Wars Within Wars - One Fire

American Political History · Jul 18, 2022 · 23m

In the late summer of 1684, a French royal army sat starving on the shore of Lake Ontario — and an Onondaga orator walked into its camp and dictated terms to the king’s governor. That was the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Five Nations: the most powerful nation on the continent, courted by both the French and the English and commanded by neither. This episode traces how five nations on a handful of rivers became that power. From the confederacy they built to end generations of mutual killing — the longhouse stretched across New York, the council of fifty sachems, the clan mothers who chose and…