In the mid-sixteenth century an estimated 65 000 Iroquoian-speaking people – Huron, Petun, and Neutral – inhabited the area now known as Southern Ontario.1 The various groups that later formed the Huron or Wendat confederacy were scattered in many individual villages and village clusters along the north shore of Lake Ontario, in the Trent valley, and throughout modern Simcoe County. They probably numbered 25 000 people. Since the Petun (or Tionontati) of the seventeenth century do not appear to have lived very long in their historic homeland (situated between Nottawasaga Bay and the Niagara Escarpment) and were closely allied to the Huron in speech and culture, it seems likely that they too originated in the triangle of settlement north of Lake Ontario.2 They numbered perhaps 7 000. Farther south, the earlier Iroquoian settlements lying west of the Grand River valley had already been abandoned and the ancestors of the various tribes of the Neutral confederacy lived in the present-day Hamilton area and the Niagara Peninsula. Even more numerous than the Huron, they numbered, say, 30 000 to 35 000.
The status of tribal confederacies in the middle of the sixteenth century is obscure. The Huron later claimed that the two founding nations or tribes of their confederacy, the Attignawantan and the Attigneenongnahac, formed their alliance about A.D. 1450 and that the two other nations, the Tahontaenrat and the Arendahronon, only became part of the confederacy at the beginning of the seventeenth century.3 Various smaller groups were joining these nations as late as the 1630s. At least one anthropologist has expressed doubts that any Indian confederacy predates the start of the fur trade. T.J.C. Brasser views confederacies as the responses of inland groups to problems of gaining reliable access to supplies of European goods.4
The Huron-Petun and Neutral languages were closely related to each other within the Iroquoian language family. The linguistic status of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, whom Jacques Cartier had encountered in the sixteenth century, is less clear, but they seem to have spoken a language or languages that were more closely related to Ontario Iroquoian than to the languages of the Five Nations Iroquois.5 The Ontario Iroquoian groups each had distinctive traits, but they shared a general pattern of life already well established by the beginning of the sixteenth century. They lived in villages that were located near light, easily worked soil and sometimes numbered 1 500 or more inhabitants. The cultivation by women of corn, beans, and squash produced up to 80 percent of the food that was eaten. Apart from the dog, the Iroquoians kept no domestic animals. As they did not practise crop rotation, their fields had a declining fertility. The increasing distance that villagers had to go to obtain firewood compelled them to relocate their villages every ten to thirty years. The Neutral lived in an area particularly rich in game. They appear to have depended more upon hunting than did the Huron. Their villages may have been also on average somewhat smaller than Huron ones.6 Most Iroquoian women and children remained in or near the villages on a year-round basis. Men tended to reside in the villages only over the winter; during the rest of the year many of them dispersed in small groups to hunt, fish, trade, and wage war. Some Neutral men also may have left their villages to hunt (or perhaps to wage war) for extended periods during the winter.7
Map 3.1
Areas of Iroquoian Settlement in 1630s, Early 1640s
Drawn by Marta Styk, University of Calgary
Model of Huron village based on historical and archaeological information.
Canadian Museum of Civilization, J10162
This pattern of economic activities encouraged the development of matrilocal residence patterns. A woman and her daughters, or a number of sisters or cousins related through the female line, together with their husbands and children, lived in a single longhouse. This extended family constituted the basic unit of cooperation for the production and sharing of food and other necessities. A number of these extended families who lived in a single village and believed themselves to be related matrilineally constituted a clan segment. Each of these units, named after a particular animal or bird, had its own chiefs (one for peace and one for war). Clan members were forbidden by rules of incest to marry one another. One or more clan segments constituted a village, and adjacent villages a nation. The nation might average as many as 5 000 members. There were also village and national councils made up of clan-segment chiefs. The recognition of a close affinity among members of clan segments named after the same animal or bird reinforced the solidarity of the group, and ultimately of the confederacy. Clans that bore the same name were further grouped to form three phratries, or larger groups, which cooperated for ritual purposes.
The Iroquoians valued self-reliance. Every person prized his or her independence and resented being given orders; hence chiefs, having to rely on public opinion to support general policy, had to consider the wishes of their people carefully before proposing a particular course of action. Kin groups were responsible for protecting and avenging their members. Murder or injury had to be atoned for with heavy payments and expressions of condolence if blood feuds were to be avoided. Among groups not united by kinship or trading links, warfare was rationalized as a continuous process of blood feud. War and its associated rituals were also valued as a means to achieve individual male prestige. It further provided male prisoners, who frequently were tortured to death as a sacrifice to the sun, the patron spirit of war and natural fertility.
Before European contact, intertribal trade generally consisted of small amounts of luxury items, such as marine shell beads and native copper; however, as early as A.D. 1000, in northern Simcoe County, a trade in utilitarian items seems to have developed across the southern margin of the Precambrian Shield. The Iroquoians traded with the Nipissing and other groups who lived around the shores of Georgian Bay, exchanging corn, fish nets, and tobacco from present-day Southern Ontario for furs, dried fish, and meat.8 The heads of particular clans or families generally controlled individual trade routes. In return for presents they allowed other traders to use them. All traders were forbidden to cross the territory of other nations without obtaining, also in return for presents, prior permission from local chiefs. Most intertribal trade was between specific trading partners who adopted each other as ritual kinsmen and often exchanged children as tokens of trust and goodwill. While the value of goods was related to scarcity and traders sought good value for their wares, the Indians avoided haggling over the price of individual items. Arguments about prices were phrased in terms of friendship and alliance rather than in terms of economic considerations.
The Iroquoians believed that no community member should go hungry or lack necessities while others had more than they needed. The principal motive for accumulating surplus food stuffs and obtaining rare goods from other groups was to be able to give them away to fellow tribesmen. Chiefs and their kinsmen strove particularly hard to accumulate goods so that their clan could win approval and influence by giving them away. The Iroquoians strongly disapproved of stinginess, a trait that could lead to accusations of witchcraft. Prestige was derived from giving away property.
The Iroquoians viewed most aspects of nature, such as the sun, moon, rivers, lightning, and disease, as animate and therefore responsive to human behaviour and entreaty. They also attributed souls to man-made objects, such as nets. They sought to invoke these forces through ritual and to win their support or avert their anger. They employed charms to bring luck in hunting, fishing, and related activities, and performed rituals to ensure the successful growth of crops and the increase of wild plants. Much ritual was concerned with curing disease and alleviating psychological distress.9 The Iroquoians valued feasts and gift-giving as protection against witchcraft. They employed shamans as part-time specialists to deal with the spirit world. Ritual curing societies, the membership of which cut across clan and even national boundaries, assisted these people of power. Although the Iroquoians had no priests or formal creeds, religion permeated every aspect of their lives.
Among the most important Iroquoian rituals were those associated with the burial of the dead. The Huron kept the bodies of their dead relatives in village cemeteries until they relocated their villages, when they reburied their bones in a common ossuary or bone pit. The Feast of the Dead, the ritual associated with this reburial, gradually grew more elaborate. The Huron invited friendly neighbouring groups and trading partners to participate in the lavish exchanges of presents that became a major feature of this ritual. This collective tribute to the dead, whose memory each family loved and honoured, promoted goodwill and cooperation among the disparate segments of villages, nations, and allied groups.
This period lasted from 1550, when European goods first arrived in the Great Lakes area, until 1615, when European travellers first recorded their impressions of the Ontario Iroquoians. In the first half of the sixteenth century, small amounts of European goods apparently appeared in Iroquoian sites in what is now Ontario and New York State, most of it probably originally obtained from European fishermen who traded for furs along the lower St. Lawrence and the coasts of the present-day Maritime provinces.10 Rumours about Jacques Cartier’s exploration of the St. Lawrence River and about the European settlements that he and Jean-François de La Rocque, Sieur de Roberval, attempted to establish near what is now Quebec City between 1541 and 1543 must have reached the Ontario Iroquoians. The arrogance of the French and their kidnapping of Indians led the St. Lawrence Iroquoians to close the St. Lawrence River above Tadoussac to European visitors after 1543, although they continued to trade with them farther down-river.11
After 1550 Basque whalers and other Europeans traded at Tadoussac with some regularity. By 1580 professional fur traders started to send ships to the St. Lawrence and soon began to seek a monopoly over the fur trade there. The increasing popularity of beaver hats led to a new emphasis on beaver pelts.12
The small amount of European goods that reached the Iroquoians living in the Trent River valley and near the north shore of Lake Ontario at first may have come by way of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians. The Huron already living in what is now Simcoe County obtained European goods from the Nipissing and Algonquin. These goods reached the Algonquin along a trade route that ran from Tadoussac across central Quebec to the upper part of the Ottawa valley. This route duplicated that by which, according to Cartier’s reports, native copper from the Upper Great Lakes had reached the St. Lawrence valley in the 1530s.
The Five Nations Iroquois in the interior of present-day New York State probably felt considerably threatened by their lack of access to iron axes and metal arrowheads.13 They may have been the Amerindian group who attacked and dispersed the remaining St. Lawrence Iroquoians towards the end of the sixteenth century. Certainly it was the Mohawk and not the Huron who raided the St. Lawrence valley in the first decade of the seventeenth century and who contended with the Montagnais (Innu) and Algonquin for control of that region.14 If so, this is the first recorded case of an Iroquoian group attacking and dispersing its neighbours in order to gain a more secure access to European goods. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians around present-day Montreal and Quebec City also appear to have been the first Iroquoians who were dispersed as a result of intertribal conflicts arising from the fur trade.
Archaeological finds indicate that large numbers of St. Lawrence Iroquoian refugees went to live among various Iroquoian groups in the Trent valley and still farther west. Historical evidence suggests that other St. Lawrence Iroquoians who were attacked by the Mohawk found refuge among the Algonquin and the Abenaki.15 After the dispersal of St. Lawrence Iroquoians, increasing amounts of European goods continued to reach the Huron by way of the Algonquin and Nipissing, who traded these goods principally in return for cornmeal, fish nets, and tobacco. These traders visited the Huron both by way of Lake Nipissing and Georgian Bay and up the St. Lawrence River and the Trent valley until the Iroquois attacks finally closed the Trent valley route as an artery of trade late in the sixteenth century.16 After that time all European goods reached the Huron by way of Georgian Bay.
The Arendahronon and the Tahontaenrat joined the Huron confederacy around the end of the sixteenth century. About the same time, all of the Huron nations settled in the northern half of today’s Simcoe County. This location, at the southeastern corner of Georgian Bay, was as close as their horticultural economy would permit them to live to the remaining dependable source of European goods. At the same time, the Huron began to trade large quantities of European goods to the Petun and Neutral. This expanded trade apparently stimulated a growing demand among the Ontario Iroquoians for luxury goods obtained from Native people to the south. These items included fancy furs, marine shells, shell beads, and gourd storage vessels. The Huron’s direct contacts with the Susquehannock or Andaste, an Iroquoian-speaking people who lived south of the Iroquois in the Susquehanna valley, probably began about this time. The Susquehannock were important suppliers of beads made from marine shells. By 1615 the Huron and the Susquehannock had concluded an alliance against their common enemy, the Iroquois.
The Neutral’s hunting territories along the north shore of Lake Erie contained many swampy areas rich with beaver colonies. Favourably located, they could easily trade with many neighbouring Iroquoian groups – the Erie, Susquehannock, Seneca, Petun, and Huron; this may explain the origin of their celebrated neutrality in the Huron-Iroquois rivalry. Later the Neutral probably also obtained European goods from both the Huron and the Iroquois in return for furs. In general, such goods seem to be more abundant in Neutral sites of the seventeenth century than in Huron ones.17
The war between the Huron and the Iroquois predated direct European contact. Prior to 1609 the Huron’s possession of European goods may have provided the Seneca with a motive for raiding them. This may have marked the first step in the transformation of the confrontations among the Iroquoian tribes of the interior from largely ritual hostilities into economically motivated warfare. The initial impact of the fur trade apparently stimulated broader political alliances among the Iroquoians, such as the expansion and consolidation of the Huron, Iroquois, and perhaps Neutral confederacies, as well as more intensive and wide-ranging intertribal contacts of both a friendly and a hostile nature throughout the Lower Great Lakes region.
With the upper St. Lawrence River blockaded by the Mohawk and Oneida, the Neutral, poor canoeists themselves, did not seek to trade directly with the French. Early in the seventeenth century, however, the Huron became interested in establishing a direct trading relationship with the French so that they might obtain European goods in larger quantities and at cheaper prices. The Algonquin opposed this, as they wished to continue profiting from their exclusive role as middlemen in trade between the Huron and the French. Yet, as the Mohawk and Oneida began to attack the Algonquin more fiercely in an effort to steal vital European goods from them, the Algonquin were compelled to seek military support. They sought this from the Huron; they were already trading European goods with them in return for furs and cornmeal, and some Algonquin groups wintered among them.
The French traders at Tadoussac soon realized that this expanding coalition of northern tribes could increase the volume of high-quality beaver pelts that were reaching them from the interior. They sought to lower the prices that they had to pay for furs by eliminating the Montagnais and Algonquin middlemen. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain built a fortified trading post at Quebec, the first step in freeing the St. Lawrence valley from Iroquois attack and turning it into a major artery of trade. In 1609 Champlain accompanied his Montagnais and Algonquin allies in battle against the Iroquois, and the following year they defeated a party of about a hundred Mohawk warriors near the mouth of the Richelieu River. As a result of this defeat, the Mohawk ceased raiding the St. Lawrence valley for over twenty years, until 1633. The Iroquois found it safer and easier to obtain European goods from the Dutch traders who had begun to frequent the Hudson River valley after Henry Hudson had explored the river in 1609.
A party of Arendahronon warriors became the first Huron to make direct contact with the French. An Algonquin chief named Iroquet, who had wintered in the Huron country, invited them to join Champlain’s expedition against the Iroquois in 1609. Two years later the council chiefs of the Huron confederacy secretly sent a valuable present to Champlain and stated that the Huron wished to conclude a trading alliance with the French that would be independent of the French alliance with the Algonquin. Their envoys promised to help Champlain reach the Huron country if the French concluded such a treaty.
In 1615 the Algonquin finally gave the Huron the right of passage through their territory. Too few in number and too dependent on Huron corn, they could not deny the Huron the use of the Ottawa River, an action that probably would have led to war between them. Henceforth, the Algonquin had to be satisfied with the tolls that intertribal law required the Huron to pay them for rights of passage through their territory. They continued, however, to try to undermine good relations between the Huron and the French by spreading rumours and fomenting various unpleasant incidents.
By the 1620s armed Frenchmen who travelled to and from the Huron country with Huron traders had compelled the Oneida to abandon their attacks on the Ottawa valley. The French also protected the Huron from intimidation by the Algonquin. The historical geographer Conrad Heidenreich has argued that the Huron’s main reason for seeking an alliance with Champlain was to enjoy French military support against the Iroquois rather than to be able to trade with them.18 Yet, apart from their utilitarian value and ritual significance, French trade goods were essential for maintaining the network of aboriginal alliances by means of which the Huron protected themselves against the Iroquois.
Battle of Lake Champlain, 30 July 1609 – from Champlain’s Voyages of 1613. Champlain and two French musketeers and the Huron are in combat with the Iroquois. On the right is shown the Iroquois’ temporary camp in which they have spent the night. The canoes that look like French riverboats as well as the Indians’ nudity and erroneous hairstyles weaken the picture’s credibility. The engraver freely borrowed the hammocks and palm trees from illustrations of Latin America.
Canadian Museum of Civilization, J10225
The terms of the French-Huron alliance recognized Atironta, the principal council chief of the Arendahronon, as their special friend and ally. The Arendahronon had been the first Huron nation to make direct contact with the French. In return the Huron chief agreed to share with the chiefs of the various nations and clan segments that made up the Huron confederacy his right to trade with the French. This distribution of authority, which allowed the chiefs to acquire wealth through their control of trade with the French, reinforced rather than altered traditional Huron social and political organization. Effective control of much of this trade seems to have fallen into the hands of the Attignawantan, the most numerous nation of the Huron confederacy.
After 1615 groups of Huron traders travelled to the St. Lawrence valley each summer by way of Lake Nipissing and the Ottawa River. They supplied the French with ten to twelve thousand beaver skins each year. By 1630 they obtained all of these skins in trade, having exhausted the beaver population of their own hunting territories.19 The Huron obtained many skins through the exchange of corn, fish nets, tobacco, and European goods with the Nipissing, who in turn bartered for furs as far north as James Bay each summer, and with the Algonquian-speaking Indians, who traded west into the Lakes Michigan and Superior regions. Huron traders also exchanged corn for furs with the Algonquin in the Ottawa valley. By preventing both the Petun and the Neutral from concluding a trading relationship with the French, the Huron expanded their trading of European goods with these groups, receiving in return tobacco and luxury goods from the south, as well as furs.
Although it required considerable extra effort, the fur trade brought additional wealth to all of the Iroquoian societies of Southern Ontario. Iron knives permitted easier and more elaborate bone carving (which produced a wide variety of tools), while the metal from many worn-out kettles could be reworked, using techniques that had formerly been applied to scarce native copper. The Huron also modified iron tools to adapt them for the uses they now made of them.20 Ritualism grew more elaborate in the wealthier and expanded societies of Southern Ontario. Among the Huron, large amounts of European goods were interred or given away at major festivals to validate the status of the givers. The ossuaries of pre-contact times, which contained only a few goods, contrast with the richly endowed ones of the contact period. No evidence exists that the new wealth succeeded in undermining the emphasis on sharing and redistribution that was part of traditional Iroquoian culture or that it undermined the existing social code. Its main impact was to make a simple way of life more dramatic. It allowed the Ontario Iroquoians to realize a potential for development that was inherent in their culture but that otherwise might not have been realized.
On account of the large Ontario Iroquoian population and its relative isolation from the Europeans (the Huron had to transport goods hundreds of kilometres inland from the French trading stations along routes that required frequent portages), the influx of European goods did not undermine most Native crafts. The Huron continued to regard cloth as a luxury, and glass beads remained few in number and highly valued. The Huron did not carry alcoholic beverages inland and generally avoided them. Metal kettles were favoured for travelling and as prestige items at feasts and celebrations; yet the production of clay cooking pots continued. As they were able to transport only a limited amount of goods, the Huron traded mainly for iron knives, axes, and other cutting tools that allowed them to work more quickly. The Huron also valued metal arrowheads, which they either bought from the French or made out of worn-out kettles. These could penetrate the traditional wooden armour worn by both the Huron and the Iroquois. During this period warfare between the Huron and the Iroquois remained traditional in its conceptualization and objectives, and both sides were relatively evenly balanced in their strengths. On account of the metal arrowheads, however, set battles tended to be replaced by hit-and-run encounters.21
Only a small number of Europeans visited the Ontario Iroquoians prior to 1634. Most of them were employed by the trading company to live among the Huron and encourage them to bring their furs to the St. Lawrence each year. Étienne Brûlé, the most famous, appears to have arrived in the Huron country in 1610, and he lived there (apart from short absences) until 1633. In that year Brûlé was murdered by some Huron traders who suspected him of trying to persuade the Seneca to trade with the French.
Many early visitors learned to speak the Huron language and adapted themselves in varying degrees to the Huron way of life. The Huron allowed the traders to visit the Petun and Neutral to trade furs on their own account, so long as they did not winter among these peoples or attempt to persuade them to conclude an alliance with the French. A few missionaries, mostly Récollets and after 1626 also Jesuits, lived among the Huron. They spent most of their time trying to master the Huron language. One did more. The Récollet priest Joseph de La Roche Daillon infuriated the Huron by attempting in 1626 to conclude an alliance between the French and the Neutral. This action earned him the Huron’s enmity.
Following a brief period during which the English held Quebec, the Jesuits in 1634 renewed their mission to the Huron. They sought to convert the entire Huron confederacy to Christianity as a first step in the conversion of all the peoples of the region. Unlike the Récollets, they worked only to alter the Huron way of life in ways that would make it conform with Christian standards of morality. The Jesuits realized that if they were to work safely and effectively among the Huron, the Huron must accept them as part of their trading alliance with the French. The Society of Jesus also used their influence in government circles in France to have the French traders, of whose conduct they disapproved, withdrawn from the Huron country and replaced by the Jesuits’ own lay employees.
The Jesuits’ return to the Huron country coincided with the beginning of a series of epidemics that continued until 1640 and culminated in a violent smallpox outbreak. As the Native people had little immunity to these diseases, the epidemics reduced the population of the Ontario Iroquoians and of the neighbouring hunting peoples by about half. The Five Nations Iroquois were also stricken at this time and probably suffered losses of about equal magnitude. Anthropologist William Fenton has suggested that less than a century earlier epidemics perhaps played a role in the dispersal of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians.22 Between 1616 and 1619 disease devastated the Indians from Maine to Cape Cod. Less serious outbreaks of what may have been European-introduced illnesses were reported for the Ottawa valley in 1611 and 1623–24. Yet recent studies of archaeological evidence suggest that neither the Huron and Petun nor the Mohawk themselves experienced any major declines in population prior to the 1630s. It is, however, quite possible that less lethal epidemics of European diseases had reached these groups at an earlier period.23
The epidemics of the 1630s hit children and old people more than any other group in the Huron population. Since technological and political skills, as well as ritual information, tended to be a prerogative of older men and women, the surviving Ontario Iroquoians must have found themselves more reliant on European goods. The death of so many elders deprived them of much of their experienced leadership at a time when they most needed it. By the late 1630s, the Huron felt so dependent on European goods that they believed they would be ruined if two successive years elapsed without their traders visiting the St. Lawrence.24 The ratio of population to political offices also declined, altering these offices’ meaning and making their validation in terms of clan productivity more difficult. The epidemics left the Huron far more vulnerable to the Jesuits’ pressure to convert to Christianity.
At first, the Huron viewed the Jesuits as members of a ritual curing society that employed baptism as its curing ritual. The Jesuits’ claim that the souls of those who were baptized would go to heaven, and thus not be able to join those of relatives and friends in the traditional Huron “villages of souls,” troubled the Indians. This claim corresponded with the Iroquoian belief that the souls of people who had died in different ways experienced different fates after death. Some Huron sought baptism so that their souls might join those of relatives who had permitted themselves to be baptized in the hope that this might cure them. Others refused baptism so that their souls might join those of relatives who had died without being baptized. Later the Huron suspected the Jesuits of being sorcerers who spread the epidemics to destroy the Huron and their neighbours. In Huron eyes, the apparent unwillingness of the Jesuits to cure them confirmed this accusation. During the epidemics they could observe that, in contrast to themselves, the French either remained healthy or quickly recovered. The Huron did not slay the Jesuits as sorcerers, however, being convinced the French would cease trading with them if they did so. Yet, in 1641, a Jesuit winter mission to the Neutral so angered the Huron that they compelled the Jesuits to abandon their missions to the Neutral and Petun for an interval of several years.
By the 1630s the Five Nations Iroquois had grown sufficiently reliant on European goods that their own hunting territories no longer yielded enough pelts to supply their wants. In 1633 they resumed their raids on the St. Lawrence valley. They robbed furs and European goods from the Algonquin, Montagnais, and Abenaki, and also encroached on the hunting territories of these groups. Around 1640, first the New England colonists and then the Dutch began to sell large numbers of muskets to their Native trading partners. This allowed the Mohawk, and to a lesser degree the other nations of the Iroquois confederacy, to wage war more effectively. Yet to pay for these guns and for the powder and shot needed to operate them, the Iroquois had to obtain still more furs.
In the early 1640s the Neutral, although they did not have guns, took advantage of their iron hatchets and metal-tipped arrows to wage a particularly ferocious and destructive war against the Algonquian-speaking peoples of what is now southeastern Michigan. The Neutral apparently wanted to gain control of the rich beaver grounds in the vicinity of Lake St. Clair. Slightly earlier, either the Neutral or the Seneca had dispersed the Wenro, an Iroquoian nation living in western New York State whose territory embraced swampy areas rich in beaver.25 The Huron obtained more pelts by expanding their trade with the northern hunting peoples. Thus, in various ways, a number of Iroquoian peoples worked to increase their supply of beaver pelts at this time.
By the early 1640s the three western nations of the Iroquois confederacy – the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca – felt as pressed as the Mohawk and Oneida to obtain more furs. But unlike the Mohawk and Oneida, they were not in a convenient location to raid hunting peoples such as the Montagnais and Algonquin. All of their neighbours were Iroquoian-speaking horticulturists like themselves. Yet, by 1642, the Western Iroquois had destroyed an Arendahronon village after plundering it of the trade goods and furs that the Huron had collected there. Within a short time, the Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga seem to have made it their policy to plunder and destroy more and more villages until they had dispersed the Huron. Then they would be free to raid the hunting peoples of what is now central Ontario, as was the practice of the Mohawk and Oneida, who had already raided the Algonquin. To accomplish this task, the Seneca enlisted the Mohawk’s help. The Mohawk, who had more guns than did the other members of the Iroquois confederacy, wanted to join in a war that would provide them with larger quantities of Huron furs than they had ever obtained before. All of the Iroquois nations also sought captives whom they could adopt to make up for their heavy losses sustained through epidemics.26
In 1639 the Jesuits established Sainte Marie, a fortified, agriculturally self-sufficient mission centre on the banks of the Wye River. The priests transported pigs, calves, and even a cannon inland from Quebec to equip this mission, which became a sizable, all-male European settlement in the heart of the Huron confederacy.27 After 1640 the Jesuits succeeded in converting over a hundred Huron each year, and by 1646 the practising Huron Christian community numbered about 500. To achieve this, the Jesuits employed a variety of different approaches. They consciously strove to impress the Huron with the technological superiority of the French and with their own superior knowledge, including their ability to predict eclipses. In trading, the French treated converts with more respect than non-Christians and paid them higher prices for their furs. When the French began to sell muskets to the Huron in 1641, they sold them only to trustworthy and tested converts. These actions encouraged the baptism of many Huron traders and warriors. The number of converts rapidly increased, particularly in the large towns of Ossossané and Teanaostaiaé.
Huron Christians praying.
From Bressani’s map of New France, 1657, Novae Franciae Accurata Delineado, National Archives of Canada
The Jesuits forbade their converts to attend any functions where traditional rituals were practised. This made it impossible for Christian Huron to participate in most public activities of their communities, including feasts, curing rituals, and burial rites. Christians also refused to fight alongside non-Christians, even though both faced a common enemy. In the opinion of most Huron, such antisocial behaviour was a form of witchcraft that threatened the well-being of their communities. By the winter of 1648–49 the Christians had become the majority in the town of Ossossané. While they had been allowed to behave as they wished when they were in a minority, the rules changed once they became a majority. Now in Ossassané, the Jesuits had their converts deny non-Christians the right to practise their religion in the community.
Not surprisingly, the late 1640s saw the development of a traditionalist faction among the Huron that opposed the spread of Christianity. The more radical members of this faction called for the Jesuits’ expulsion from the Huron country, as well as the exile of all Indians who refused to renounce Christian teachings. They advocated ending their thirty-three-year-old trading alliance with the French. In the place of the French alliance, they proposed peace and a trading pact with the Iroquois.
The radicals among the anti-Christian party found enough support to begin the negotiation of a peace treaty with the Onondaga. However, when a group of chiefs killed a young Frenchman who worked for the Jesuits and then demanded the expulsion of the Jesuits and their converts, they found themselves outnumbered by an alliance of Christians and those traditionalists reluctant to make peace with the Iroquois.
The development of new factions for and against the French, and for and against Christianity, further divided the Huron. These factions were all the more dangerous because some of them corresponded roughly with national divisions. The Attignawantan, the most favourably disposed towards Christianity, had suffered the least from the Iroquois and opposed making peace with them. The Arendahronon, the least disposed towards accepting Christianity and the most favourably inclined towards making peace with the Iroquois, already had many of their people living as captives in Iroquois villages.28
Although the Huron Christians looked to the Jesuits to protect their villages, Jesuit help proved ineffectual beyond the confines of the fathers’ mission headquarters at Sainte Marie. By 1647 the Ahrendahronon had been compelled to abandon their settlements near Lake Simcoe. The following year the Iroquois attacked and destroyed two large Attigneenongnahac villages. In the spring of 1649, a war party of over a thousand Seneca and Mohawk destroyed at least two more Huron settlements. At this point, the Huron ceased trying to resist and abandoned their remaining villages.
After the collapse of the Huron confederacy, many Huron died of starvation or exposure. Several thousand more either were taken prisoner by the Iroquois or joined them voluntarily. Those who freely travelled to the Five Nations country included many whose relatives had already been captured and adopted by the Iroquois. A large number of Huron attempted to regroup on Gahoendoe (now Christian Island), an island in Georgian Bay close to the Huron country, but after a winter of starvation, sickness, and harassment by the Iroquois, the survivors were forced to disband. About 600 Christians followed the Jesuits to Quebec, where their descendants continue to live and are known as the Huron of Lorette or Wendaké. Others who escaped the Iroquois and survived continued as best they could. One whole nation, the Tahontaenrat, moved south to join the Neutral and eventually the Seneca, while smaller groups of refugees sought shelter among the Petun, Neutral, and Erie, as well as among their Algonquian-speaking trading partners to the north.
To prevent the Petun from serving as the nucleus around which the Huron refugees might attempt to revive their settlements, the Iroquois attacked them in the winter of 1649–50. They pillaged and burned the village of Etharita, where they no doubt seized many furs. Following this defeat, the poorly armed Petun dispersed. Many of them fled to the northwest accompanied by Huron refugees.
Map 3.2
The Country of the Huron, between 1639 and 1648
(showing the location of some of the major Huron settlements)
Drawn by Marta Styk, University of Calgary
The Iroquois next attacked the Neutral. Their villages, like those of the Huron, offered the prospect of captives and rich booty, while their dispersal opened up new hunting territory to the Seneca, as well as a new route (through Michigan) along which the Iroquois could raid the hunting tribes of the Upper Great Lakes. Already, in 1647, the Seneca had pillaged one Neutral village on the pretext that the Neutral had allowed an Iroquois warrior to be killed by his Huron pursuers in sight of that village. Now the Iroquois also feared that the Huron refugees might draw the Neutral into a trading alliance with the French. In spite of some successful resistance, the Iroquois dispersed the Neutral, who lacked guns, in 1651. Some 800 fled westward. They gathered on the western shore of Lake Huron in 1652–53 and were reported to be planning to move farther west the next spring. Other groups appear to have fled south. None of these groups retained their identity, nor is there any further record of their activities. Following the dispersal of the Neutral, most of present-day Southern Ontario remained unpopulated for more than fifty years, during which time the area served as a vast hunting territory for the Iroquois.
After 1650 remnant groups of Ontario Iroquoians were widely dispersed in the region of the Upper Great Lakes. Their story becomes closely intermeshed with that of the Algonquian-speaking Indians whom the seventeenth-century French termed “Ottawa.” The history of the Ottawa is reviewed in chapter 4.
In the late seventeenth century, the Petun-Huron sought to find a remedy for their small numbers by playing French off against English and one Native people against another. These tactics earned them the mistrust of everybody with whom they had dealings. In particular, their relations with the Great Lakes Algonquian-speaking Indians became progressively more strained in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Yet the behaviour of the Petun-Huron also ensured that no one in the region could afford to take them for granted as political and economic conditions changed. On occasion they even won the grudging admiration of their victims, including the French.29 Chief Kondiaronk, whose activities were first recorded in 1682, was particularly adept at keeping the French and Iroquois at war with one another. He did this because he feared that if the French and Iroquois were not at war, the Iroquois would be free to harass the Petun-Huron and other peoples of the Upper Great Lakes region. Kondiaronk skilfully exploited his own amicable contacts with both the French and the Iroquois to foment incidents that sabotaged their efforts at reconciliation.30 In particular, he played a major role in disrupting Governor Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville’s peace talks with the Iroquois in 1688.
Following the Treaty of Ryswick, which in 1697 established peace between France and England and ended active British support for the Iroquois war effort, the Five Nations negotiated a lasting peace with the French that was ratified at Montreal in the summer of 1701. That summer, Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac established the small French colony of Pontchartrain at what is now Detroit on the west side of the Detroit River. The French established this settlement to keep English traders out of the Upper Great Lakes area. Despite Jesuit opposition and the reluctance of some Indians to move, the Petun-Huron were persuaded to resettle at Detroit. Their chiefs sought to have their men enrolled as a regular paid company of French troops to police the other Aboriginal peoples of the region. The French refused this offer because they feared having these Indians acquire the discipline of regular European soldiers.31
The Petun-Huron, who continued to live in their traditional longhouses during the eighteenth century, established their first village near Fort Pontchartrain. There they had some trouble with their more numerous Algonquian-speaking allies, the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwa, who also founded their villages nearby. In 1742 the Petun-Huron established new villages around the Jesuit mission on Bois Blanc (now Bob-lo) Island, near the mouth of the Detroit River. In 1748 they were relocated near a new mission station at La Pointe de Montréal, opposite Detroit, where they were placed under closer French supervision. Father Pierre Potier, who was a missionary to the Petun-Huron in this region from 1744 until his death in 1781, recorded much valuable information about the Petun-Huron language at this time.32 Later, increasing European settlement in the Windsor area caused many Petun-Huron to relocate farther south along the Canard River.
After they moved to Detroit, the Petun-Huron also began to hunt, and some to settle, south of Lake Erie, in the vicinity of the Sandusky and Maumee rivers. Although by this time the Petun-Huron had lost all memory of their specific national identities, clan and phratry membership continued to play a vital role in their social and political activities. According to anthropologist James Clifton,33 more conservative senior Petun-Huron chiefs, including the three phratry leaders and the chiefs of the deer clan, received special patronage from the French. They continued to live in the north and to support the French. Less-favoured chiefs tended to encourage the movement to Ohio, where they could often trade at more favourable rates with independent traders from the colony of Pennsylvania. There the Huron-Petun also interacted with the Miami who were moving into the region from the west, the Iroquois and Delaware from the east, and the Shawnee from the southeast.
In 1747 Nicolas Orontony, a Petun-Huron chief of the Turtle clan, was probably induced by fear of retaliation for his people’s murder of some French traders to try to form a league of peoples that sought to destroy the French posts in the western Great Lakes region. When the French learned of his plans and military reinforcements were sent to Detroit, Orontony burned his fortified village at Sandusky and retreated to the Ohio valley, where he died around 1750, likely during an epidemic.
As a result of their territorial expansion, the Petun-Huron were able to lay claim to a large part of present-day Ohio as well as to land in the extreme southwestern part of Ontario. Their alliances with both the French and the English strengthened this claim, which was recognized by other Indian groups. Although few in number, the Petun-Huron exercised the right to light the council fire at intertribal gatherings in Ohio. In this fashion, they acquired a more secure position for themselves in the disrupted tribal mosaic of the western Great Lakes.
It was about the time that the Petun-Huron first began to trade with Pennsylvanians that the Pennsylvanians began to refer to them, especially those living south of Lake Erie, as the “Wyandot” (a corruption of Wendat, a term of self-reference that prior to 1650 had been restricted to the tribes of the Huron confederacy).34
The Wyandot, perhaps in part fearing the expansion of English settlement west of the Appalachians, generally supported the French during the Seven Years’ War. They also initially backed Pontiac in his unsuccessful effort to expel the British from the Upper Great Lakes in 1763. Following General Anthony Wayne’s defeat of the local Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the Wyandot were forced to cede land to the United States government. The Treaty of Greenville, signed in 1795, was the first of several cessions in which the Wyandot surrendered their territory and reservations in the eastern United States. In 1843 all the Wyandot living in the American midwest were resettled in Wyandotte County, Kansas. Those who wished were declared to be United States citizens in 1855, but in 1867 the American government restored tribal status and granted the Wyandot a small tract in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma. Their descendants live there to the present. In spite of prolonged exposure to missionaries, these Wyandot kept the knowledge of Iroquoian religious beliefs and rituals, as well as of the Petun-Huron language, alive into the twentieth century.35
At the end of the eighteenth century, European settlement increased in the area near present-day Windsor, Ontario. In 1790 the British deputy superintendent of Indian affairs acquired title to all Wyandot land in the area, except for the Old Huron Mission site, opposite Detroit, and the larger Huron (or Anderdon) Reserve on the Canard River. The Old Huron Mission site was wholly ceded to the Crown in 1800. In 1836 the Huron Reserve was also ceded and sold, except for 7 770 acres that were conveyed to the Wyandot. During the early 1840s, many Wyandot moved to the United States to join their kinsmen in their removal to Kansas. In 1876 the remaining Wyandot applied for enfranchisement under the terms of the Indian Act. In 1880–81 the forty-one remaining heads of families were enfranchised and their reserve divided in severalty. In 1907 J.N.B. Hewitt claimed that the Anderdon band was now entirely scattered, “with the possible exception of a very few persons.”36 Nevertheless, in 1911, when Marius Barbeau visited the “Wyandots of Amherstburg” in his search for Wyandot myths, tales, and traditions, he recorded important information from Miss Mary McKee, a seventy-three-year-old member of the Bear clan.37 He noted, however, that only two or three other Indians still spoke Wyandot and that they had little interest in their traditional culture. The descendants of the Anderdon band continue to live in the Windsor area. The traditional names of Warrow, Splitlog, Gibb, and White are found in local telephone directories, and a “Green Corn” picnic has been held on Grosse Isle on the Detroit River each summer in recent years.38
Huron Indians leaving their residence near Amherstburg, Upper Canada, on a hunting excursion. Painted between 1825 and 1834 by the Canadian artist William Bent Berczy (1791–1873).
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 15305
NOTES
1 All but the final section of this paper is based heavily on Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal 1976). The latter work should be consulted for the detailed documentation of many arguments. The interpretation of the proto-historic period has been altered somewhat to take account of material presented in Peter G. Ramsden, A Refinement of Some Aspects of Huron Ceramic Analysis, Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury series, no. 63 (Ottawa 1977).
2 C.E. Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600–1650 (Toronto 1971), map 22
3 Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols. (Cleveland 1896–1901; reprint, New York 1959), 16:227–9
4 T.J.C. Brasser, “Group Identification along a Moving Frontier,” Verhandlungen des XXXVIII Internationalen Amerikanistenkongresses (Munich 1971), band 2, 261–5
5 Floyd G. Lounsbury, “Iroquoian Languages,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C. 1978), 334–43
6 Bruce G. Trigger, “Settlement as an Aspect of Iroquoian Adaptation at the Time of Contact,” American Anthropologist 65 (1963): 86–101
7 Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations, 21:207–11
8 Bruce G. Trigger, “The Historic Location of the Hurons,” Ontario History 54 (1962): 137–48
9 A.F.C. Wallace, “Dreams and the Wishes of the Soul: A Type of Psychoanalytic Theory among the Seventeenth Century Iroquois,” American Anthropologist 60 (1958): 234–48
10 C.F. Wray and H.L. Schoff, “A Preliminary Report on the Seneca Sequence in Western New York, 1550–1687,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 23, no. 2 (1953): 53–63; Ramsden, A Refinement. For an alternative view of the coastal sources of European trade goods, see James W. Bradley, Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois: Accommodating Change, 1500–1655 (Syracuse 1987). The primacy of the St. Lawrence is reaffirmed by William R. Fitzgerald, “Chronology to Cultural Process: Lower Great Lakes Archaeology, 1500–1650” (PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1990).
11 Richard Hakluyt, The Principali Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, facsimile edited by D.B. Quinn and R.A. Skelton (Cambridge 1965), 723
12 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (Toronto 1956), 12–14; S. de L. Barkham, “A Note on the Strait of Belle Isle during the Period of Basque Contact with Indians and Inuit,” Études Inuit Studies 4, nos. 1–2 (1980): 51–8
13 H.P. Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 6 vols. (Toronto 1929), 2:96
14 Bruce G. Trigger, “Hochelaga: History and Ethnohistory,” in J.F. Pendergast and B.G. Trigger, eds., Cartier’s Hochelaga and the Dawson Site (Montreal 1972), 1–108
15 Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations, 22:215
16 Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 233–4
17 William C. Noble, “The Neutral Indians,” in W.E. Engelbrecht and D.K. Grayson, eds., Essays in Northeastern Anthropology in Memory of Marian E. White (Rindge 1978), 152–64
18 Conrad E. Heidenreich, “History of the St. Lawrence – Great Lakes Area to A.D. 1650,” in C.J. Ellis and N. Ferris, The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650 (London, Ont. 1990), 490
19 Gabriel Sagard, Histoire du Canada (Paris 1866), 585
20 Charles Garrad, “Iron Trade Knives on Historic Petun Sites,” Ontario Archaeology 13 (1969): 3–15
21 K.F. Otterbein, “Why the Iroquois Won: An Analysis of Iroquois Military Tactics,” Ethnohistory 11 (1964): 56–63
22 William N. Fenton, “Problems Arising from the Historic Northeastern Position of the Iroquois,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 100 (1940): 175
23 Biggar, The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 2:207; G.M. Wrong, ed., The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons by Father Gabriel Sagard (Toronto 1939), 263. For population trends, see Dean R. Snow and William A. Starna, “Sixteenth-Century Depopulation: A View from the Mohawk Valley,” American Anthropologist 91 (1989): 142–9; and Gary Warrick, “A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 900–1650” (PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1990).
24 Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations, 13:215–17
25 Marian E. White, “Neutral and Wenro,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C. 1978), 407–11
26 Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 40 (1983): 528–59; Heidenreich, “History of the St. Lawrence – Great Lakes Area,” 491
27 Kenneth E. Kidd, The Excavation of Ste. Marie I (Toronto 1949); W. Jury and E.M. Jury, Sainte-Marie among the Hurons (Toronto 1954)
28 Bruce G. Trigger, “The French Presence in Huronia: The Structure of Franco-Huron Relations in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Canadian Historical Review 49 (1968): 107–41
29 E.H. Blair, ed., The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, 2 vols. (Cleveland 1911–12), 2:44–5
30 William N. Fenton, “Kondiaronk,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 2: 1701–1740 (Toronto 1969), 320–3
31 James A. Clifton, “Hurons of the West: Migrations and Adaptations of the Ontario Iroquoians, 1650–1704,” Research Report, Canadian Ethnology Service (Ottawa 1977). For a general account of Petun-Huron relations, see the relevant sections of Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York 1991).
32 Pierre Potier, “Elementa grammaticae huronicae” and “Radices huronicae,” in A. Fraser, ed., Fifteenth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario for the Years 1918–1919 (Toronto 1920), 1–455
33 James A. Clifton, “The Re-emergent Wyandot: A Study in Ethnogenesis on the Detroit River Borderland, 1747,” in Papers from the Western District Conference, ed. K.G. Pryke and L.L. Kulisek (Windsor 1983), 10–15
34 Elisabeth Tooker, “Wyandot,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C. 1978), 398–406; Clifton, “The Re-emergent Wyandot”
35 Marius Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, Memoir 80, Geological Survey of Canada (Ottawa 1915); Marius Barbeau, Huron-Wyandot Traditional Narratives in Translations and Native Texts, National Museum of Canada, Bulletin 165 (Ottawa 1960)
36 J.N.B. Hewitt, “Huron,” in Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C. 1907, 1910), 1:591
37 Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, xi
38 Charles Garrad, personal communication
