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
Iroquois Iroquois clothing changed rapidly as a result of the introduction of scissors and needles obtained from the Europeans, and the British scholar Michael Johnson has cautioned that European accounts of Iroquois clothing from the latter 17th century may not have entirely reflected traditional pre-contact Iroquois clothing. In the 17th century women normally went topless in the warm months while wearing a buckskin skirt overlapping on the left while in the winter women covered their upper bodies with a cape-like upper garment with an opening for the head. By the 18th century, cloth colored red and blue obtained from Europeans became