A season of unequaled calamities.

—Susanna Johnson

In fairness to the Europeans who came to North America to settle, the outbreak of hostilities between themselves and the native peoples seems to have been inevitable largely because the native populations were continually warring with each other. In befriending one tribe or another Europeans were almost surely to become targets themselves. Like dominoes in a row, conflicts between one set of native peoples had unforeseeable consequences throughout the native community. It is ironic, however, that the Iroquois, who dispersed so many of their fellow native Americans in the northeastern woodlands, were the last to make a firm and permanent alliance with a European power. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries up to the final conflict of the French and Indian War, the Iroquois Confederacy toyed diplomatically with both the English and the French. When the final alliance with the English was made, it was called a “covenant chain,” and it was not broken by any of the Iroquois nations until the American Revolution. ¹

The wars that characterized eighteenth-century Europe inevitably spilled over into America. The many conflicts that rocked Europe from

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