Later, these tribes were also among the first to accept Catholicism, which added favor in the eyes of the French. When the Europeans accepted the friendship of these tribes, however, they accepted the enmity of the Iroquois as well.
It is also important to establish that the practices of the Iroquois were more than the exaggeration and hearsay of excitable Frenchmen. The Iroquois surely performed torture upon war captives; many European settlers viewed first-hand the mutilated body-parts of war captives. However, there has been some doubt in the current century that cannibalism was really practiced by the Iroquois.
Anthropologist W. Arens proposed in that there were no first-hand accounts of flesh eating among the Native Americans, and thus no solid proof for cannibalism. With this assertion in mind, it is now possible to inquire why the Native Americans performed these appalling acts.
The death of family members had a profound psychological effect upon the Iroquois, thus they required strong measures to relieve themselves of sadness. Essentially, they felt that they needed restitution in some form or another for the dead relative. The Iroquois warriors then established a raid solely to gather captives; scholars call this practice "mourning-wars. Though the scalp represented a captive, live prisoners were preferred. The other two options involved a live captive: the Iroquois either vengefully tortured the prisoner to death or adopted him or her into the tribe.
Since the Iroquois were a matriarchal society, the mourning woman would ultimately decide the fate of those captives that were brought to the village, mostly based upon the amount of grief that she felt for her dead relation. In this account he told of an Iroquois war band that captured a small group of Algonquin and himself. Immediately the Iroquois cut off a few fingers from each captive using fish scales.
The Iroquois intended to take the captives to their village. On the way one Algonquin woman, realizing what her fate would be, ran into a icy river and drowned herself rather than face the impending torture. Next they cleared the scaffold except for one Algonquin named Awessinipin, and they began burning his body with brands.
The Iroquois forced an Algonquin woman to take a torch and burn Awessinipin and then killed her when she finally complied. Throughout this entire ordeal the Algonquin man showed no pain. They continued this torture throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.
Mary Jemison offer other detailed descriptions of Iroquois atrocities, but generally the torture followed the same pattern. The victors usually subjected the prisoners to a heavy beating at the same time. Thereafter the Iroquois took the captives to their village and subjected the men to the gantlet or gauntlet.
They then humbled those who survived in a number of ways; for example the Iroquois might strip them naked in front of the village and force them to sing and dance. This process always ended either in a slow death by fire and scalping or with adoption into the Iroquois village. There are definitely reasons behind this torture that do not extend into metaphysical domains.
The initial beating obviously broke the spirits of the captive and ensured submission. The act of battering prisoners to break their will is no isolated policy of the Iroquois alone, but of nearly every race throughout history. After returning to their village, the Iroquois used the gantlet to further break the spirits of the captives and to serve as a test of endurance and physical tolerance.
The Iroquois would execute without ceremony those captives who fell and did not get up, which indicates disdain for mental and physical weakness. Indeed, the Iroquois expected even those captives who underwent subsequent lethal torture to stand strong and not cry out—the warriors would disgustedly dispatch a captive who lost his composure.
As the night went by and the prisoner remained silent, the entire tribe would become more and more frenzied until the sun came up and the prisoner was killed. Thus it seems that torturing captives to death was a ritualized act of vengeance that was truly fulfilled only when its objective making the victim respond to the torture failed!
The warriors were not the only ones who conducted the torture, however; the women and children of the village had just as much of an active role as the men did. Afterwards, Delaware and Shawnee warriors entered the war and, in direct defiance of the Iroquois, raided British frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
After the Great Lakes warriors returned from the siege of Fort William Henry in , smallpox swept through the Great Lakes during the winter of which fairly well ended further participation of the alliance tribes in the war.
After Montreal surrendered, the British occupied Detroit in , and only the Illinois country remained under French control until The members of the French alliance had to come to terms with the British and in agreed to meet at Detroit with Sir William Johnson, the British Indian Commissioner. In keeping with the traditions of the old French alliance, the Wyandot were made the keepers of the council fire.
Johnson wisely did not wish to change past relationships but only adapt them to British authority. Viewing the former French allies as a conquered people, Amherst raised prices on trade goods and limited the supply of gunpowder. This was a disaster. After years of trade, Native Americans had become dependent on European goods. Tensions rose, and aggravated by crop failures and epidemic during , erupted into the Pontiac Rebellion in The Wyandot reluctantly joined Pontiac and attacked the British fort at Sandusky, but as the siege of Detroit dragged on, the Detroit Wyandot were among the first to ask the British for peace.
Pontiac signed a preliminary truce with the British commander at Detroit in October and withdrew to Indiana. The Detroit Wyandot followed suit in September. During the French and Indian War, Pennsylvania had unilaterally renounced the Iroquois cession of Ohio at the Albany Conference in , and this was a major factor in the lack of resistance the British encountered when they occupied the Ohio Valley in In the wake of the Pontiac rebellion, the British halted settlement west of the Appalachians in However, faced with growing discontent in the American colonies, they began negotiations with the Iroquois in to open Ohio to settlement.
Meetings were held at Sciota in and , but William Johnson's threats of war with the Iroquois kept the tribes divided, and the Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo were forced to stand alone against the "Long Knives" during Lord Dunmore's Cresap's War With the beginning of the American Revolution in , the British ended their neutrality in the struggle between the "Long Knives" and Ohio tribes and urged the Indians to attack American settlements in Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
The Shawnee were the most active in this, but they received increasing support from the Detroit and Ohio tribes, In September, a force of Wyandot, Mingo, and Shawnee attacked Fort Henry Wheeling, West Virginia and burned the nearby settlement. They also attacked a blockhouse near Fort Union and later joined the British expedition of Captain Henry Bird which ravaged the Kentucky settlements during Victims included men, women, and over 30 children, and this senseless act added a bitter note of revenge to the struggle.
Defeated by a combined force of Delaware and Wyandot, Crawford was captured by the Wyandot. Half King turned him over to the Delaware who burned him at the stake in revenge for the Movarian Delaware killed at Gnadenhuetten. With the end of the Revolutionary War in ,the Wyandot had only warriors. The British asked their allies to stop their attacks, but there was little chance of this.
The bitter fighting between the Ohio tribes and Long Knives had taken on a life of its own beyond the control of either the British or United States. The warriors fighting for Ohio were determined to keep the Americans out, and the Long Knives did not consider the peace with Britain included "Injuns," so the fighting continued.
The new American government needed to sell the lands in Ohio to pay its debts from the war, and the British knowing this, saw an opportunity to regain their colonies through economic collapse and refused to withdraw from its forts in the Ohio valley until the Americans paid the obligations to British loyalists required by the peace treaty. The Long Knives' solution to this impasse was simple.
George Rogers Clark, whose victories had given the Americans the Ohio Valley, asked for authorization to raise an army and conquer all the Indians. Congress thanked him for past services but politely refused. Faced with an invasion of Ohio which might threaten Canada, the British encouraged the formation of a new alliance against the Americans.
It was formed at meeting held at the Sandusky villages of the Wyandot in Although the British did not attend themselves, they brought the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant from Canada to speak and promise their support. The first council fire was at the Wakatomica Shawnee , but this was burned by the Americans in Later that year, the council fire was moved to the Wyandot village of Brownstown just south of Detroit.
Wishing to avoid an expensive war, the Americans in negotiated a second Treaty of Fort Stanwix with the Iroquois confirming their earlier cession of Ohio. The next step was to reach an agreement with Ohio tribes, but this would be difficult since the Americans refused to recognize the alliance which had been formed at Sandusky the previous year.
The Treaty of Fort MacIntosh was signed with the Wyandot, Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Delaware where they agreed to American sovereignty over Ohio in exchange for a boundary with white settlement.
Half King signed for the Wyandot but later repudiated the agreement. In a similar treaty was signed with the Shawnee at Fort Finney Greater Miami Treaty , but both of these agreements were doomed. The chiefs who signed did not represent the consensus of the alliance, and even before Congress had been able to sell the Ohio land rights to the Ohio Company and a New Jersey syndicate, American frontiersmen were flooding into Ohio and squatting on land beyond the agreed boundaries.
There were 12, white settlers north of the Ohio in , and General Josiah Harmar, the American military commander, could neither keep them from encroaching on native lands nor remove them once they were there. Fighting resumed in When the alliance met in council that fall, it was decided to demand the Ohio River as the frontier. A truce was called to give the Americans time to respond, but by the time the message reached Congress in July, the fighting had already resumed.
The Americans made final attempt to avoid war and resolve the dispute through treaty. In December, , Arthur St. The alliance agreed and decided to settle for the Muskingum as the boundary. However, there was considerable disagreement, and American soldiers building the council house for the meeting were attacked by Ottawa and Ojibwe warriors in July, Joseph Brant returned to the alliance council demanding they repudiate all treaties ceding any part of Ohio.
The Shawnee and Miami agreed, but Tarhe, a Wyandot chief, decided to negotiate and was able to convince the Delaware, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe to join him. The Treaty of Fort Harmar was signed in January agreeing to the Muskingum as the boundary of settlement, but the Wyandot and other moderates within the alliance had lost control.
By summer the Shawnee and Miami, with British support, had built a consensus and afterwards dominated the alliance. In the fall, the Shawnee asked the Iroquois to join them in the fight for Ohio. The Iroquois already had enough trouble defending their own homeland from settlement and declined. They would have no further influence among the Ohio tribes after this.
Meanwhile, as American settlers continued to encroach, the United States had ratified the Constitution creating a new form of government. While Washington formed his administration and decided how to take their lands in Ohio, the Wyandot in Canada were under British pressure to surrender land in southwest Ontario for the resettlement of American Tories displaced by the Revolutionary War.
In May, they signed a treaty with Alexander McKee ceding their lands east of Detroit in exchange for two reserves: a small tract opposite Detroit; and a larger one at Anderdon on the Canard River near Amherstburg. Washington finally decided to take Ohio by force and ordered General Harmar to move against the alliance.
In October Harmar's army was mauled while trying to cross the upper Wabash River in northeast Indiana. Washington, who had a bad temper, replaced Harmar with Arthur St. Clair, but in November, St. Clair's army was nearly annihilated in western Ohio. With killed and wounded, it was the worst defeat ever inflicted on an American army by Native Americans. Above all else, Washington should be remembered as someone who did not surrender in the face of adversity.
In he sent Anthony Wayne to take command in Ohio. Americans knew him as "Mad Anthony," but the Indians would call him "Blacksnake," because, like the blacksnake, Wayne sat quietly, patiently waiting for the right moment to strike. Wayne trained an army of regulars while building a line of forts aimed straight into the heartland of the alliance in northwest Ohio.
As the alliance chiefs nervously watched Wayne's slow, methodical approach, American commissioners made overtures of peace. The British again urged resistance, and the Shawnee killed two American representatives enroute to a conference with the alliance. The alliance, however, was beginning to unravel. It could field 2, warriors but had trouble feeding them over an extended period, and Wayne was definitely extending the conflict.
In the Wabash tribes Peoria, Piankashaw, Kickapoo, and Wea signed a treaty with the Americans which caused them to leave the alliance and remain neutral. The Fox and Sauk also withdrew at the same time. In July, American commissioners met for the last time with the alliance.
At first, only the Wyandot, Shawnee, and Miami favored continuing the war, while the others were undecided. Finally, the majority decided to fight, and the meeting ended.
One of Wayne's supply trains was destroyed at Ludlow Spring, but he established himself at Fort Greenville 80 miles north of Cincinnati. As the time of confrontation approached, doubts emerged within the alliance, and the Shawnee chief, Blue Jacket opened separate negotiations. The start of Wayne's advance may also have played a part in the British decision to finally close its forts on American territory and reach an accommodation with the United States.
After a desperate attack on the Americans at Fort Recovery failed, the alliance had only warriors in August, to face Wayne's Legion at Fallen Timbers. After the battle, the retreating warriors sought refuge with the British at Fort Miami, only to have them close the gates on their former allies.
Wayne's army marched right up to the British fort but did not attack. Afterwards, the Americans burned several of nearby Indian villages and destroyed their food supplies. Then Wayne returned to Fort Greenville and waited. After a hungry winter, the alliance made peace.
No longer able to rely on British help against the Americans, the Wyandot and other tribes signed the Treaty of Fort Greenville in ceding all of Ohio except the northwest. This allowed the Wyandot to remain at Sandusky and Detroit, and Cranetown was the only one of their villages which needed to be relocated to conform to the Greenville treaty line. With defeat after a long, bitter war, there was a terrible period of social disintegration within the tribes of the alliance after Whiskey became a major problem, and civil authority broke down.
The "peace chiefs" Walking-in-the-Water was the Wyandot peace chief controlled the tribal councils and were determined to cooperate with the Americans. Although sometimes this was helped by bribery, most were doing the best they could, and it was, in general, a thankless job which all-too-often put them in danger from their own people.
There was little cooperation between the individual tribes, and an attempt to resurrect the alliance at Brownstown in failed.
The Americans, however, were not satisfied with the lands gained at Greenville and were soon pressing for more cessions. In the Wyandot also Delaware, Ottawa, Ojibwe, Shawnee, and Potawatomi signed the Treaty of Fort Industry ceding more land and agreeing to a new "permanent frontier. That year, a prophet arose among the Shawnee with a message of spiritual renewal, rejection of the whiteman's trade goods and whiskey, and return to traditional ways.
His name was Tenskwatawa The Open Door. He had several rivals for spiritual leadership, and his teachings were similar to Neolin, the Delaware Prophet whose new religion had provided the impetus for Pontiac's Rebellion in What made Tenskwatawa different was his brother was Tecumseh. Tecumseh was a respected warrior, natural leader, and spell-binding orator. Completely opposed to further land cessions to the Americans, he also favored the formation of an alliance of all tribes, even former enemies, to accomplish this.
Tecumseh gave his brother's religious movement a political purpose directly opposed to the authority of the peace chiefs. After Tenskwatawa predicted a solar eclipse in , his movement gained a large following in several tribes. Because of their important position within the old alliance, Wyandot support was crucial for Tecumseh, but the new religion had an ugly side which alienated many.
In Tenskwatawa visited the Wyandot villages. After making several converts, the Prophet denounced four women as witches. Only the intervention of the Wyandot chief Tarhe prevented their execution. Similar events occurred among the Delaware with fatal results for the accused. Despite the growing strength of Tecumseh and his brother, the land cessions continued.
Another treaty in allowed the Americans to build a road Detroit to Columbus, Ohio through their lands. Tecumseh was furious and travelled to Canada where he received promises of support from the British. In at the Treaties of Fort Wayne and Vincennes, major cessions were made in southern Indiana and Illinois, and Tecumseh went after the peace chiefs.
During the summer of , the Wyandot chief Leatherlips was assassinated by Roundhead, a Detroit Wyandot chief loyal to Tecumseh.
Other Wyandot on the lower Sandusky killed two women as witches, and the calumet and wampum belts of the alliance were transferred from Brownstown to Tecumseh's capital at Tippecanoe. The reaction of the Brownstown council that fall was to denounce the Prophet as a witch. Tecumseh never achieved more than partial support among the important tribes of the alliance, Wyandot, Delaware, and his own people, the Shawnee.
His strength lay with the tribes in the west which were part of the alliance fighting the Osage. He travelled constantly trying to gain more support. It was during one of these journeys in that governor William Henry Harrison marched on Tippecanoe. Ignoring his brother's orders, Tenskwatawa ordered an attack on Harrison's army and lost. Tippecanoe was destroyed, the Prophet's credibility seriously damaged, and Tecumseh had to rebuild his alliance. There was little time before the outbreak of the War of Tecumseh sided with the British, but most of the Wyandot, Delaware and Shawnee chose to remain neutral.
The Michigan Wyandot under Roundhead, however, were among Tecumseh's staunchest supporters. Tarhe and his followers fought for the Americans. The division of the Wyandot continued until Tecumseh and Roundhead were killed at the Battle of the Thames October, Afterwards, the war in the Great Lakes came to an end. The pro-British Wyandot remained in Ontario at Anderdon.
Major land cessions came later. In September, at the Treaty of Maumee Rapids Fort Meigs , the Wyandot surrendered their remaining lands in Ohio in exchange for two reservations: the Grand Reserve on the upper Sandusky 12 by 12 miles and the Cranberry Reserve one square mile.
The Ohio Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo received similar small reservations. The following year, the Wyandot signed two treaties at St. The first enlarged the Grand Reserve in Ohio to 12 by 19 miles and added a reserve at Big Springs for any of the Canadian Wyandot who wished to return to the United States. In the second treaty, the Michigan Wyandot surrendered Brownstown capital of the alliance in exchange for a reserve on the Huron River.
There were no further land cessions by the Wyandot until after Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in Then pressures began to mount for them to sell their lands in Ohio and Michigan and remove to Kansas. Since the Wyandot lands were protected by treaty, the government's plan was to eat away at their land base by taking advantage of factions within the Wyandot.
This was what the Wendake envisioned as the land of the dead, when Wendake people died, eventually their souls would join Aataentsic and Iouskeha in this village and live a life that looked very much like the one they had while living.
In the s, Wendat had about 25 villages that were home to anywhere between and people each. In these villages, there were longhouses, about 15 in each village, that served as communal housing. Each family had a distinct space within the longhouse, but multiple families lived in the same structure. Around the outside of these longhouses were corn fields, where the women of the village grew the crops that sustained the people throughout the year.
Sarah: Souls were incredibly important to Wendat culture. Almost everything had a soul — people, animals, plants, and even rocks. The Wendat performed rituals to honor any animal or fish that they had to kill in order to sustain themselves, and treated the bodies of animals with deep respect.
For instance, they would never give their dogs the bones of an animal they had eaten — it would be disposed of with respect. Animals spirits who felt disrespected had the ability to return and ruin hunting and fishing prospects for the Wendat people by telling other animals how to escape the hunters.
Even inanimate objects, especially large and prominent objects like unusually shaped rocks or landscape features. If something was particularly awe-inspiring, it might need to be appeased with an offering or extra respect. For example, Erik Seeman gives the story about a rock that looked like a person holding two arms up, and as Wendats walked past it, they would leave some tobacco as a tribute for the rock. This actually reminds me of how at my college, we had a statue of the Greek goddess Minerva at the front door of the Main building.
We were always leaving things for her, especially flowers — she held her hands out in a way where you could put things in her hands, and she always had things placed in her hands or on her head. Averill: Even the sun and the sky had souls — obviously, these were the manifestations of the first people, Iouskeha and his grandmother, Aatentsic. These were spirits who could be incredibly loving and useful and helpful — helping to heal or bring about good harvests — but they could just as easily get angry and spiteful, and cause there to be accidents or bad weather.
Iouskeha and Aatensic were appeased with sacrifices of tobacco and other things. Wendat people believed that a powerful tool of communication with the spirit world was through dreams, and that dreams held serious significance and needed to be properly and thoroughly interpreted. Dreams held powerful messages that Wendats needed to follow through out — for instance, dreaming that you needed to cook a big dinner for your neighbors meant waking up and getting to work to make that meal.
Sarah: We could talk much, much longer just about the fascinating points of Wendat culture and religion, but we need to get down to the creepy stuff.
How did the Wendat deal with death? First, death was not something that the Wendat people feared; The dying were not supposed to show in any way that they were afraid of their impending death, even as those around them began to make preparations for the funeral.
This was most obvious in the athataion, or farewell feast. I know they had some smaller dinner parties with friends as he came closer to the end of his life. So this is not all that foreign even though it took place hundreds and hundreds of years ago in a very different culture. Averill: The athataion required the women of the village to cook the very best they could offer, and the very best cuts of meat would be given to the dying person.
Once they had eaten, the dying person would give, sort of, a speech where they would tell their friends and family how they were not afraid of death, and how they looked forward to entering the spirit world. If they were a warrior, they would sing their death song — a common feature in many Native tribes. But overall, the feast was fairly happy — people shared stories and laughed and shared memories. Sarah: When the dying person finally died, that happy mood disappeared. Female friends and family members wailed and cried, while adult men were stoic and silent.
Now, I just have to share that when I was reading this I actually paused and said to my husband, this is how it should still be! Everyone is dead and everyone is going to die! We should just drink wine and lay on the couch and sob! But then, if that was, like, a sanctioned thing — where we could all just scream and sob and get ALL of that off our chest for a bit, and then have someone say, ok, ok, time to stop for now — I think that sounds wonderfully cathartic!
Averill: After the weeping was cut off, they would carefully fold the body up into the fetal position, then wrap it up in a beaver skin robe, and lay it on a mat to await its funeral ceremony. When everyone was gathered from surrounding villages, they would have another feast, this time called agochin atiskein, or the feast of souls. Depending on the status of the dead person, the feast would be bigger or smaller.
All people had a feast, but higher status people just had bigger and more lavish feasts. It was believed that the spirit of the dead person was still there, partaking in the feast, gaining strength for the journey the soul would then taken. During the feast, leaders and elders would give speeches like eulogies meant to comfort the mourners. Then came the time for burial, and where things get very interesting — and a leeeetle creepy.
The age and status and cause of death dictated what happened to the corpse. Very young babies would be buried by a path, so it would always be very close to passers by — this would keep the spirit close to the young women of the village so it might be born again. So it had to be burned, but in a particular way — where the body was cut up and disembowled, with some flesh and bowels burned in a fire, and the rest of the body buried.
The corpse was carefully carried out to a scaffold, which was made from four poles with a platform in the middle made out of bark. The body would be placed on to this platform, which was something like 8 or 10 feet off of the ground. Even though the women were in charge of planting and farming, the men would always be responsible for the tobacco plants, and the women would be in charge of all other crops.
The Hurons had so many crops, one commented on the seven thousand acres saying "it was easier to get lost in the corn field" than in the surround forest. About eighty percent of the Indians feed came from their crops. The rest went to trade with others. When in came to hunting, the Hurons used bows and arrows to shoot deer, nets to catch beaver, and traps to catch bears. During the times in which they caught bears, they would keep them alive for two years, feeding them and fattening them up so they would produce a lot of meat for the tribe.
They also liked to fish in lakes and rivers. Whitefish was the most common fish they caught. Unlike the Iroquois, however, they used canoes that were made of birchbark, like those of the Algonquian tribe. The nets they used to capture beaver were made from plants called nettles.
They tied stones at the ends of the nets in order to keep them down once thrown over the animal. Other weapons consisted of harpoons made of bone hooks, and tomahawks made by the Europeans.
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