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 and hoes to farm. As a result of the money earned from land rented to the Palatines, the Iroquois elite gave up living in longhouses and started living in European style houses, having an income equal to a middle-class English family. By the middle of the 18th century, a multi-cultural world had emerged with the Iroquois living alongside German and Scots-Irish settlers. The settlements of the Palatines were intermixed with the Iroquois villages. In 1738, an Irishman, William Johnson, who was successful as a fur trader, settled with the Iroquois. Johnson who become very rich from the fur trade and