (accessed 22 Nov., 2010). Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America: A Series of Historical Narratives. Vol. 2 Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1867. http://www.archive.org/stream/franceenglandinn02parkuoft#page/n13/mode/2up (accessed 10 Dec., 2010). Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Salisbury, Neal. "The Indians' Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans." The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (Jul., 1996): 435-458. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2947200 (accessed 1 Dec., 2010). Schoolcraft, Henry R., Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States: Collected and Prepared Under the Direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Per Act of Congress of March 30 , vol. 2. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Company, 1852. http://books.google.com/books?id=4mtAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA233&dq=Henry+S choolcraft+1852+Information+Respecting+the+History,+Condition,+and+Prospe cts+of+the+Indian+Tribes+of+the+United+States:+Collected+and+Prepared+Un der+the+Direction+of+the+Bureau+of+Indian+Affairs,+Per+Act+of+Congress+o f+March+30.&hl=en&ei=owQJTeSSMs2Qnwf98uwu&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct =result&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed 10 Dec., 2010). Schlesier, Karl H. "Epidemics and Indian Middlemen: Rethinking the Wars of the Iroquois, 1609-1653." Ethnohistory 23, no. 2 (Spring, 1976): 129-145. http://www.jstor.org/stable/481513 (accessed 22 Nov., 2010). Tooker, Elizabeth. "The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League." Ethnohistory 35, no. 4 (Autumn, 1988): 305-336. http://www.jstor.org/stable/482139 (accessed, 22 Nov., 2010). Tooker, Elizabeth and Bruce G. Trigger. An Ethnohistory of the Huron Indians from 1615-1649. Washington, D.C.:Huronia Historical Development Council and the Smithsonian Institute, 1967. Trelease, Allen W. "The Iroquois and the Western Fur Trade: A Problem in Interpretation." The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49, no. 1 (Jun., 1962): 32-51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1889464 (accessed 1 Dec., 2010). Trigger, Bruce G. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of The Huron People to 1660. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987. ------. The Huron: Farmers of the North. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winton, 1969. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920. Warrick, Gary A. A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500-1650. New York:

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Cambridge University Press, 2008.