Prehistory and Euro-American Exploration
By the time of the Columbus' 1492 expedition, Ohio and the Lakes in general were populated by a wide variety of Native Americans. They worked the land, hunted in the woods, and even fished and explored the Lakes. With the advent of European exploration in the 1600s came a great native population upheaval. Disease decimated hundreds of thousands of natives, while European land claims and wars forced Native American nations on the coast to move inland. By the time the first French explorers began to go up the St. Lawrence River to traverse the upper Lakes in the early 1600s, the tribes they found were different than what had been there less than fifty years earlier. The following is a brief list of the major Native American tribes and nations in the Great Lakes region at the end of the seventeenth century:
· Iroquois, Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca in NY
· Conestoga in PA
· Erie in N. Ohio; Miami and Shawnee in central and southern Ohio
· Potawatomi in S. MI; Menominee in Upper Peninsula, MI
· Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, and Winnebago in WI
· Algonquin, Huron, Tionontati, Ottawa, Missisauga, and Chippewa in Ontario, Canada
NOTE: These are rough boundaries, and some of these groups migrated seasonally.It's interesting to note historic legacy of geographic names, peoples and places . Erie, a Native American name, does not mean "eerie," as in the "Oohh, I'm scared!" context, but is the name of a people that lived along that Lake's shore. Huron is a name of a tribe as well, for which we have an Ohio county and a Lake Huron to the west named. Quebec is a French adaptation of the Indian word Ka'bect or Kebec. In similar fashion, the Iroquois word for "the villages" is Kanata which eventually became "Canada." Other cities with French-derived names, like Marquette and Detroit, are located around the Lakes.
European Expansion | Northeast Ohio Context
Summary of Events