Erie people

The Erie were an Iroquoian-speaking people who farmed the plain along the south-eastern shore of Lake Erie, in today's western New York and north-western Pennsylvania, until the mid-17th century. Known to the French as the Cat Nation, they were broken up as a political entity by Haudenosaunee attacks in the 1650s. Most survivors were absorbed into Haudenosaunee communities, and some historians argue that a refugee band went south to become the Westo of the colonial Southeast.

Very few Europeans ever met the Erie, and almost everything written about them comes from French missionaries relying on Wendat and Onondaga informants. In 1624 the missionary Gabriel Sagard rendered their Wendat name, Eriehronon, as the Cat Nation; the "cat" may have meant the raccoon or, as some scholars suggest, the eastern panther. Their language, never recorded, was said by the Jesuits to be understood by the Wendat and Neutral, and it disappeared with the nation's dispersal.

Archaeologists now think the Erie developed locally rather than migrating from the south. During the Late Woodland period, roughly 900–1650, small bands turned into farming communities living in large palisaded villages, a change driven by intensive maize growing and the need for defence. Recent work sees the Erie as a loose alliance of three settlement clusters rather than one nation. The eastern cluster, near the Buffalo River, took shape in the 14th century under strong influence from Iroquoian groups north of the lake. The central and western clusters formed in the late 16th century, when villagers from the Allegheny Plateau moved down to the milder lake plain, perhaps because the Little Ice Age had shortened the upland growing season.

Excavations such as Arthur C. Parker's 1907 study of the Ripley Site in Chautauqua County show a matrilineal, clan-based society. Extended families of related women shared bark-covered longhouses inside palisades and grew maize, beans and squash, adding game, fish and wild foods. Erie potters made incised wares with flared rims, and panther images on pipes and carved bone suggest a special spiritual tie to that animal. Before epidemics struck, the population may have been around 12,000.

In the mid-17th century smallpox and measles roughly halved the region's Indigenous population. The Haudenosaunee, seeking captives to replace their dead and new beaver grounds for the fur trade, dispersed the Wendat in 1649 and the Neutral soon after. Many Wendat and Neutral refugees joined the Erie and urged them to strike first; raids, the capture of an Onondaga leader and failed peace talks led to open war in 1654. The Jesuit Relations describe that summer's siege of a hastily built Erie fort, held by perhaps 2,000 warriors with their families, by about 1,200 Onondaga and Seneca, many of them armed with Dutch muskets. The attackers broke in and killed many of those inside. By 1656 the Erie confederacy no longer existed.

Most captives, largely women and children, were taken in by Seneca and Onondaga households, though some were held as forced labour. Over time they merged into Haudenosaunee society, and their descendants live in Haudenosaunee communities in New York, Oklahoma and Ontario. In 1656 a well-armed group of 600 to 700 warriors, the Richahecrians, arrived at the falls of the James in Virginia. Building on Marvin T. Smith's 1987 work, Eric Bowne has argued that they were Erie refugees who later moved to the Savannah River as the Westo, a powerful slave-raiding people allied with Carolina until their defeat in the Westo War of 1680–1682.

Our maps for 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Erie territory south of Lake Erie. The 1700 and 1715 maps still show it, although the Erie had ceased to exist as a nation by about 1656. On the 1650 map it borders the Haudenosaunee, the Miami and the Potawatomi.