Fahim Sadi
History 3072
September 18
When I see this image, the first thing that comes to mind is not a battle but a stomp. I say this because we can all see that in the middle, a Frenchman is standing with a gun, and the people of Iroquois are shooting him with arrows as if he is surrounded. However, this is sadly the opposite, as this was the battle of Lake Champlain, where the French defeated the Iroquois. About 9 Frenchmen and 60 Hurons fought against 200 Iroquois and beat them. This battle took place on July 29, 1609, when French explorer Samuel de Champlain and his allies fought the Iroquois. There had been previous altercations between the French and the Iroquois leading up to this such as the kidnapping of the Iroquois, the fur trade, territories and controlling of the resources, and the French alliance with the Algonquins and the Hurons. Iroquois people had a belief that the French were taking over their land, religion, and controlled resources. They were right, to say the least, because the French did indeed intend to take over and control the majority of the territories and resources. If you look at modern-day Canada, a lot of people speak French instead of what they would have spoken had they not been invaded by the French. The same way we speak English here in the United States is because it is a country that was once invaded and controlled by the British Empire which left a lot of influences and impacts. The same goes for the French-speaking regions and populations in Canada. I went to Canada myself this summer of 2024 and it was surprising to me that in the part of Canada I went to most people spoke French over English and they had very little English. Now, if one asked me why I speak English instead of French or Spanish, I would probably say something like “Oh, it’s because I was raised in the States or I was raised in New York.” The point I am trying to make here is that these regions had once been occupied by someone else by force hence we have different cultures and languages. So the Iroquois had feared that this would happen and they were very hostile towards the French as a result of that. The other two native tribes I mentioned at the end were the Algoquins and the Hurons, they were not like the Iroquois. They were more welcoming in a sense because they was willing to trade with the French. Champlain used firearms to surprise the Iroquois and catch them off guard. They were also wearing armor to protect themselves from the arrows, this was very critical in the battle because not only did the 60 warriors from the Huron help the Frenchmen, but the Iroquois were at a massive disadvantage because of the firearms and armor that the Frenman were wearing. I also mentioned that one of the reasons for this battle was because of the kidnapping of the Iroquois by the French. The Frenchmen Cartier was an explorer and he had kidnapped two Iroquois in one of his expeditions, from which one of them was taken to France. Therefore fighting the French was very rational to the Iroquois. We can see in the image that there are about 16 boats docked at Lake Champlain which one would assume were used by the Iroquois because there were 200 fighters, then we see Champlain and his allies by the trees firing at the Iroquois. We can only speculate that the Iroquois were only hostile because they were afraid of losing their land and they were different from other tribes. In truth, this battle completely changed the relationship between the Iroquois and the French.
Work Cited
“Browse JCB Archive of Early American Images.” John Carter Brown, https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/JCB~1~1. Accessed 18 September 2024.