By limiting when and where certain human activities were possible, climate and environmental factors helped direct the course of empires in North America, both Indigenous and Euro-American. During conflicts that involved Lake Ontario, such as the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution or the War of 1812, big weather events or the timing of the spring ice break-up could decide the outcome of a military campaign or handicap a lake fleet. The harsher conditions of the Little Ice Age encouraged the fur trade, but for a time dissuaded Europeans from migrating to northern North America on a larger scale; milder weather in the 19th century went hand in glove with the expansion of permanent colonization efforts. Those living in these settlements still remained vulnerable to the weather and needed to adapt their subsistence strategies to the climate they encountered in the Lake Ontario watershed. Such adaptations had social, political, and economic ramifications: a society based on trading furs, which requires constant mobility, organizes itself quite differently than one reliant on agriculture and grain, which requires a sedentary population.

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