Iroquois in ancient times, settling in the backcountry of the Southeast United States, including what is now Tennessee. In 2010, more than 45,000 enrolled Six Nations people lived in Canada, and about 80,000 in the United States. The most common name for the confederacy, Iroquois, is of somewhat obscure origin. The first time it appears in writing is in the account of Samuel de Champlain of his journey to Tadoussac in 1603, where it occurs as "Irocois". Other spellings appearing in the earliest sources include "Erocoise", "Hiroquois", "Hyroquoise", "Irecoies", "Iriquois", "Iroquaes", "Irroquois", and "Yroquois", as the French transliterated the term into
Iroquois intention of the French to use the Catholic Haudenosaunee in the St. Lawrence valley as a buffer to keep the Haudenosaunee allied with the English living in what is now upstate New York away from Montreal, the center of the French fur trade. The attempts of both the English and the French to use their Haudenosaunee allies for their own purposes were foiled as the two groups of Haudenosaunee showed a "profound reluctance to kill one another". Following the move of the Catholic Iroquois to the St. Lawrence valley, historians commonly describe the Iroquois living outside of Montreal as the