#131 The Furry Geopolitics of the Eastern Seaboard 1630s-1660s

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 131.
0:11.4	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I am recording this episode on October 30, 23, in New Orleans.
0:19.3	We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States
0:23.4	from the beginning without presentism. Before we jump into the history fun, please make note that I
0:30.8	will be in Denver for the afternoon and evening on November 12, 2023, and I'm going to do another
0:36.8	meetup of fans of the podcast.
0:39.5	I'll be staying downtown in the Brown Palace, and we'll probably host it nearby,
0:44.3	if not actually, in one of the hotel bars, probably about 4 to 7 p.m., something like that.
0:50.7	Please send me a note by any of the usual means, direct message on Twitter or Facebook
0:56.2	or by email at the History of the Americans at gmail.com. If you think you can make it so I can get
1:02.8	the appropriate space arranged, I hope you can make it. If you look up online timelines of wars between European settlers and Indian nations of the
1:15.3	eastern seaboard, most of them cover the Pequot War and then skip to King Philip's War in
1:21.4	1670 with nary a mention of Keefe's War or the fighting in Maryland or New Sweden about the same time.
1:30.3	Ope Cancana's final attack of 1644 has typically folded into a general summary of the Anglo-Powiton
1:37.8	wars from 1610 to 1646, as if the fighting were constant for 36 years. In reality, the 1640s and 50s saw a series of
1:48.8	conflicts up and down the eastern seaboard between and among various European settlements
1:53.8	and local tribes, in many cases, in places where there had not been fighting before.
1:59.7	The question is, what had changed? My first thought
2:04.2	was to roll through these small wars chronologically, but the more I read, the more I realized
2:10.5	that would not be very illuminating. One of the reasons is that there is even less documentation
2:16.2	about these battles than there was about Keefe's war.
2:19.8	We know, for example, that the Susquehontics whipped the Marylanders in an early skirmish, but only from the faintest of references.
	...

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