Introduction (Part 1)
1700. Europe is aflame with war. Louis XIV de Bourbon places a relative on the newly vacated throne of Spain. Queen Anne of England and Scotland, along with the King of Prussia, the Holy Roman Emperor, and a few other minor countries, prepare to fight the French and Spanish. The War of the Spanish Succession has begun.
In North America, the colonials christen it "Queen Anne's War" as they rise in militias to defend their land and take their enemy's. Native tribes take sides. Scalps go from heads to hands. One tribal group, the Lenape, are in the best position to take on the French.
This is their story.
By this time, many tribes have joined in with the Deleware. Among these are the Mohegans. English settlers had slowly displaced them from their Connecticut homes. No hard feelings were there, however, so they were ready to fight the French alongside the rest.
Fifteen thousand men went on the war path. This was easily the entire tribe. Smallpox and other diseases had more than just thinned the ranks of the tribes, they had decimated them. Now, though, they were prepared to decimate Europeans.
Their first target was the French city of Montreal. When the French settlers saw the army arriving, they scoffed. Fifteen thousand natives? They stood no chance against the battle-scared (oops, bottle-scarred... no... oh, whatever it is...) French troops.
They were wrong. These natives had been armed by Her Majesty's (that is, Queen Anne's) government. With the latest in rifles they cut down the thousand men the city scraped together as a militia [OOC: The province was in revolt at the time due to war exhaustion].
The city was besieged. This time, the city was able to bring together 2500 in arms to defend the walls. However, the natives had one more trump card to play: Ten cannon bought from the English for the siege. It took only a couple of months for the city to surrender under the fire of the cannon.
After this was achieved, the Lenape ran rampant through the city (avoiding the food storage). Now they could move around Canada nearly unchecked, except for a few French soldiers here and there. Finally, they had taken so much territory that the French were forced to give huge concessions to the Lenape.
Next, the Lenape moved against the Huron, friends of the French. In a few measly months, the Huron were utterly defeated. The Lenape were merciful. They only forced the Huron chief to pay tribute every year, and didn't force them to join the Lenape Confederation. Now the tribes had a larger source of income.
In England, meanwhile, James Stuart, son of the one thrown out of Britain in 1688, brought in a huge army and deposed Queen Anne. He declared England and Scotland to be one United Kingdom under a hastily-passed Act of Union that dissolved the Scottish Parliament.
This new king was hostile to the Lenape. He immediately declared war. The Lenape's main chief, Tamenund, was not fazed. He had a good-sized army. Many of the settlements were unfortified, and only a small militia of four thousand men. The Lenape had siezed large stores of guns in Montreal and now armed many more natives with them. The English colonial areas were utterly overrun. In the end, though, Tamenund could only convince King James III to surrender the peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River.
This was a return to their ancestral homeland for the Lenape. However, they could not just throw out the Englishmen inside the city of Philadelphia. Instead, Tamenund merely called for them to live beside the Lenape in peace... and began studying ways of getting rid of them.
The next few years were spent in peace. By 1710, the Lenape had a stable nation. The tribes were beginning to blend in with each other. England was kept placated every once in a while. Lenape traders learned the finer points of competition and dominated the nearby markets.