The Lenape were not the only people on the bays to be defeated, without being conquered, by the Susquehannock's. In the winter of 1643/1644, an expeditionary force sent out by Maryland suffered a damaging defeat. Besides casualties suffered on the field, the Marylanders lost fifteen prisoners and two small pieces of field artillery. Efforts to ransom the prisoners were rejected. The Susquehannock's tortured them horribly to death. Eight years elapsed before the Susquehannock's made formal peace with Maryland .²⁰

Their victory stands out in sharp contrast against background events. Other Indians also did battle against Europeans in that turbulent time. The Esopus Indians rose against the Dutch, and Opechancanough's Powhatans attacked the Virginians. That they inflicted frightful damage cannot be gainsaid; but when the thunders of European rhetoric cease reverberating in the histories, one hears a toll of "savage" vengeance taken by the Europeans that far exceeded the demands of the Mosaic code. Cause and effect are not to be argued here. The relevant point is simply this: Europeans smashed the Esopus and Powhatan risings, but Europeans were not able to win against the Susquehannock's. This was the zenith of Susquehannock pride and power. In 1647 "a single village" of their people was reputed to have 1,300 men able to bear arms.²¹
Just how many villages they had, or what their total population approximated, does not appear, but they seem to have outnumbered impressively the thin populations of their nearest European neighbors.

To outward appearances, then, the Susquehannock's were the Great Power in their part of the world, but Susquehannock power was illusory because the mechanism for generating it was beyond Susquehannock control. That mechanism was the fur trade. To maintain their glory, the Susquehannock's had to get the weaponry that only Europeans could supply and that only peltry could buy. To get the peltry, the Susquehannock's had to hunt and fight under rules of competition set by conditions of geography and communication. Great distances lay between hunting grounds and markets. The cycle of the trade could not be completed without secure access to both a source of peltry and a source of trade goods. For a while, at least, Susquehannock military prowess and a spirit of competition among the Europeans of the southern bays had assured control of access to a market. But it was not sufficient to be mighty at the river's mouth; the best furs were beyond its fountainheads. In those distant regions the Susquehannock's were no longer so great a Power as in their homeland. Other Indian peoples, with equal or greater numbers, with determination just as fierce, and with exactly the same objectives, strove for mastery of the routes to the rich interior.

The best route for the Susquehannock's was up the Susquehanna River's West Branch toward Lake Erie. There the interlacing headwaters of

the Susquehanna, the Ohio, and the Great Lakes gave easy transportation for heavy burdens; the beaver of the west were plentiful; and the indigenous Indians apparently cooperated in one way or another. But the Susquehannock's were not the only trading Indians to head west. The Hurons had established an annual circuit of operations there, and the desperate Iroquois thrust themselves into the Lakes region to acquire the commercial quantities of furs no longer available through peaceful means after 1640.²²   Competition became keen and ruthless.

At one point the Susquehannock's apparently considered setting up a sort of Indian cartel. At the height of their power they offered alliance to the Hurons, proposing that they and the Hurons jointly should approach each of the five Iroquois nations separately – Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks – to propose a peace which "would not hinder the trade of all those countries with one another." Those who did not agree would get war. The Hurons were willing to negotiate, but the Mohawks had had enough already of Huron diplomacy. The Mohawks had negotiated with the Hurons and the French in 1645 for a share of the western beaver trade, only to be doublecrossed. Besides, the Mohawks would be at a hopeless disadvantage in an "unhindered" trade. They were compelled, by proximity and politics, to use Rensselaerswyck or Fort Orange as their market, and these posts were far more distant from beaver country than either the Hurons' market at Montreal or the Susquehannocks' market on the Delaware and Chesapeake. Unhindered trade under these conditions would have meant no trade at all for the Mohawks. As George T. Hunt puts it, "the Susquehannah embassies went to the Iroquois pleading for a continuance of a trade in which the Iroquois were to have no part." The Mohawks' response was to devastate Huronia in 1649 and 1650.²³   A great Mohawk effort to achieve the same sort of lightfling conquest of the Susquehannock's in the winter of 16511652 was repulsed, but conflicting reports suggest that the Susquehannock's suffered heavy losses. Shortly afterward they made their peace with Maryland, apparently to be able to concentrate on their northern enemies.²⁴

With this introduction the ensuing wars should logically have centered on a Mohawk- Susquehannock contest, and the historian is puzzled to find that nothing of the sort occurred. Indeed everything seems to turn out wrong. The Mohawks cooperate with the Susquehannock's and brawl with the other Iroquois nations; and when the Susquehannock's stand a siege in their home fort and later raid Iroquoia, Mohawk involvement is minimal. How could such a turnabout occur? Once more the trade was at the heart of developments, but to understand them now we must see the trade at both ends of its cycle.

It behooves the investigator of these years to step back a few paces from the map and take a large view, including Europe in his span of vision. Frontier history in the seventeenth century is the history of two frontiers: one is the frontier in the traditional American sense of the meeting place of Indian and European societies; the other is the frontier in the traditional European sense of a zone between great powers. Trading Indians straddled both these frontiers. They were subject not only to the stresses of ethnocultural contact but also to the struggles of empire builders. Backwoods diplomacy had a way of reflecting, however distortedly, the decisions made in Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris, and London; and this was the era of the Thirty Years War, the Puritan Revolution, the dynastic struggles of France, England, and Holland, and the creation of the Dutch overseas empire from Brazil to Java. Relatively speaking, when Indian turns of policy are examined closely on the assumption that their makers were as rational and self-serving as Europeans, they present a clear and logical pattern; what has made them seem mysterious is the manner in which European scribes recorded Indian policy statements to conform to the European's purposes.