Voracious reader that I still am i know all about the Beaver Wars. The Iroquois were the Romans of the Baroque Age, their empire reached it's peak by the mid 17th Century. They were aligned with the English Colonies who bought the beaver pelts, the English taught them to take scalps as trophies, particularly the French. At it's greatest extent, the Iroquois Empire controlled most of the Great Lakes. And like the Romans, they ran into an enemy they couldn't defeat: The Cree. The Algonquin tribes aligned with the French and it backfired on them, they were almost completely wiped out. It proved ominous for the Iroquois, it eliminated a buffer zone between them and the Northern tribes. The Iroquois lost the Battle of Mattawa. That allowed the new citadel the French had built to resist Iroquois incursions: Montreal.