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The Erie people (also Eriechronon, Riquéronon, Erielhonan, Eriez, Nation du Chat) were
Indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
historically living on the south shore of
Lake Erie Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also h ...
. An
Iroquoian The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian ...
group, they lived in what is now western New York, northwestern
Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
, and northern
Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...
before 1658. Their nation was decimated in the mid-
17th century The 17th century lasted from January 1, 1601 ( MDCI), to December 31, 1700 ( MDCC). It falls into the early modern period of Europe and in that continent (whose impact on the world was increasing) was characterized by the Baroque cultural moveme ...
by five years of prolonged warfare with the powerful neighboring
Iroquois The Iroquois ( or ), officially the Haudenosaunee ( meaning "people of the longhouse"), are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of First Nations peoples in northeast North America/ Turtle Island. They were known during the colonial years to ...
for helping the
Huron Huron may refer to: People * Wyandot people (or Wendat), indigenous to North America * Wyandot language, spoken by them * Huron-Wendat Nation, a Huron-Wendat First Nation with a community in Wendake, Quebec * Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi ...
in the Beaver Wars for control of the fur trade. Their villages were burned as a lesson to those who dared oppose the Iroquois. This destroyed their stored
maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. The ...
and other foods, added to their loss of life, and threatened their future, as they had no way to survive the winter. The attacks likely forced their emigration. The Iroquois League was known for adopting captives and refugees into their tribes. The surviving Erie are believed to have been largely absorbed by other Iroquoian tribes, particularly families of the
Seneca Seneca may refer to: People and language * Seneca (name), a list of people with either the given name or surname * Seneca people, one of the six Iroquois tribes of North America ** Seneca language, the language of the Seneca people Places Extrat ...
, the westernmost of the Five Nations. Susquehannock families may also have adopted some Erie, as the tribes had shared the hunting grounds of the
Allegheny Plateau The Allegheny Plateau , in the United States, is a large dissected plateau area of the Appalachian Mountains in western and central New York (state), New York, northern and western Pennsylvania, northern and western West Virginia, and eastern Oh ...
and Amerindian paths that passed through the
gaps of the Allegheny The gaps of the Allegheny, meaning gaps in the Allegheny Ridge (now given the technical name Allegheny Front) in west-central Pennsylvania, is a series of escarpment eroding water gaps (notches or small valleys) along the saddle between two ...
. The members of remnant tribes living among the Iroquois gradually assimilated to the majority cultures, losing their independent tribal identities. The Erie were also called the ''Chat'' ("Cat" in French) or "Long Tail" (referring, possibly, to the raccoon tails worn on clothing). Like other Iroquoian peoples, they lived in multifamily
long house A longhouse or long house is a type of long, proportionately narrow, single-room building for communal dwelling. It has been built in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe, and North America. Many were built from timber and often rep ...
s in villages enclosed in palisades. These defensive works often encompassed their fields for crops. They cultivated the "Three Sisters": varieties of corn,
beans A bean is the seed of several plants in the family Fabaceae, which are used as vegetables for human or animal food. They can be cooked in many different ways, including boiling, frying, and baking, and are used in many traditional dishes thr ...
, and
squash Squash may refer to: Sports * Squash (sport), the high-speed racquet sport also known as squash racquets * Squash (professional wrestling), an extremely one-sided match in professional wrestling * Squash tennis, a game similar to squash but pla ...
, during the warm season. In winter, tribal members lived off the stored crops and animals taken in hunts.


Language

The Erie spoke the
Erie language Erie was believed to have been an Iroquoian language spoken by the Erie people, similar to Wyandot. But it was poorly documented, and linguists are not certain that this conclusion is correct. There have been no known connections between the Erie ...
, an unattested
Iroquoian The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian ...
language said to have been similar to
Wyandot Wyandot may refer to: Native American ethnography * Wyandot people, also known as the Huron * Wyandot language Wyandot (sometimes spelled Wandat) is the Iroquoian language traditionally spoken by the people known variously as Wyandot or Wya ...
.


Territory

The known boundaries of Erie lands extended from the Allegheny River to the shores of Lake Erie. They were once believed, due to a misidentification of villages by early French explorers mapping the Great Lakes, to control all the land from northwestern Pennsylvania to about Sandusky, Ohio, but archaeologists have now attributed the western half of that to a whole other culture referred to as the Whittlesey's, who were likely an Algonquian people. A site assumed to have been Erie at Conneaut, Ohio was later reattributed to the Whittlesey, who surrounded their villages with earthen mounds instead of wooden palisades but were also living in Longhouses, rather than wigwams, by the time of European Contact. However, a second village on the east side of the river likely had been an Erie settlement. Another Erie settlement was discovered in Windsor, Ohio, at the southwestern corner of Ashtabula County, which is two river valleys further west than the sites at Conneaut. No significant settlement remains from prior to the Beaver Wars was ever documented in Trumbull or Mahoning Counties, leaving the exact border between the two peoples in question. At the time the Erie existed, their immediate neighbors included the
Neutral Nation The Neutral Confederacy (also Neutral Nation, Neutral people, or ''Attawandaron'' by neighbouring tribes) were an Iroquoian people who lived in what is now southwestern and south-central Ontario in Canada, North America. They lived throughout ...
, across Lake Erie, the
Petun The Petun (from french: pétun), also known as the Tobacco people or Tionontati ("People Among the Hills/Mountains"), were an indigenous Iroquoian people of the woodlands of eastern North America. Their last known traditional homeland was sou ...
to the north, between the Genessee and Niagara Rivers, the Susquehannock east of the Allegheny River and two historically unknown nations- the
Monongahela culture The Monongahela culture were an Iroquoian Native American cultural manifestation of Late Woodland peoples from AD 1050 to 1635 in present-day western Pennsylvania, western Maryland, eastern Ohio, and West Virginia. The culture was named by Mar ...
to the south of the Allegheny River (named for the Monongahela River, which itself was named after a nickname for the Lenape, who lived there later) and the
Whittlesey culture Whittlesey culture is an archaeological designation for a Native American people, who lived in northeastern Ohio during the Late Precontact and Early Contact period between A.D. 1000 to 1640. By 1500, they flourished as an agrarian society by 1500 ...
to the west. The Monongahela Culture was most likely a Siouan-speaking society.


History


Precontact

While
Indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
lived along the
Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lak ...
for thousands of years in succeeding cultures, historic tribes known at the time of European encounter began to coalesce by the 15th and 16th centuries. The Erie were among the several Iroquoian peoples sharing a similar culture, tribal organization, and speaking an
Iroquoian language The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian ...
which emerged around the Great Lakes, but with elements that may have originated in the south. People from the
Whittlesey tradition Whittlesey culture is an archaeological designation for a Native American people, who lived in northeastern Ohio during the Late Precontact and Early Contact period between A.D. 1000 to 1640. By 1500, they flourished as an agrarian society by 1500 ...
and
Fort Ancient culture Fort Ancient is a name for a Native American culture that flourished from Ca. 1000-1750 CE and predominantly inhabited land near the Ohio River valley in the areas of modern-day southern Ohio, northern Kentucky, southeastern Indiana and western ...
of Ohio and Pennsylvania may have been ancestors of the Erie people. Iroquoian oral history suggests the Erie descended from them and that they descended from peoples living in the St. Lawrence River Valley. It also says the Eries defeated an unknown tribal who built earthworks., but names given for this group of uncertain origin- with one using Alligewi, the Lenape word for the Erie themselves and the other account using Squawkihaw, the word the Iroquois used for the Meskwaki. Neither group built the mounds in question- three of which were excavated by archaeologists in Pennsylvania and Ohio. These are Sugar Run Mound, North Benton Mound and Towner's Mound. https://knappnotes.com/2016/01/01/towners-woods-a-burial-mound-and-a-hopewell-princess/&ved=2ahUKEwjV-M_Bz-X6AhWMVTABHcInBxYQFnoECCYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0hgS5nyhRPQod-HO4FUus3 Only Towner's Mound, in Kent, Ohio, still stands. Linguists who have studied the handful of words on record believed to be of Erie origin believe the tribe was closer to the Huron than the Iroquois, however. If descended from the Iroquois, archaeology suggests they couldn't have arrived before the 12th or 13th centuries. A Huron origin would suggest them arriving even later. The editors of ''New American Heritage'' state the various confederacies of Iroquoian tribes migrated from south to the
Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lak ...
regions and in between well before pre-Columbian times. Conversely, others such as the editors of the 1911 ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' suggest the tribes originated in what became Algonkian territories along the Saint Lawrence and moved west and south when the Algonquian tribes moved north up the coast and spread west.


Post-contact

By the time of European encounter, Algonquian and Iroquoian tribes were competitive, although they were known to conduct trading and spent most years in uneasy peace. Separation between tribes living in wilderness ensured contacts were mainly small affairs before the use firearms tipped the balance of warfare to enhance the killing ability of a people who could not outrun a bullet, a limitation which existed before guns and the ability to kill at range. Rivalries and habitual competition among American Indians tribes for resources (especially
fire arms A firearm is any type of gun designed to be readily carried and used by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see Legal definitions). The first firearms originated in 10th-century China, when bamboo tubes ...
) and power was escalated by the lucrative returns of the fur trade with French and Dutch colonists beginning settlements in the greater area before 1611. Violence to control the fur-bearing territories, the beginnings of the long-running Beaver Wars, began early in the 17th century so the normal peace and trading activity decreased between the tribes, who had responded to demand for beaver and other furs by over-hunting some areas. The Erie encroached on territory that other tribes considered theirs.ERIE HISTORY
"The Erie needed beaver for this trade and probably encroached on other tribal territories to get it. The result was a war with an unknown Algonquin enemy in 1635 that forced the Erie to abandon some of their western villages.", 2016-0612.
During 1651, they'd angered their eastern neighbors, the Iroquois League, by accepting Huron refugees from villages which had been destroyed by the Iroquois. Though reported as using poison-tipped arrows (''
Jesuit Relations ''The Jesuit Relations'', also known as ''Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France'', are chronicles of the Jesuit missions in New France. The works were written annually and printed beginning in 1632 and ending in 1673. Originally written ...
'' 41:43, 1655–58 chap. XI), the Erie were disadvantaged in armed conflict with the Iroquois because they had few firearms. Beginning in 1653 the Erie launched a preemptive attack on western tribes of the Iroquois, and did well in the first year of a five-year war. Consequently, in 1654 the whole Iroquois Confederacy went to war against the Erie and neighboring tribes such as the
Neutral people The Neutral Confederacy (also Neutral Nation, Neutral people, or ''Attawandaron'' by neighbouring tribes) were an Iroquoian people who lived in what is now southwestern and south-central Ontario in Canada, North America. They lived throughout t ...
along the northern shores of
Lake Erie Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also h ...
and across the Niagara River, the Tobacco people between the Erie and Iroquois, neighbors to all three groups. As a result, over five years of war they destroyed the Erie confederacy, the Neutrals, the Tobacco, with the tribes surviving in remnants. By the mid-1650s, the Erie had become a broken tribe. Dispersed groups survived a few more decades before being absorbed into the Iroquois, especially the westernmost Seneca nation. Historically the Monacan and
Erie Erie (; ) is a city on the south shore of Lake Erie and the county seat of Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States. Erie is the fifth largest city in Pennsylvania and the largest city in Northwestern Pennsylvania with a population of 94,831 a ...
were trade allies, especially copper, but years later that relationship fell apart due to growing colonial pressure. Because the Erie were located further from the coastal areas of early European exploration, they had little direct contact with Europeans. Only the
Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...
fur traders from
Fort Orange Fort Orange ( nl, Fort Oranje) was the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland; the present-day city of Albany, New York developed at this site. It was built in 1624 as a replacement for Fort Nassau, which had been built on nearb ...
(now
Albany, New York Albany ( ) is the capital of the U.S. state of New York, also the seat and largest city of Albany County. Albany is on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River, and about north of New York C ...
) and Jesuit missionaries in Canada referred to them in historic records. The Jesuits learned more about them during the Beaver Wars, but most of what they learned, aside from a single in-person encounter, was learned from the
Huron Huron may refer to: People * Wyandot people (or Wendat), indigenous to North America * Wyandot language, spoken by them * Huron-Wendat Nation, a Huron-Wendat First Nation with a community in Wendake, Quebec * Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi ...
who suffered much reduction before the Erie did. What little is known about them has been derived from oral history of other Native American tribes,
archaeology Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landsca ...
, and comparisons with other Iroquoian peoples. After the Haudenosaunee routed the Erie in 1654 and 1656, the group dispersed. In 1680, a remnant group of Erie surrendered to the Seneca people. Erie descendants merged with Haudenosaunee in Ohio, who lived on the Upper Sandusky Reservation from 1817 to 1832, when Ohio forcibly removed its tribes to
Indian Territory The Indian Territory and the Indian Territories are terms that generally described an evolving land area set aside by the United States Government for the relocation of Native Americans who held aboriginal title to their land as a sovereign ...
. These included the tribes who would form the present-day Seneca-Cayuga Nation in Oklahoma.


See also

* Mingo *
Neutral Nation The Neutral Confederacy (also Neutral Nation, Neutral people, or ''Attawandaron'' by neighbouring tribes) were an Iroquoian people who lived in what is now southwestern and south-central Ontario in Canada, North America. They lived throughout ...
*
Wenrohronon The Wenrohronon or Wenro people were an Iroquoian indigenous nation of North America, originally residing in present-day western New York (and possibly fringe portions of northern & northwestern Pennsylvania), who were conquered by the Confeder ...
*
Shawnee The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands. In the 17th century they lived in Pennsylvania, and in the 18th century they were in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, with some bands in Kentucky a ...
* Susquehannock people


Notes


Footnotes


References

* * * * * * * * * *


External links


Seneca-Cayuga Nation

Erie Indians
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Erie
Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture {{DEFAULTSORT:Erie People Extinct Native American tribes Iroquoian peoples Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands Great Lakes tribes Native American tribes in Ohio Native American tribes in Pennsylvania Native American tribes in West Virginia Prehistoric cultures in Ohio