Iroquois Finger Lakes region, and upstate New York along the St. Lawrence River area downstream to today's Montreal. French, Dutch and British colonists in both New France (Canada) and the what became the Thirteen Colonies recognized a need to gain favor with the Iroquois people, who occupied a significant portion of lands west of colonial settlements. Their first relations with them were for fur trading, which was favorable and became lucrative to both sides. The colonists also sought to establish positive relations to secure their settlement borders. For nearly 200 years the Iroquois were a powerful factor in North American colonial
Logan (Iroquois leader) become Logan the Mingo took the name "James Logan" out of admiration for his father's friend. With the disruption of warfare, disease, and encroachment, some Seneca and Cayuga among the Iroquois migrated to the Ohio Country, as did Lenape. Joining together in a process of ethnogenesis, they became known as the Mingo tribe. Logan the Mingo is usually identified as a Mingo "chief", but historian Richard White has written that "He was not a chief. Kayashuta and White Mingo were the Mingo chiefs. Logan was merely a war leader. ... " The Iroquois and other Native American tribes tended to