<P> By 1677, the Iroquois formed an alliance with the English through an agreement known as the Covenant Chain . By 1680, the Iroquois Confederacy was in a strong position, having eliminated the Susquehannock and the Wampanoag, taken vast number of captives to increase the size of their population, and had secured an alliance with the English that guaranteed supplies of guns and ammunition . Together the allies battled to a standstill the French, who were allied with the Huron . These Iroquoian people had been a traditional and historic foe of the Confederacy . The Iroquois colonized the northern shore of Lake Ontario and sent raiding parties westward all the way to Illinois Country . The tribes of Illinois were eventually defeated, not by the Iroquois, but by the Potawatomi . </P> <P> In 1679, the Susquehannock, with Iroquois help, attacked Maryland's Piscataway and Mattawoman allies . Peace was not reached until 1685 . During the same period, French Jesuit missionaries were active in Iroquoia, which led to a voluntary mass relocation of many Haudenosaunee to the St. Lawrence valley at Kahnawake and Kanesatake near Montreal . It was the 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 Canadian Iroquois while the Iroquois who remained in the historical heartland of Iroquoia in modern upstate New York are described as the League Iroquois . </P> <P> In 1684, the governor of New France, Joseph - Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, decided to launch a putative expedition against the Seneca, who were attacking French and Algonquian fur traders in the Mississippi river valley, and asked for the Catholic Haudenosaunee to contribute men for his expedition . La Barre's expedition ended in fiasco in September 1684 when influenza broke out among the troupes de la Marine while the Canadian Iroquois warriors refused to fight, instead only engaging in verbal battles as they exchanged insults with the Seneca warriors . King Louis XIV of France was not amused when he heard of La Barre's failure, which led him to sack La Barre as governor of New France, and sent as his replacement, the marquis de Denonville, who arrived in August 1685 as the new governor of New France with orders from the king to crush the Haudenosaunee confederacy . The Sun King had instructed Denonville to ensure that the "grandeur" of France be respected even in the most remotest woods of North America . </P> <P> In 1684, the Iroquois invaded Virginia and Illinois territory again and unsuccessfully attacked French outposts in the latter . Trying to reduce warfare in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, later that year, the Virginia Colony agreed in a conference at Albany to recognize the Iroquois' right to use the North - South path, known as the Great Warpath, running east of the Blue Ridge, provided they did not intrude on the English settlements east of the fall line . </P>

When did the iroquois confederacy divide and collapse