ERIE

The Erie, a once-powerful tribe inhabiting the south shore of Lake Erie in present-day northern Ohio, northwestern Pennsylvania, and western New York, are an example of a people who were victims of European expansion although they themselves had little direct contact with Europeans. Their extinction resulted from conflict with fellow Iroquoian-speaking peoples (the IROQUOIS [haudenosaunee]), in particular the SENECA, over hunting grounds as the local peoples responded to increasing demand in the lucrative 17th-century fur trade with the French, Dutch, and English. The Erie were in fact known for the animal skin robes they wore, complete with tails. Their name, pronounced EAR-ee, is a shortening of Erielhonan for “it is long tailed,” in reference to the long tail of the mountain lion. They were known to the French as the Nation du Chat, or “Cat Nation.”

What little is known about the Erie comes from archaeological sites and from early Jesuit missionaries to the region, although much of their writings about the tribe are secondhand, derived from reports to the French by other tribes. The earliest known contact between Erie and Europeans occurred in 1615, when Frenchman Etienne Brule, exploring for Samuel de Champlain, became the first European known to reach Lake Erie. The Erie are described as living much like the other Iroquoian-speaking NORTHEAST INDIANS. They inhabited longhouses, their villages placed along rivers emptying into Lake Erie. For defensive purposes, they built wooden palisades or earthen walls around their villages. They practiced farming, growing the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—in addition to hunting, fishing, and gathering. Feared by other tribes, the Erie were renowned for using poisoned arrows.

The main trading partners of the Erie were the SUSQUEHANNOCK, who acted as middlemen, exchanging European trade goods for furs. Firearms were not among the trade goods, however. The Dutch and English did provide guns to the Iroquois, who, when the Erie encroached on their hunting grounds, used them in battle against them. The final conflict began in 1653 over hunting territory as well as over the Erie’s harboring of HURON (wyandot) and neutral refugees, enemies of the Iroquois. A Jesuit document reports that a force of 1,800 Iroquois—Seneca as well as warriors from among the cAYugA, oneidA, and ONONDAGA— invaded Erie territory in 1654. At one village an Iroquois chief supposedly said, “The Master of Life fights for us. You will be ruined if you resist him,” to which an Erie replied, “The only Master of Life we recognize is our weapons.”

The Erie, in the face of continuing Iroquois pressure, were eventually broken up as a tribe, their villages destroyed and their people killed or absorbed into the Seneca. Major fighting ended by 1656. Small groups held out against the Iroquois for a number of years, the last resistance reportedly ending in 1680. Other Erie may have fled to the Susquehannock. A woman named Gandeactena and her mother were among the Erie captives taken prisoner in 1654. Two years later,

Gandeactena married a Huron, who had been converted to Christianity by the Jesuits, and began practicing Catholicism herself. She eventually moved to Quebec. Baptized in 1668 as Catherine, Gandeactena helped found the mission of Saint Franpois Xavier, and there she worked to convert other Indians until her death five years later.

The Honniasont, or Black Minqua, an Iroquoian people located on the upper Ohio River in present-day

Western Pennsylvania and neighboring parts of Ohio and West Virginia, were perhaps a subtribe of the Erie. Like the Erie, they were defeated and absorbed by the Iroquois. The Mingo, a subtribe of the Iroquois Indians, who branched off sometime before 1750 and settled on the upper Ohio River in Pennsylvania, may have included Erie descendants as well as Susquehan-nock. Some of the modern-day Seneca-Cayuga living in Oklahoma consider themselves to be of Erie descent.

See INUIT