sometimes given, Erigos, or Errienous.[1] About forty years afterward, the Iroquois (Five Nations) fell upon them with such fury and in such force that the nation was annihilated. Those who escaped the slaughter were absorbed among their conquerors, but allowed to live on their own lands, paying a sort of tribute to the Iroquois. This was the policy of that nation in all its conquests. A few years after the conquest of the Eries, the Iroquois again took to the war-path, and swept through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, even attacking the Mississippi tribes. But for the intervention and aid of the French, these tribes would have shared the fate of the Hurons and Eries. Until the year 1700, the Iroquois held the south shore of Lake Erie so firmly that the French dared not trade or travel along that side of the lake. Their missionaries and traders penetrated this part of Ohio as early as 1650, but generally suffered death for their zeal.
Having completed the conquest of the Hurons or Wyandots, about Lake Huron, and murdered the Jesuit missionaries by modes of torture which only they could devise, they permitted the residue of the Hurons to settle around the west end of Lake Erie. Here, with the Ottawas, they resided when the whites came to the State. Their country was bounded on the south by a line running through the central part of Wayne, Ashland, Richland, Crawford and Wyandot Counties. At the western boundary of this county, the line diverged northwesterly, leaving the State near the northwest corner of Fulton County. Their northern boundary was the lake; the eastern, the Iroquois.
The Delawares, or "Lenni Lenapes," whom the Iroquois had subjugated on the Susquehanna, were assigned by their conquerors hunting-grounds on the Muskingum. Their eastern boundary was the country of the Iroquois (before defined), and their northern, that of the Hurons. On the west, they
extended as far as a line drawn from the central part of Richland County, in a semi-circular direction, south to the mouth of Leading Creek. Their southern boundary was the Ohio River.
West of the Delawares, dwelt the Shawanees, a troublesome people as neighbors, whether to whites or Indians. Their country was bounded on the north by the Hurons, on the east, by the Delawares; on the south, by the Ohio River. On the west, their boundary was determined by a line drawn southwesterly, and again southeasterly—semi-circular—from a point on the southern boundary of the Hurons, near the southwest corner of Wyandot County, till it intersected the Ohio River.
All the remainder of the State—all its western part from the Ohio River to the Michigan line—was occupied by the Miamis, Mineamis, Twigtwees, or Tawixtawes, a powerful nation, whom the Iroquois were never fully able to subdue.
These nations occupied the State, partly by permit of the Five Nations, and partly by inheritance, and, though composed of many tribes, were about all the savages to be found in this part of the Northwest.
No sooner had the Americans obtained control of this country, than they began, by treaty and purchase, to acquire the lands of the natives. They could not stem the tide of emigration; people, then as now, would go West, and hence the necessity of peacefully and rightfully acquiring the land." The true basis of title to Indian territory is the right of civilized men to the soil for purposes of cultivation." The same maxim may be applied to all uncivilized nations. When acquired by such a right, either by treaty, purchase or conquest, the right to hold the same rests with the power and development of the nation thus possessing the land.
The English derived title to the territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi partly by the claim that, in discovering the Atlantic coast, they had possession of the land from "ocean to ocean," and partly by the treaty of Paris, in February, 1763. Long before this treaty took place, however, she had granted, to individuals and colonies, extensive tracts of land in that part of America, based on the right of discovery. The French had done better, and had acquired title to the land by discovering the land itself and by consent of the Indians dwelling thereon. The right to possess this country led to the French and Indian war, ending in the supremacy of the English.
- ↑ Father Louis Hennepin, in his work published in 1684, thus alludes to the Eries: "These good fathers," referring to the priests, "were great friends of the Hurons, who told them that the Iroquois went to war beyond Virginia, or New Sweden, near a lake which they called 'Erige,' or 'Erie,' which signifies 'the cat,' or 'nation of the cat,' and because these savages brought captives from this nation in returning to their cantons along this lake, the Hurons named it, in their language, 'Erige,' or 'Erike,' the lake of the cat,' and which our Canadians, in softening the word, have called 'Lake Erie.'
Charlevoix, writing in 1721, says: "The name it bears is that of an Indian nation of the Huron (Wyandot) language, which was formerly seated on its banks, and who have been entirely destroyed by the Iroquois. 'Erie, in that language, signifies 'cat,' and, in some accounts, this nation is called the 'cat nation.' This name, probably, comes from the large numbers of that animal found in this region."
