Iron Wars
North America, 1610 - 1620
On March 3, 1609, twelve Englishmen, along with thirty Chawtaw native troops and six Shawano guides, heads northeast out of Alexandria. Their mission: to contact and establish relations with the mysterious "snake people" the Shawano have been at war with for four years. The Shawano, an agricultural people settled in the Alpheus River valley, are being pressured off their lands by the aggressive Snake People to their north. The Shawano want European help in fending off these invaders--particularly they want guns and horses, both of which the Snake People possess--but London is loath to give aid without a better understanding of what is happening in the Northeast.
As they pass through the Alpheus valley, the English delegation moves from a region of relative peace and abundance into a war zone. The "Snake People" are pushing hard into the lands west of a great mountain range the English can just barely glimpse on the horizon. And when they reach the edges of Snake territory, and start through hostile country, what they see deeply dismays them.
They are met not long after crossing the border by a party of "Snakes", mounted on horses and carrying matchlock rifles. The Shawano interpret, and for the first time the English learn the real name of these "snake people": the Haudenosaunee. Explaining theirs is a mission of peace and diplomacy, the English and their native escort are led deep into Haudenosaunee lands. Along the way they see forts, clearly new by the freshness of the wood, and also just as clearly under renovation: the wood is being replaced by stone. Stone forts--miniature castles--are popping up all along a broad front stretching from the lake the Haudenosaunee call Skanodario to the Atlantic Ocean. The English pass farms where corn is being tended with iron hoes; some farms even have horse-drawn plows. Infantry on their way to the front pass by, clad in steel breastplates and carrying iron lances. The entire Northeast is unsettled, thanks to the Haudenosaunee.
Haudenosaunee expansion is driven by a thirst for iron. The war machine of the north requires ever more ore, and ever more coal, to manufacture axes, spears, swords, plows, guns, cannon, armor, and all the other metal accoutrements of modern life. Thanks to metal plows, horses to pull them, and new crops, the Haudenosaunee population is booming; from a population of just 9000 in 1582, after the great epidemics swept the Northeast, their numbers have grown to almost 60,000. This is abetted by the practice of war concubinage that has sprung up in the wake of vast "mourning wars". Haudenosaunee war bands sweep through a frontier region, pillaging villages, killing all the men, and taking the women back with them to their own growing cities. The captured women, little better than slaves, are expected to bear part of the next generation of Haudenosaunee warriors. Expansion must continue, for the Haudenosaunee. And so they need iron to support their expanding civilization and coal to smelt that iron. Charcoal would be better, but the Haudenosaunee are concerned about denuding their forests. They'll need that timber to build ships.
They've been checked to their south by an alliance between the Linnawpees and the Zennakomacks, two tribes who are fighting tenaciously and hanging on like grim death, despite their numerical and technological inferiority. Along the middle and southern Oskenonton Mountains, the rugged slopes mean that the indigenous Odalings have managed to hold off the encroaching Haudenosaunee, who desire the iron locked up in the Odalings' hills. Following the path of least resistance, the Haudenosaunee are pouring into the northeastern Alpheus River valley. Already they have annihilated the Monongahelas, assimilated the western Andasterons, and driven the Yeshang east towards the sea. Now only the Odalings stand in their way in the Oskenontons, and the Shawano in the Alpheus River valley.
When the English at last reach a large town, they are stunned by the size of the settlement. Thousands of natives live together in an urban area larger and more densely populated than anything the English have yet seen. Blacksmiths work industriously in their smithies, heaps of spearheads outside. A prosperous marketplace sees a vigorous trade in hides, grain, timber, and other raw materials, as well as manufactured goods like baskets, leather clothing, and tools. Longhouses of increasing size and complexity are everywhere.
They are taken before the regional Haudenosaunee war chief, a Kanien'keháka named Karriwasay. He does not seem surprised to see them.
Through an interpreter they converse. The English announce their intention to mediate as a neutral third party between the Shawano and the Haudenosaunee, in the hopes of creating a just peace and a more stable northeast.
Karriwasay just waves his hand dismissively. "These matters do not concern you, white men. This is for the red man to decide, for the Haudenosaunee to decide. All the lands upon which the Sun shines its rays shall become ours; we shall reach out our hands and take them."
"By what right do you make war on your neighbors?" asks the lead English negotiator. "What grievance have you against them, that you slaughter them and drive them from their lands?"
"By what right did you take the land for your city by the great water in the south? The right of the strong to take from the weak! The right of the civilized to take from the savage! We are the new race, the new people! We will make a new country. This whole land has been torn up by war, torn up and sewn together and torn up again. Over and over and over, this has happened. We will stop it. We will make a lasting peace, a true peace."
"You will make this land a wilderness, and call it a peace. When we came to the south, and built our city, no natives used that land. It was of no use to them, but of use to us. So when we built our city, and brought in our canoes fine iron tools from across the great water," says the Englishman, "we traded with the natives there for food and furs and other things we desired, and thus all prospered. All benefited. In this place, who benefits? Only you. Make a real peace with the Shawano, and there will be trade and prosperity and both you and they shall reap the harvest of such a peace."
The war chief laughs. "The Shawano can submit to us, and they will have their peace. Not before. Go back to your city, white man."
The first English embassy to the Haudenosaunee is a failure.
And when they do go back to their city, Celadon on the Hercules, it is with the grim realization that just when they thought they had rid themselves of their rivals in the New World in the form of the Spanish, a new set of rivals has appeared, summoned up like Nemesis. Conflict seems inevitable. Celadon is growing, and so too are the Haudenosaunee. Collision, not cooperation.
Celadon, the capital of English North America, has begun to change. The city's primary industry is smuggling. Mexican ports remain closed to European ships, and European and English New World ports remain closed to Mexicans, and will continue to be so into the 1630s. However, this has not abated the European desire for Mexican goods such as cacao, vanilla, indigo, cotton, sugar, carmine, silver, mahogany, leather, and more, all of which must be smuggled into the continent. The usual route is overland to Tampico on the Veracruz coast, and from there along the sparsely settled coast of New Canaan to Drakeshire and the Hercules River delta. The terrain there, perfect for smugglers, allows the small sleek ships to dart in among the various islands and coves, unload the cargo, and then escape. The contraband is then smuggled on English or French ships bound for Europe. The smuggling trade is so rich that, despite the Governor's best efforts to stamp it out, half the town's burgesses have made their fortune in it, and the fine mansions springing up alongside the Hercules are paid for with gold earned off smuggled goods. With agriculture having never been particularly productive, the illicit trade in Mexican goods drives the Celadonian economy. It is said that a young man can earn enough to start his own rice farm with the profits from a single smuggled load of indigo or carmine.
With the delta being agriculturally marginal, there has been little demand for land; most Dracontines are clustered around the coast. That, however, is beginning to change. In Europe a fad among the upper classes is reshaping the Dracontine economy. Tobah, a native plant whose smoke is stimulating when inhaled, is catching on with wealthy English, French, Germans, Danes, Italians, and others, and demand for the plant is growing every year. Cultivation of tobah requires a great deal of land, because the plant quickly exhausts the soil. This inevitably brings the increasingly land-hungry Dracontines into conflict with the natives.
Since the founding of the colony the official policy of the colonial administration has been one of friendly relations with the natives; the native Glorianans saw their numbers decimated by European disease, but the Dracontines have also had their population checked by disease--mosquito-borne malaria and tick-borne typhoid fever--allowing the natives to recover somewhat. For this reason, although the colonists had violent confrontations during their early years with the Blacklegs, Tanixes, and Dotchytawny, in the main their relations with their indigenous neighbors have been amicable. Trade, not land, brought most colonial adventurers out of their city and into the wild north. Further, a significant portion of Celadon's population has native ancestry; the Dracontine climate, while mild in many respects compared to more tropical climes further south, remains unbearably hot for many. Young women have proven reluctant to emigrate, in contrast to young men, who are eager for the opportunity to make a fortune in the New World. Convicts, a sizable portion of the new settlers, are likewise predominantly male. Many freemen cannot afford the passage across the sea and so sell themselves into indentured servitude in exchange for their travel expenses. They set to work in the new tobah fields for anywhere from four to ten years, but this arrangement is not conducive to bringing over a wife or family. As a result of all these factors, women are scarce in Drakeshire, with somewhere on the order of five men for every two women. Seeking companionship, many male English colonists turn to native women. The colonial government, who initially tried to prevent interracial marriages, eventually gave up in the face of overwhelming demand. Lord Drake does, however, insist that marriages be performed in the sanctity of a Christian church; native women must convert before they can marry white settlers.
Most of these "red brides" come from the Nawchee, a tribe located directly north of Celadon City. Marrying a native has an additional benefit besides companionship for young Englishmen on the make: the Nawchee practice matrilineal kinship. A man marries into his wife's family, rather than the reverse. Most natives in the region conceive as trade as an exchange of gifts between friendly relatives; culturally, either you are a relative or you're an enemy. Ceremonial adoptions cement alliances between clans, figuratively making the new allies family. By marrying into the Nawchee, young Englishmen can now "exchange gifts"--trade--with their neighbors freely. The Nawchee are being increasingly drawn into the burgeoning Drakeshire economy.
Not all Nawchee regard this as a good thing. Many young Nawchee men, deprived of spouses, have taken to forming secret societies for the purposes of meting out terror on the white settlers around the Hercules River. While this never amounts to more than the occasional murder, it adds to the subtle tension between colonists and natives.
The real problems are further north, upriver. Food has always been a problem for Celadon; with European crops not feasible, the people rely on the sea, rice, and corn for their nutrition. But when traders returning from the far-northern outpost at Alexandria, where the Hercules is joined by the lesser but still mighty Alpheus River, report that the land there is more temperate and more suitable for English agriculture, a land rush ensues. By 1620 nearly five hundred farmers have staked out claims around the fort at Alexandria. The garrison commander successfully keeps them from settling on lands belonging to the Illiniwek, from whom the English bought the land for their trading post, to the north and east, leaving only the southern approach available for settlement. Here the farmers begin hewing out farms to grow wheat, rye, flax, oats, and barley, and quickly find that they can practically name their price for grain downriver, so great is the demand for familiar English crops. Hops are introduced in 1624, and beer begins to supplement the rice wine brewed in the delta.
But this land now under settlement belongs not to the friendly Nawchee, or the relatively cool Illiniwek, but instead to a powerful and easily roused nation who stands in the path of English expansion: the Chickasaw. Numbering nearly ten thousand, the Chickasaw are traditional enemies of the Nawchee and the Chawtaw, Drakeshire's neighbors to the north and east. They do not take this incursion into their territory either lightly or lying down. As English and French settlers begin to colonize the Alexandrian Confluence, open warfare between the interlopers and the Chickasaw breaks out. Riverboats headed both upstream and down are attacked by flotillas of war-canoes, farms are burned and their inhabitants slaughtered, Chickasaw villages are massacred and razed. Violence is endemic along the middle reaches of the Hercules.
With the new threat of the Haudenosaunee and the more familiar one of the Chickasaw now dominating the military and political thoughts of the Anglo-French leadership in Drakeshire, Melusina, and the new colony at Côte d'Émeraude (1616) east of Drakeshire, as the 1610s roll on a new policy regarding European/native relations is clearly needed. The traditional policy of live and let live, which was effective for decades, no longer seems to be working. Fortunately for the English and French, the mid-to-late 1610s sees a pause in Haudenosaunee expansion as they consolidate their gains, but something must be done. The current situation is not tenable.