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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 Confederation of the Five Nations of the Iroquois in two decisive wars between 1638–1639 [1] and 1643. This was likely part of the Iroquois Confederacy campaign against the Neutral people, another Iroquoian-speaking tribe, which lived across the Niagara River. This warfare was part of what was known as the Beaver Wars, as the Iroquois worked to dominate the lucrative fur trade. They used winter attacks, which were not usual among Native Americans, and their campaigns resulted in attrition of both the larger Iroquoian confederacies, as they had against the numerous Huron.
After defeating the Huron in 1649, the Iroquois conducted a December 1649 attack against the Tabacco people, who fell in 1650-1651. The Iroquois continued to campaign westwards along the north shores of Lake Ontario. As had happened to the Huron peoples, the sudden and unexpected winter attack led to disorganization and isolation of clan groups, and early losses of key towns by the Neutrals in the 1651-53 campaign by the warriors of the League of the Iroquois leading to eventual defeat and displacement (flight by whole villages) [2] of first the Tabacco tribes, then the Neutral groups, as had happened to the Huron.
Through the first half of the 1600s sources report the Wenrohronon tribe inhabited lands along both ends of the Lakes Erie and Ontario and their connecting river, the Niagara River. This range ran from the west side of the lower Genesee River valley around Rochester, NY (opposite to the territory of the Seneca peoples) and extended westerly along the right bank (eastern) shores of the Niagara River (opposite lands occupied by the main Neutral Nation on the Canadian side of today's river) and from lands at its source (Lake Erie, in the vicinity of Buffalo) continued a comparatively shorter distance along the southern shores at the eastern end of Lake Erie.
While the terminal southern and western end of this range is unknowable, the extent along the southern shore of Lake Ontario from Rochester to Buffalo) is about 65 miles (104.6 km). North to south, it is likely their lands extended up from Lake Ontario farther southerly more than the approximately 26 miles (42 km) shown on the map, possibly to the drainage divide (and Genesee River gorge area) formed atop the terminal moraine left behind by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, but in all likelihood, into a shared hunting ground shared with the Erie tribes near the headwaters of the Allegheny River.
While not well known today even as a tribal name in the aftermath of becoming extinct during generations-long plagues and near continuous internecine warfare, the Wenro People are known primarily through the mentions in the decades the Jesuit Relations were published. The tribe's villages the Missionaries describe seem to have been reduced to relatively fewer permanent settlements than their neighbors by internecine warfare in the late 16th century before becoming known to the few French who encountered them. [3]
Protected by the gorges of the Genesee River on the east, their small territory likely contained few valuable resources save for hunting lands, and their survival between the oft warring Huron and Iroquois was because they managed to trade simultaneously with both and their presence was valuable as a buffer state.
The Wenro were recorded by Franciscan missionary Joseph de La Roche Daillon in 1627, who encountered them at the site of Oil Springs. Daillon noted the tribe's use of crude petroleum (then a largely unknown substance) as an alleged medicine. The editors of American Heritage Magazine writing in the American Heritage Book of Indians suggested the French visitors encountered the Wenro people shortly after they had lost an internecine war, probably with the Senecas, accounting for the relatively small size of their territory, [2] as they were on fair terms with the Erie [2] and good terms with both the Neutrals and Huron [2] at that time, and the Susquehannocks were both remote and have little to compete over in consequence. (De La Roche was likely preceded twelve years prior by Etienne Brule, who passed through an unspecified land "west of Seneca territory" in 1615; Brule did not document anything specific about any of the tribes or lands he encountered.) The Wenro are documented to have conducted a mass migration out of western New York and into Huron territory in 1639, with many dying along the way; the few survivors who completed the trip were accepted into the Huron tribe. [4]
Later in the 1640s-1650s, [2] after the Beaver Wars turned genocidal, they had a falling-out with their former allies, the Neutrals, which made it impossible for the Wenros to withstand their long-time enemies, the Iroquois. [5] To a greater degree than their successive stunning defeats of the Huron people, the Petun, the Neutrals, the Shawnee people (in Ohio), the Wenro were ultimately conquered by the Iroquois nations in a manner closer to the later destruction of the Susquehannocks, and the Erie nations. [6] In the aftermath of battle, there were few survivors and the society was broken.
Iroquoian cultures allowed for survivors to be adopted (assimilated) into the victorious nations, to the point that one French observer in the 1870s estimated the majority of Iroquois were adopted. [2] Many were possibly absorbed into the Seneca Nation, whose descendants inhabit some of their former territory today, but the Erie were given an ultimatum to return Huron and Neutrals sheltered by the tribe, which led to the three years of warfare reducing the Erie Confederation and the Iroquois invasion pushing the Shawnee out of eastern and northern Ohio. [2] Remaining survivors were exiled into Huron territory. [6]
Wenro | |
---|---|
Region | New York, Pennsylvania |
Extinct | 17th century |
Iroquoian
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | None (mis ) |
qgv | |
Glottolog | wenr1236 |
Wenrohronon was an Iroquoian language and thus was related to Susquehannock, Wyandot, Erie and Scahentoarrhonon. [7]
Gallitzin is a borough in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is bordered by Gallitzin Township and Tunnelhill, all of which sit astride the Eastern continental divide. Tunnel Hill and Gallitzin both are pierced by railroad tunnels shortening the necessary ascent for rails crossing the Allegheny Front onto the Allegheny Plateau which encompasses the towns' terrains. Topping the gaps of the Allegheny, the area is one of only five major breaks in the Appalachians allowing east–west transportation corridors before the advent of 20th century technologies.
The Wyandot people are Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands of North America, and speakers of an Iroquoian language, Wyandot.
Étienne Brûlé was the first European explorer to journey beyond the St. Lawrence River into what is now known as Canada. He spent much of his early adult life among the Hurons, and mastered their language and learned their culture. Brûlé became an interpreter and guide for Samuel de Champlain, who later sent Brûlé on a number of exploratory missions, among which he is thought to have preceded Champlain to the Great Lakes, reuniting with him upon Champlain's first arrival at Lake Huron. Among his many travels were explorations of Georgian Bay and Lake Huron, as well as the Humber and Ottawa Rivers. Champlain agreed to send Brûlé, at his own request, as an interpreter to live among the Onontchataron, an Algonquin people, in 1610. In 1629, during the Anglo-French War, he escaped after being captured by the Seneca tribe. Brûlé was killed by the Bear tribe of the Huron people, who believed he had betrayed them to the Seneca.
The Beaver Wars, also known as the Iroquois Wars or the French and Iroquois Wars were a series of conflicts fought intermittently during the 17th century in North America throughout the Saint Lawrence River valley in Canada and the Great Lakes region which pitted the Iroquois against the Hurons, northern Algonquians and their French allies. As a result of this conflict, the Iroquois destroyed several confederacies and tribes through warfare: the Hurons or Wendat, Erie, Neutral, Wenro, Petun, Susquehannock, Mohican and northern Algonquins whom they defeated and dispersed, some fleeing to neighbouring peoples and others assimilated, routed, or killed.
The Seneca ( SEN-ik-ə; are a group of Indigenous Iroquoian-speaking people who historically lived south of Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes in North America. Their nation was the farthest to the west within the Six Nations or Iroquois League in New York before the American Revolution. For this reason, they are called “The Keepers of the Western Door.”
The Genesee River is a tributary of Lake Ontario flowing northward through the Twin Tiers of Pennsylvania and New York in the United States. The river contains several waterfalls in New York at Letchworth State Park and Rochester.
The Phelps and Gorham Purchase was the sale, in 1788, of a portion of a large tract of land in western New York State owned by the Seneca nation of the Iroquois Confederacy to a syndicate of land developers led by Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham. The larger tract of land is generally known as the "Genesee tract" and roughly encompasses all that portion of New York State west of Seneca Lake, consisting of about 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km2).
The Grand River, formerly known as the River Ouse, is a large river in Ontario, Canada. It lies along the western fringe of the Greater Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario which overlaps the eastern portion of southwestern Ontario, sometimes referred to as Midwestern Ontario, along the length of this river. From its source near Wareham, Ontario, it flows south through Grand Valley, Fergus, Elora, Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge, Paris, Brantford, Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River, Caledonia, and Cayuga before emptying into the north shore of Lake Erie south of Dunnville at Port Maitland. One of the scenic and spectacular features of the river is the falls and Gorge at Elora.
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.
The Neutral Confederacy was a tribal confederation of Iroquoian peoples. Its heartland was in the floodplain of the Grand River in what is now Ontario, Canada. At its height, its wider territory extended toward the shores of lakes Erie, Huron, and Ontario, as well as the Niagara River in the east. To the northeast were the neighbouring territories of Huronia and the Petun Country, which were inhabited by other Iroquoian confederacies from which the term Neutrals Attawandaron was derived. The five-nation Iroquois Confederacy was across Lake Ontario to the southeast.
The Erie people were Indigenous people historically living on the south shore of Lake Erie. An Iroquoian group, they lived in what is now western New York, northwestern Pennsylvania, and northern Ohio before 1658. Their nation was decimated in the mid-17th century by five years of prolonged warfare with the powerful neighboring Iroquois for helping the Huron in the Beaver Wars for control of the fur trade.
The Niagara Frontier refers to the stretch of land in the United States that is south of Lake Ontario and north of Lake Erie, and extends westward to Cleveland, Ohio. The term dates to the War of 1812, when the northern border was in contention between the United States and British forces in Canada. It refers only to the land east of the Niagara River and north of Lake Erie within the United States. The western side of the Niagara River, on the Canada/Ontario side, is the Niagara Peninsula; it is considered part of the Golden Horseshoe.
Joseph de La Roche Daillon was a French Catholic missionary to the Huron Indians and a Franciscan Récollet priest. He is best remembered in Canada as an explorer and missionary, and in the United States as the discoverer of oil near the Allegany River.
Buffalo is the county seat of Erie County, and the second most populous city in the U.S. state of New York, after New York City. Originating around 1789 as a small trading community inhabited by the Neutral Nation near the mouth of Buffalo Creek, the city, then a town, grew quickly after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, with the city at its western terminus. Its position at the eastern end of Lake Erie strengthened the economy, based on grain milling and steel production along the southern shores and in nearby Lackawanna.
The Petun, also known as the Tobacco people or Tionontati ,(Dionnontate, Etionontate, Etionnontateronnon, Tuinontatek, Dionondadie,or Khionotaterrhonon), were an indigenous Iroquoian people of the woodlands of eastern North America. Their last known traditional homeland was south of Lake Huron's Georgian Bay, in what is today's Canadian province of Ontario
The Iroquois, also known as the Five Nations or the Six Nations and by the endonym Haudenosaunee, are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of Native Americans and First Nations peoples in northeast North America and Upstate New York. They were known during the colonial years to the French as the "Iroquois League", and later as the "Iroquois Confederacy". The English called them the "Five Nations", including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. After 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora from the southeast were accepted into the confederacy, which became known as the Six Nations.
The Mingo people are an Iroquoian group of Native Americans, primarily Seneca and Cayuga, who migrated west from New York to the Ohio Country in the mid-18th century, and their descendants. Some Susquehannock survivors also joined them, and assimilated. Anglo-Americans called these migrants mingos, a corruption of mingwe, an Eastern Algonquian name for Iroquoian-language groups in general. The Mingo have also been called "Ohio Iroquois" and "Ohio Seneca".
Proto-Iroquoian is the theoretical proto-language of the Iroquoian languages. Lounsbury (1961) estimated from glottochronology a time depth of 3,500 to 3,800 years for the split of North and South Iroquoian.
Huronia is a historical region in the province of Ontario, Canada. It is positioned between lakes Erie, Ontario, and Huron. Similarly to the latter, it takes its name from the Wendat or Huron, an Iroquoian-speaking people, who lived there from prehistoric times until 1649 during the Beaver Wars when they were defeated and displaced by the Five Nations of the Iroquois who lived in New York.
The Iroquoian peoples are an ethnolinguistic group of peoples from eastern North America. Their traditional territories, often referred to by scholars as Iroquoia, stretch from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in the north, to modern-day North Carolina in the south.
In 1639 the Erie and Neutrals withdrew their protection from the Wenro leaving them to fend for themselves. The Iroquois attacked, and the Wenro were quickly defeated. Most fled to the Huron and Neutrals, although one Wenro group remained east of the Niagara River and resisted until 1643.