![[Pasted image 20250202091129.png]] After Jacques Cartier’s voyages of discovery in the 1530s, France delayed creating permanent colonies in North America until Samuel de Champlain established [[Quebec]] as a French fur-trading outpost in 1608. Although the fur trade was lucrative, most potential French settlers saw Canada as an inhospitable frozen wasteland and instead focused their agricultural efforts on sugar plantations in the Caribbean. By 1640 fewer than four hundred settlers had made their homes in New France.  French fishermen, explorers, and fur traders made alliances with the [[Algonquian]] natives, especially the [[Huron]]. The Indians tolerated the newcomers because their numbers were modest and because the French supplied them with firearms for their ongoing wars with the Iroquois, who had received weapons from their Dutch trading partners. These mid-seventeenth-century conflicts were triggered by the lucrative trade in beaver pelts, earning them the name of the [[Beaver Wars]]; but they are probably better understood as “mourning wars” in which the Iroquois tried to assimilate the Huron people to replace members of their own community that had been lost through disease and conflict. Indians had been very effective managers of game for centuries in the Northeast, but the insatiable market for beaver pelts in Europe and the arms race between rival tribes encouraged them to hunt and trap beavers nearly to extinction, and to encroach on the territories of their neighboring tribes. Fighting between rival native groups spread throughout the Great Lakes region. Seventeenth-century French and Dutch colonies in North America were modest in comparison to Spain’s global empire. [[New Netherland]] began with trading posts along the Connecticut River and up the [[Hudson River]] near what is now [[Albany]], New York. New France and New Netherland remained small commercial operations focused on the fur trade and did not attract much immigration. The Dutch in New Netherland focused their operations to Manhattan Island, Long Island, the Connecticut and Hudson River Valleys, and what later became New Jersey. Dutch trade goods circulated widely among the native peoples in these areas and spread to the interior of the continent along preexisting native trade routes. French farmer-settlers called habitants spread sparsely along the [[St. Lawrence River]]. Traveling French fur traders and missionaries penetrated farther into the interior of North America, exploring the [[Great Lakes]] region and using the Mississippi River to connect with their other North American colony, [[Louisiana]]. These voyageurs allowed France to make somewhat inflated imperial claims to lands that nonetheless remained firmly under the dominion of native peoples (although this wasn’t unique to France). And because most of the French in North America were [[Voyageurs]], unions between French men and native women were common. The ethnically-mixed [Métis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis) peoples of Canada who trace their ancestry to these unions were recognized by the Canadian government in 1982. --- Next: [[3.6 New Netherland]] Back: [[3.4 Nuevo Mexico]]