While fighting raged from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, the main theatre of operations was along the Great Lakes and St Lawrence border which separated the United States from British North America. It was here, according to Carl Benn, in his book The Iroquois in the War of 1812, that the opposing armies shed the most blood; in the heartland of the Iroquois Confederacy (Rotinonshón:ni in Mohawk), the affiliation of Indian tribes also known as the Six Nations.

We have only the Iroquois’ oral history as a guide, so the confederacy’s founding date is difficult to determine. Some academics have put it at around 1450, while others say it could even have been as early as the twelfth century or as late as the beginning of the seventeenth. What is generally held to be fact is that the confederacy’s founding father was Tekanawí:ta – the Peacemaker – a shaman and prophet who received a vision from the Great Spirit which set him on the path to bring unity and justice to the various warring tribes.

So successful was he that by the late 1600s the confederacy had become the greatest native polity in North America. Once dubbed the “Romans of the New World”, the Iroquois, from their homeland in upstate New York, dispatched raiding parties as far south as the Carolinas, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky and as far north as Michigan and Ontario, subjugating every tribe they encountered.

But with the coming of the whites, all that was to change.

The first recorded contact between Iroquois and Europeans took place in 1534 when the French explorer Jacques Cartier met an Indian fishing party. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain built a trading post at Quebec. A year later he led a military expedition up the Richelieu River and into the lake that now bears his name. He and his Huron guides met and defeated a party of Mohawk, killing over fifty and taking several of them prisoner. It was an incident which sealed the Mohawk’s hatred of the Huron and sowed their distrust of the French for the next two centuries.

But progress could not be halted. The arrival of the French and later the Dutch and the English led to the opening of the fur trade; the disastrous repercussions that enterprise inflicted upon the lives of the aboriginal population cannot be exaggerated. The demand for beaver pelts had the same effect on the Eastern Woodland Indians that the decimation of the great bison herds had on the Cheyenne and the Sioux during the latter part of the nineteenth century. It changed their way of life for ever. For after the hunters came the missionaries, loggers, settlers, speculators, assorted land agents and, of course, the government, and with the government came the wars.