What Lake Erie might have looked like before the last ice age will remain a mystery. The vegetation and the animal life lie buried forever. But once the ice sheets began to finally retreat north of the area, the land bridge at the west end of the lake likely witnessed the passage of animals and the humans that followed them.
Following the retreat of the glaciers, Lake Erie’s first human occupants were likely roaming bands of hunters and gatherers belonging to groups who have been named after their weapons, and known as the “Fluted Point” people. Archaeological evidence suggests that they arrived even as the glaciers still hovered only a few hundred kilometres to the north.
Because the waters of Lake Erie were lower at this point, any evidence of these groups in that area now lies below water. As the techniques of sharpening spear points became more refined, the period from 8500 BC to 6000 BC became known as the Plano period. Progressive waves of technical refinements kept sweeping northward, including the development of pottery and pipes. Records place their presence at around AD 1000 But another more advanced group was slowly making its way northward. Known as the Middle Woodland or Mound Builders (due their practice of burying their dead in large mounds) this group practised farming and occupied permanent villages. They are believed to have crossed into Ontario around AD 1300 and were displaced by war or absorption by the earlier occupants.
The Mound Builders belonged to the Iroquoian linguistic group and evolved into the Erie, Petun, and Iroquois nations, as well as the Attiwondaronks and Huron groups, although mound-building itself appears to have ended in Ontario around AD 800.
Much has been written about the Attiwondaronks, or “Atiquandaronk,” as the Huron and Iroquois had derisively called them, meaning those who speak strangely. The term they used for themselves was “Onguiaahra,” from which it is believed the name Niagara originated. These were the first inhabitants of the Erie shore with whom the earliest Europeans came in contact. Archaeological evidence suggests that they moved into Ontario’s southwestern peninsula before AD 1300, settling largely between the Grand River and the Niagara River. South of Lake Erie lived a nation after whom the lake was named, the Ehriehronnons (later shortened to “Erie”), which translates as the “people of the cat” — a reference to the population of panthers that existed at the time.
East of the Niagara River was the land of the Iroquois confederacy, a political union that included the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga. (Later, when the Tuscarora nation joined, they became known as the “Six Nations” — a name they carry to this day.)
North of Lake Erie roamed the Huron, to whom the Attiwondaronks were linguistically related. However, animosity was strong between the Huron and Attiwondaronks on the one side, and the Iroquois on the other. War was never far away. In 1640 the Seneca launched a vicious war against the Attiwondaronks over what they believed was the killing of a Seneca chief named Annenraes. Soon after, when the Iroquois launched their infamous war against the Hurons in 1649 (which featured the notorious torture of the priests Lalemont and Brébeuf), the Attiwondaronks were not spared and by 1653 most of their number had dispersed or been annihilated.
The little that is known of the Attiwondaronks comes from the early French explorers to the region. In 1616, Samuel de Champlain called them the “Neutrals” because of what he perceived to be their refusal to take sides in the traditional wars between the Iroquois and the Huron. Champlain estimated their number at around 4,000 and he observed that they lived by burning trees and planting corn and tobacco in the clearings. Much of Champlain’s knowledge is thanks to his interpreter, Étienne Brûlé, who stayed with them during the summer of 1615.
A Recollet missionary named Joseph de La Roche Daillon spent the winter of 1626 with the Neutrals. He recorded that the Neutrals lived in twenty-eight villages, in addition to scattered seasonal hunting and fishing camps. Although the Neutrals moved their villages once the soil became exhausted, the main centre was called Kandoucho, with other villages being named Ongniaahra (later to become “Niagara”) and Teotongniaton. Overseeing them in Daillon’s time was a chief named Tsohahissen, or Souharissen, although an earlier chief, while peace still held between the Neutral and the Iroquois, was thought to have been a “queen” named Jikonsaseh.1
The next Europeans to record their experience with the Neutrals were the Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Jean de Brébeuf and Joseph Marie Chaumonot. Their remarkable accounts appear in the texts of the Jesuit Relations, a document that has proven to provide invaluable insight into the Ontario’s aboriginal inhabitants of the seventeenth century. In the ten villages where the two priests stayed they estimated the population to be 3,000, while among the forty overall villages they estimated the population to be 12,000. Theirs was not a happy visit, however, for the Hurons had warned the Neutrals in advance of the illnesses inflicted upon their population by the European diseases borne by the unknowing missionaries. Brébeuf then returned to the mission at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons where, along with four other fellow priests, he was tortured and killed.2
Neutral villages consisted of longhouses made of tree boughs covered with large pieces of bark. The middle of the longhouse would contain as much as a dozen fires, with a family on each side. Excavations at Fort Erie show that the Attawondaronks quarried flint to make arrowheads, spear points, knives, and tomahawks.
While nearly all evidence of the Neutrals has long been eradicated, buried, or ploughed under, a remarkable remnant known as the Southwold Earthworks, located in Elgin County, has survived. Surrounded by farm fields and forested ravines, the earthworks, a national historic site since 1923, was occupied around AD 1500, and consisted of a double palisade, four to five metres in height with gaps to allow the passage of a stream. Explorations by famed archaeologist Wilfred Jury3 in the 1940s also unearthed evidence of a succession of villages near Clear Creek. Still earlier, a Chatham amateur archaeologist named Edmund Jones had found the remains of a Neutral village in what is today Rondeau Provincial Park.
Attiwandaronks typically used the longhouse for their dwellings.
While the grisly fate of the Jesuits who were tortured and killed in 1649 still resonated in France and Quebec, the religious fervour to convert the “heathen savages” continued unabated. Next up were a pair of Sulpician priests, one René de Bréhant de Galinée and François Dollier de Casson. Anxious to convert those tribes living west of the Great Lakes, who had yet to encounter their first missionary, the two were in fact part of an exploratory expedition headed by a young Jesuit dropout, René-Robert, Cavalier de La Salle.
Despite farming by the settlers, the Attirondawonk Earthworks have survived and display the trenches used in their palisaded village.
Having read the much sought-after Jesuit Relations in France, La Salle hungered for adventure in the new world. During a chance meeting with two Iroquois, La Salle was told of a river that led south of Lake Erie to a faraway salt sea. Imagining that this might at last be the fabled passage to China, La Salle raised enough money to put together an expedition to discover this new route. Governor Daniel de Remy de Courcelle of New France agreed, but only on the condition that he agree to add the two missionaries to his force.
On July 6, 1669, the group set out. Seven canoes, each containing three men and their supplies and equipment, and two Iroquois guides, along with a Dutch settler who was fluent in Iroquois, made their way west along Lake Ontario to an Iroquois village at the end of the lake. Here they met by chance an earlier explorer, Adrien Jolliet.4 Fresh from Lake Superior, where he was seeking a copper mine, Jolliet told the astonished travellers of a new route to the upper lakes, one that led not through the traditional French River route, but that took him through Lake Erie and Lake Huron.
At this news, the expedition