Algonquin History
Algonquins in the 1700s AD
When European traders began to buy huge amounts of North
American furs to sell in Europe and China,
Algonquin hunters began to trap and hunt lots of animals, especially beaver, to get their fur
to sell to the European traders. They got in many wars with the Iroquois
to their south and west over land and over the control of the fur trade
in the 1500s AD. As a result, the Algonquin seem
to have pushed the Iroquois further south and
forced them to pay tribute. The Algonquin seem to have controlled land as
far south as the upper Hudson river valley (in modern New York State).
In 1570, the Algonquins formed an alliance with the Montagnais to their
east, and they continued to fight the Iroquois together.
Battle between the Algonquins and the Iroquois, 1609
By 1603, the Algonquins' situation had changed for the worse. They were often losing battles with the Iroquois, and this kept them from traveling on the St. Lawrence river. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain, a French leader, was eager to make an alliance with the Algonquins and agreed to help them fight off the Iroquois. French guns killed two Iroquois chiefs, and the rest retreated, afraid of the new weapons. The Algonquin were not able to get any guns from their new French allies, but they did get steel knives and other weapons, and with these the Algonquin, under their general Pieskaret, were able to push the Iroquois further south.
Now that they had some southern land, the Algonquins began to grow a little corn and beans, but they were really too far north for successful farming, and they got most of their corn and beans by trading with the Iroquois or with the French.
By 1629, the Iroquois had trapped all the beaver in their own land (modern
New York State) and wanted to expand their hunting land to the north, into
their old land in Canada, which was now held by the Algonquins. The Iroquois
got steel weapons from their Dutch trading partners and attacked the Algonquins,
and because the French were busy with a war with England, the Iroquois won.
The Algonquins lost all their southern land back to the Iroquois.
In 1632, the French began to sell guns to the Algonquins, to try to help
them get back the southern land (New York State), but there were not enough
guns and the guns were not good enough. At the same time, French Jesuits
began to convert people to Catholicism. This caused a lot of fights between
the new Christian
people and their leader, Tessouat, who continued to follow the traditional
religion, which further weakened the Algonquin people.
By 1650 the Iroquois had gotten much stronger than the Algonquin, and the French were not supporting the Algonquin anymore. Many Algonquins had died of smallpox in 1634, and the rest were scattered in small, weak groups.
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In 1667 the French finally fought off the Iroquois, and the Algonquin were able to trade furs again, but there were only about 2000 of them left. Another epidemic in 1676 and 1679 killed off most of them. With peace, their numbers slowly increased again.
In 1760, when the British conquered Quebec, the Algonquins gave up their alliance with the French and became allies of the British instead. Because they were allied with the British, Algonquin men fought on the British side in the American Revolutionary War.
Algonquin child and mother (1800s)
But after the war, in the 1800s, thousands of British settlers chose to leave the United States and moved north on to Algonquin land. There they began in the 1840s to cut down the forests in order to sell the wood. This ruined the Algonquin hunting grounds. Algonquin people had to move onto smaller and smaller reservations.
To find out more about Algonquin history, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Algonquin
people before 1500 AD
Chinook people
Sioux people
Inuit people
Blackfoot people
Ute people
Pueblo people
Iroquois people
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