When the Neutral fell, the hunting ground opened

They burned villages and ended the Neutral Confederacy as a separate nation. Estimates put the Neutral population at roughly 12,000 before the attacks; epidemics in the 1640s had already cut their numbers. The campaign was one piece of the longer Beaver Wars (opens in a new tab), covered more broadly in the Iroquois Beaver Wars story on this site.

The Neutral had lived between the Huron to the north and the Iroquois to the southeast, and had tried to stay out of the worst of the fighting—hence the French name. Once the Huron confederacy collapsed in 1648–50, that buffer was gone. Iroquois forces, armed with Dutch firearms and driven by both mourning-war captive-taking and the need for new beaver hunting grounds, turned on the Neutral and then on the Erie.

By the mid-1650s both peoples had been broken as independent confederacies. Survivors were killed, scattered, or adopted into Iroquois towns.

With the Neutral and Erie gone, Iroquois power reached over the hunting ranges of former rivals. The upper Ohio Valley was left without large resident confederacies. In the following decades it was used as contested hunting ground—first by the Iroquois, later by the Shawnee, Cherokee, and others who moved into the gap. That is one reason maps of Kentucky from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s read as hunting territory rather than a land of large permanent towns.

The land was used, not empty. Who lived where, and when, is often uncertain; early written references are mostly secondhand.

This story is not a Kentucky battle and has no Kentucky map pin. The events took place in southern Ontario. Their consequence for Kentucky was indirect but lasting: the opening of the Ohio Valley hunting ground that later Native nations and, after them, colonial hunters and settlers moved through. The Iroquois Beaver Wars story carries the wider arc through the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 and the Iroquois claim sold at Fort Stanwix in 1768. This page stays on the Neutral collapse and the hunting-ground years that followed.

Disease shaped these wars as much as guns did. Smallpox and other epidemics struck Iroquois towns and their enemies alike. Many raids were mourning wars, fought to take captives who could be adopted to replace the dead. The Neutral fall was military and demographic at once.

French observers had called the Attawandaron “Neutral” because they tried to stay clear of the Huron–Iroquois fight; once that fight ended in Huron defeat, neutrality offered no protection.