Iroquois

[George Lang]

My apologies for cluttering the mail, but I've bundled up a few things
over the past week.  Follows an extract which readers will correctly
perceive as something from a manuscript.  Perhaps it will be of use to
others....

No mean component of the transcontinental fur trade were Iroquois,
contract steel trappers from peoples now  officially confined to the
Kahnawaké, Kanesataké and Akwesasne reservations in present day
Québec and New York State, and who had worked in the Ohio Valley
and then beyond the Great Lakes on the prairies and as contract
trappers with the North West Company since 1800, intermarrying with
“Cree and Métis, but later with whites.” (Dickason  992:203-4).

To them French was, if not native at least common.   For example, one
Registre Brugnier, who was at Astoria, came from “a respectable
Montreal Iroquois family who lost his outfit and was reduced to
hunting.”  Although the Brugnier do not appear in the Catholic Church
Records, there are numerous “Iroquois” by surname, perhaps
because men “with tin ears, like David Thompson and Alex[ander]
Henry gave up trying to spell Iroquois names and referred to Pierre
Iroquois, Joseph Iroquois, Thomas Iroquois, or Charles Iroquois”
(Jackson 1996:20). Their names do regularly appear in the business
records of the trade: Dehodionwasse, Hatchiorauquasha, Kanota,
Konitogen, Hayaiguarelita, Miaquin, Sasnirie, Sowenge,
Tennnotiessen, Thaarackton, Karotohaw Ostiserio, Tevanitgaon.

This transcontinental wave of displaced Iroquois raises a neglected
issue in the history of Jargon.  In the first place, the Iroquois
“remembered the destruction of the ancient Longhouse heritage. The
fur trade [in the East had] ended the dream of Indians, scattering
natives like the ashes of the destroyed council fire.  The Iroquois knew
the fate of Indian America long before other nations” (Jackson
1996:29).  Yet the Iroquois were collaborators in the transformation
which produced Jargon and eventually dissolved most Indian cultures
in the Pacific Northwest.

In some sense, the role of the Iroquois as displaced, transfigured
agents of the new economy was due to a technological innovation, the
invention and marketing of the steel trap, which drastically altered the
ways in which beaver and other fur-bearing prey had been harvested
by relatively unaltered Indian societies for the benefit of British and
American trading companies, a novelty to which the Iroquois,
thousands of miles from their homelands were amenable, and at
which they were adept…