Chapter Four:
New France, Part 1: The Erie
In the final decade of the 15th century ships from Europe began making regular crossings of the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Gradually the Europeans probed the river mouths, gulfs and ocean inlets and crept into the interior of North America.
In the spring of 1534, Frenchman Jacques Cartier entered the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with two ships, seeking gold, spices and a water route to Asia. The following year his second expedition pushed inland as far as the site of present-day Montreal, where the rapids there prevented his vessels from proceeding any further. During this 1535 expedition Cartier or one of his men was probably among the first Europeans to learn of the existence of Lake Erie, described vaguely as one of the inland seas known to the Natives.
After several years' hiatus caused by European political strife, Cartier returned to the Saint Lawrence Valley in 1541, this time under the command of Jean‑Francois de La Rocque de Roberval, with the mission to establish French colonies in order to squash Spanish claims in the region. Bitter winter, mutiny and hostile Indians—Natives had been kidnapped and taken forcibly to France with both of the first two expeditions—led Cartier to abandon his efforts. He deserted Roberval on Newfoundland, skulking away during the night, and sailed back to France, an inauspicious end to his adventures. Roberval fared no better. He found neither wealth nor a water passage to Asia, nor did he succeed in establishing any colonies. But the French had arrived in the Saint Lawrence Valley.
Fully two generations later, in 1608, an expedition under the command of Samuel de Champlain returned to the region. They came to establish a fur trading colony on a spot on the Saint Lawrence that Cartier had touched in 1534, where the waters of the gulf narrow to a river, called "kebec" in the language of the Native Hurons meaning "narrowing of the waters," and recorded by the French as "Quebec."
The first winter killed 72 percent of his colonists, though Champlain survived and fresh settlers arrived in the spring. Champlain continued his push into the interior, trekking to the long lake now forming the border between the present-day states of Vermont and New York which today still bears his name, and further, overland to Lake Huron, marking the French entry into the Great Lakes region. With the claims established by these initial expeditions, the French would remain the primary European presence in the Great Lakes for the next century and a half, the original Old World empire to claim what would someday become Euclid Township.
Champlain had with him on the 1608 expedition a servant, a young man of 18 named Etienne Brule. As Champlain prepared in 1610 to return to France, Brule pressed his boss to allow him to stay and live among the Natives. "I had a young lad," Champlain wrote, "who had already spent two winters at Quebec, and who desired to go with the Algonquians to learn their language. I thought it well to send him in that direction because he could see the country and also the great lake [the one they knew about: Lake Huron], observe the rivers, the people, the mines, and other rare things so as to report the truth about all this. He accepted the duty with pleasure." Champlain left his man and sailed off across the waters back to France, not knowing if Brule would survive or even ever be heard from again. Happily though, when Champlain returned the following year, he found young Brule healthy and well, and quite conversant in the language of the Natives, reporting that they had treated him with great kindness. This brave sojourn among the Hurons also elevated Brule's status in Champlain's party, raising him from servant boy to interpreter and one of the explorer's chief advisors on Native affairs. Brule's success led Champlain to adopt the practice of sending men off to live among the Natives as general policy.
In 1615 Champlain set out deep into the interior once again, in search of what is now known as Lake Superior, of which he had heard reports from the Natives, which from those reports he believed—falsely—that it was a salt water sea. Still seeking a valuable water route through French‑claimed territory to Asia, Champlain was eager to find it, believing it would be, or at least lead to, the Pacific Ocean. It was on this trip, at Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, that Champlain sent Brule south toward Niagara Falls and the eastern end of Lake Erie.
Sources differ as to whether Brule on this expedition actually encountered members of the Erie Nation, the Native tribe first historically known to have occupied what became Euclid Township. Biographer Wilshire Butterfield's 1898 account of Brule's explorations speculates that the Erie villages were too far to the west of Brule's route for him to have met them. Others state that Brule's 1615 trek to the Niagara River was the first European contact with the Erie. Historian W.R. Harris is ambiguous, stating, "It is not probable that they [the Erie] were ever visited by a White [sic] man, unless Etienne Brule, Champlain's interpreter, went among them in 1615." But whether Brule met the Erie or not added little to what was or still is known of them, and the young Frenchman hurried by their homeland into present-day Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley.
The Erie, lamentably, left very little by which to know them. They had no written language and no European chronicler ever lived among them. What is known is inferred, heard second hand—often from the surely biased mouths of their enemies—or teased from the archeological record. The first historical mention of the Erie came from the writings of Father Gabriel Sagard, who had heard of a tribe living on the opposite side of the southern‑most of the Great Lakes from the Hurons, among whom he was living and whose language he was studying and cataloging. His work, Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, described his year‑long adventure in 1623 and 1624 in New France. Sagard was the first European to record any of the names of the Erie—Eriehronon and Eriquehronon—which he later translated in the dictionary of the Huron language he had compiled as "Cat People."
Two decades before the publication of Sagard's book priests of the Jesuit Order entered the Great Lakes on the heels of the explorer/soldier/entrepreneurs who accompanied Champlain and Brule. The literate brothers sent written reports of their efforts at conversion and evangelization among the Native American tribes back to their superiors in Europe annually beginning in 1610. Their collected correspondences comprise a collection known as The Jesuit Relation. After Father Sagard's footnote on the Eriehronon, this expansive, multi‑volume document represents the first, though sparse, written record of the history of the area of Euclid Township, and the first intimation on the lives of the Natives who perhaps occupied it.
In 1653 Father Francesco Gioseppe Bressani, one of the Jesuit priests living with the Huron north of the eastern Great Lakes, sent home the following report:
"The country of the Hurons is a part of New France, which is between the 44th and 45th degrees of latitude, and in the longitude about three quarters of [a longitudinal] hour [560 miles] farther toward the west than Kebek, but more than six whole [longitudinal] hours [4,500 miles] from Rome. In the direction of the summer sunset it has a lake [Lake Huron] of about 1200 miles in circumference, which we call 'the fresh water sea,' where the flow and ebb of tides can be observed,—a rare thing away from the sea [i.e. the ocean]... At the West, along the shores of this lake, was the nation which we called 'Tobacco,' because this plant was produced there in abundance; this nation was not distant from us more than 35 or 40 miles. Southward, a little toward the West, came the Neutral nation, whose first villages were not more than 100 miles distant from the Hurons; the territory of this nation extended through the space of 150 miles... Beyond that same Neutral nation, in a direction nearly South, there is a lake 600 miles in circumference, called Herie, formed by the fresh water sea, which discharges into it,—and thence, by means of a very high cataract, into a third lake, still greater and more beautiful; it is called Ontario, or Beautiful lake, but we were wont to call it the lake of Saint Louis. The former of these two lakes was at one time inhabited towards the South by certain peoples whom we call the Cat Nation; but they were forced to proceed further Inland, in order to escape their enemies whom they have toward the West. This nation has various Territories, cultivates the fields, and speaks a language similar to the Huron."
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The territory of the Erie skirted the south shore of Lake Erie, from the eastern end of the lake near Niagara Falls, west to the Maumee River at present-day Toledo. Evidence unique to this tribal group is confined to the areas within a few miles inland from the lakeshore, though they may have lived among the northern branches of the Upper Ohio River as far as present-day Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Their language was of the Iroquoian group suggesting a common origin with the neighboring Iroquois tribes with whom they so frequently fought.
The name Erie, enshrined in the lake which formed the northern boundary of Euclid Township, was one variation of the many by which they were called when Europeans arrived in the region. They were referred to as Heries, Erieckronois, Kakwas by the Seneca, and Rigneronnons. Their Iroquois enemies called them Ehriehronnons, and the French La Nation du Chat, the Cat Nation, "because of the prodigious number of Wildcats in their country... two or three times as large as... domestic Cats, but of a handsome and valuable fur." These cats were no myth, and they return to the story of Euclid Township, earning the respect of its first American settlers one and a half centuries later.
Further scraps from the Jesuit Relation offer more information about the Erie and the land and manner in which they lived, perhaps even hints of the temperate microclimate the lake created along its shore:
"... the Cat Nation is so called from the large number of Wildcats, of great size and beauty, in their Country. The Climate is temperate, neither ice nor snow being observed in the Winter; while in Summer it is said that grain and fruit are harvested in abundance, and are of unusual size and excellence."
The Erie farmed, hunted and fished. They manufactured canoes and snowshoes, crafted and decorated pottery for cooking, and lived in settled villages of wooden longhouses and stockaded earthwork forts for defense. They preferred to build on bluffs above the rivers near the lake. Erie farmers grew tobacco and smoked it in stone pipes carved from calcite. Their dress favored animal skins, but controversy exists whether they were the skins of wild panthers or raccoons, both of which swarmed among the woodlands south of Lake Erie.
"The Cat Nation is very populous, having been reinforced by some Hurons, who scattered in all directions when their country was laid waste, and who now have stirred up this war which is filling the Iroquois with alarm. Two thousand men are reckoned upon, well skilled in war, although they have no firearms. Notwithstanding this, they fight like Frenchmen, bravely sustaining the first discharge of the Iroquois, who are armed with our muskets, and then falling upon them with a hailstorm of poisoned arrows, which they discharge eight or ten times before a musket can be reloaded."
About this war with the Iroquois and the manner in which the Erie fought there will be more to say. Estimates of the size of the Erie population vary, often widely, and are based on not always reliable information provided by enemy tribes. Scholars' estimates range from 4,000 to 15,000. Guesses near the higher end seem more probable, over 10,000, based on the fact that in their final war with the Iroquois, the one alluded to in the selection above, the Erie were able to hold off the enemy who were armed with European firearms for several years, suggesting a superiority of numbers which, for a while at least, offset the advantage of modern weapons. Several Eastern tribes, the Erie among them, had the custom of adopting refugees into their societies, sometimes as brothers, sometimes as slaves. Thousands of Neutrals and Hurons rushed into Erie lands after routings by the Iroquois, and swelled the Erie population near the end of their reign.
Perhaps the only European to ever pass through what became northern Ohio during the Erie occupation was a French teenager named Pierre Esprit Radission, who was captured in 1652 by the Mohawks and later adopted into their tribe. He then marauded with a Mohawk band through the Lake Erie region in 1653. That year he and his band surprised an Erie village and killed an Erie woman and her child before the Erie men were alerted and fought back with clubs and poisoned arrows against the Mohawk group armed with guns, an episode described by historian Stanley Vestal in his 1940 biography of Radisson, King of the Fur Traders:
"Though outnumbered and hampered by their women, the Erie men 'fought and defended themselves lustily,' covering the escape of their women. The nine Eries stood their ground, made one of the Mohawks give back, and laid him low, though they had no guns, and were frightened by the banging of the Iroquois muskets."
The Erie were driven off in the encounter, and five of the nine warriors were shot dead. Radisson would collect a pension from the Hudson's Bay Company and die in England in 1710.
Other seafaring Europeans also established trading posts and colonies in eastern North America at the beginning of the 17th century. The English arrived in the Chesapeake Bay in 1607, founding the outpost at Jamestown. Dutch East India Company employee Henry Hudson ascended an ocean inlet inside an extraordinary natural harbor in 1609, another European seeking the chimeral water route to Asia. Within five years the Dutch had established posts in the Hudson Valley on the island of Manhattan and at Fort Nassau, the present sites of New York and Albany, where they traded European goods for furs with the Natives. More English settlers came to Plymouth Bay in 1620 and to Massachusetts Bay in 1630. In 1633 settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony descended the Connecticut River and settled in its valley, an important event in the future history of Northeast Ohio.
After the arrival of Europeans, the Native tribes of the Eastern Great Lakes experienced a series of epidemics from diseases to which their immune systems were completely naïve. With no accurate numbers of the initial population it is impossible to say exactly how destructive these epidemics were. European disease, however, devastated the Native Americans, with estimates of the depletion of some New World societies from foreign diseases reaching 97 percent.
The biological catastrophe that befell the Indians of the Great Lakes in the 1630s and 1640s was certainly a factor in the human catastrophe that followed. The situation in 1650—with Europeans in the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Valley, the Hudson Valley and the Massachusetts and Chesapeake Bays bringing disease and clamoring for furs from the interior, and an Iroquois Nation hungry for European goods, armed with modern weapons and engaged in an ongoing struggle with their neighbors—proved to be the end of the Eries' dominance in northern Ohio.
Nearly a century earlier, around the year 1560, the five Native nations occupying the area between the Hudson River and Lake Ontario—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and the Seneca, the Keepers of the Western Door and troublesome neighbors of the Erie—came together in a political and military alliance known as the Iroquois Confederation. Their constitution, The Great Law of Peace of the Longhouse People, sought to bring their political system and hegemony to neighboring tribes, and advocated the conquest of those who refused to acquiesce, a military policy similar to that of Alexander, and later Rome. This confederation was the most powerful group in Eastern North America throughout the 17th century, the Europeans included. In addition to political hegemony, the desire for economic hegemony was strong among them. They quickly established trade ties with the Dutch in the Hudson Valley, and, unlike other European traders, the Dutch had no qualms, even for their own defense and safety, about trading their high‑tech firearms with the Natives.
Europeans of the time particularly prized the skin of the beaver. Beaver fur trimmed clothing and beaver fur hats were profitable products in Europe, and the raw materials needed to make them were profitable as well. Rather than risk the unknown in the vast continental forest, many settlers in New France were happy simply to trade with the Indians to acquire them and the Iroquois tribes became eager sub‑contractors to the French fur industry. As the trade continued the fur trapping grounds in eastern North America became gradually depleted of the valuable animals, turning the eyes of the Iroquois west to the yet barely tapped resources of the Great Lakes region. Desire for continued trade profit led the Iroquois to attack the Huron in 1638, the first of a prolonged series of large and small conflicts among the Natives for dominance of fur resources and European trade known as the Beaver Wars, a conflict which smoldered through the Great Lakes for 46 years.
The Erie formed an alliance with the neighboring Neutral and Wenro nations to counter the Iroquois threat. And nevertheless, the Cat Nation was not by any means above the frenzy to acquire manufactured goods by trading furs with the Europeans, and neither were they above shoving their own neighbors aside to get to them. But the Erie miscalculated several times in this period. In 1635 a war with an unnamed Algonquin enemy cost them several villages in their western territory near present Toledo. Just then their defensive alliance began to crumble as well. In 1639 the Erie, along with the Neutrals, abandoned the Wenro to fend for themselves. The Iroquois quickly rushed in and tore the Wenro apart. Nine years after the Wenro routing the Eries' alliance with the Neutrals came undone when the Erie failed to support them in a brief war against the Iroquois. This coincided unfortunately for the Erie with the defeat of the Hurons to the north. The Iroquois capitalized on their Huron victory and turned on the Neutrals, whom they crushed in 1651. After that, no one remained between the Iroquois onslaught and the Erie homeland.
In another misstep, in 1653 the Erie sent a small raid against the Seneca, the westernmost tribe of the Iroquois confederation, and in the attack an important Seneca sachem was killed. The incident enraged the Seneca, but nonetheless they agreed to a peace conference. At the conference the Erie fared no better than their recent luck and diplomatic skill presaged. The Jesuit brothers of the Relation recorded the Iroquois version of the conference, and the diplomatic incident that unleashed the Eries' final, fatal war:
"The Cat Nation had sent thirty Ambassadors to Sonnontouan, to confirm the peace between them; but it happened, by some unexpected accident, that a Sonnontouahronnon was killed by a man of the Cat Nation. This murder so incensed the Sonnontouahronnons, that they put to death the Ambassadors in their hands, except five who escaped. Hence, war was kindled between these two Nations, and each strove to capture and burn more prisoners than its opponent. Two Onnontagehronnons, among others, were captured by the men of the Cat Nation; one of them escaped, and the other, a man of rank, was taken home by the enemy to be burnt. But he pleaded his cause so well, that he was given to the sister of one of the thirty Ambassadors who had been put to death. She was absent from the Village at the time; but the prisoner was nevertheless clothed in fine garments, and feasting and good cheer prevailed, the man being all but assured that he would be sent back to his own Country. When she to whom he had been given returned, she was told that her dead brother was to be restored to life, that she must prepare to regale him well, and then give him a gracious dismissal. She, however, began to weep, and declared that she would never dry her tears until her brother's death was avenged. The Elders showed her the gravity of the situation, which was likely to involve them in a new war; but she would not yield. Finally, they were compelled to give up the wretched man to her, to do with him as she pleased. All this occurred while he was still joyfully feasting. Without a word he was taken from the feast and conducted to this cruel woman's cabin. Upon entering, he was surprised at being stripped of his clothes. Then he saw his life was lost, and he cried out, before dying, that an entire people would be burned in his person, and that his death would be cruelly avenged. His words proved true; for, no sooner had the news reached Onnontague, than twelve hundred determined men started forth to exact satisfaction for this affront."
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The Erie had no firearms, but were, as the Iroquois knew through painful experience, numerous and fierce. Initially it seems they enjoyed the upper hand in the conflict.
The Jesuit Relation:
"They [the Onnontaehronnon Iroquois] informed us that a fresh war had broken out against them, and thrown them all into a state of alarm: that the Ehriehronnons were arming against them (these we call the Cat Nation, because of the prodigious number of Wildcats in their country, two or three times as large as our domestic Cats, but of a handsome and valuable fur). They informed us that a village of Sonnontoehronnon Iroquois had been already taken and set on fire at their first approach; that that same nation had pursued one of their own armies which was returning victorious from the direction of the great lake of the Hurons, and that an entire Company of eighty picked men, which formed the rear‑guard, had been completely cut to pieces; that one of their greatest Captains, Annenraes by name, had been captured and led away captive by some skirmishers of that Nation,—who, in order to deal this blow, had come almost to the gates of their village. They declared, in a word, that all the four nations of the upper Iroquois were on fire; that they were leaguing together, and arming to repulse this enemy; and that all this compelled them earnestly to seek for Peace with us, even though they might not have had any such thoughts before."
Numerous passages in the Jesuit Relation record Iroquois requests to the priests to help them acquire French weapons to fight the Erie. There is no indication that the friars complied. Still, understanding the potential of European military power, the Iroquois were cautious to ensure that the French in the Great Lakes would remain neutral in the conflict. Once the French assured them they would not intervene the western Iroquois invaded Erie territory in 1654.
Little specific is available regarding the course of the war. It lasted several years and was marked by intense hatred, ferocity and much indiscriminate blood—a war of extermination. Both sides considered women and children fair targets, and the tide of battle soon turned against the Erie. The French brothers north of Lake Erie recorded such events of the war with which they came in contact, their own religious agenda evident, in their writings home:
"On the fifth of February there came to Onontague many hunters from Sonnontouan and Oiogoen, whom the Father greeted with two presents of a thousand beads to each Nation... He also, with the presents offered in his name, wiped away the blood still remaining on their persons from the latest engagement with the Cat Nation."
"On the 12th a prisoner from the Cat Nation was brought in, to bear the brunt of these people's rage, no quarter being now given between the two tribes. He was a child of nine or ten years, and was to be burnt in a short time, which made the Father resolve to attempt the rescue of his soul from the fires of hell, not being able to save his body. But the hatred of these barbarians is so excessive that they are unwilling that their enemies should be happy even in the other world; it required adroitness to instruct and baptize this poor unfortunate in secret. The Father, accordingly, after seeing and speaking with him, feigned thirst and was given some water. In drinking, he purposely allowed some drops to run into his handkerchief,—one was enough to open Heaven's gates,—and baptized the boy before he was burnt. He was only two hours in torment, because of his youth, but he displayed such fortitude that not a tear or a cry escaped him from amid the flames."
"The Father was sent for, but too late, to confer [baptism] upon a poor captive girl of the Cat Nation, who was cruelly murdered by order of her Mistress, whom she displeased by her occasional obstinacy. On the twenty‑seventh of December, her Mistress took a notion to get rid of her; therefore, without much deliberation, she commissioned a young man to kill her. Taking his hatchet, he followed this poor victim on her way to the woods; but he changed his mind, and came back to do the deed in sight of all. Accordingly, he allowed her to return, and, when she was at the entrance to the Village, struck her on the head with his hatchet, felling her to the ground, apparently dead. Yet, she was not mortally wounded, and was therefore carried into a neighboring Cabin to have her wound dressed. When, however, the murderer was taunted with his want of skill in head‑splitting, he returned, snatched his prey from those who held her, dragged her away, and gave her more blows which killed her. This murder did not startle the children playing near by, or even divert them from their game, so accustomed are they to the sight of these poor captives' blood. Toward evening, the murderer, or some one else, went crying aloud through the streets and cabins, that such and such a person had been put to death; whereupon all began to make a noise with their feet and hands, while some beat with sticks the bark of their cabins, to frighten the soul of the departed and drive it far away. The Preachers of the Gospel are daily exposed to like dangers among these Peoples."
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The last stand of the Erie against the Iroquois took place somewhere in Erie territory sometime in 1656. The French brothers reported the invasion, the big news home from the field that year. By the account the Erie had by then finally acquired a small supply of firearms, but not nearly enough. The exact place and the exact date of the battle are not known.
"Our [the Iroquois'] Warriors entered that Country [Erie territory], remote though it was from Onnontague, before they were perceived. Their arrival spread such a panic that Villages and dwellings were abandoned to the mercy of the Conqueror,—who, after burning everything, started in pursuit of the fugitives. The latter numbered from two to three thousand combatants, besides women and children. Finding themselves closely followed, they resolved, after five days' flight, to build a fort of wood and there await the enemy, who numbered only twelve hundred. Accordingly, they entrenched themselves as well as they could. The enemy drew near, the two head Chiefs showing themselves in French costume, in order to frighten their opponents by the novelty of this attire. One of the two, who had been Baptized by Father le Moine and was very well instructed, gently urged the besieged to capitulate, telling them that they would be destroyed if they allowed an assault. 'The Master of life fights for us,' said he; 'you will be ruined if you resist him.' 'Who is this Master of our lives—' was the haughty reply of the Besieged. 'We acknowledge none but our arms and hatchets.' Thereupon, the assault was made and the palisade attacked on all sides; but the defense was as spirited as the attack, and the combat was a long one, great courage being displayed on both sides. The Besieging party made every effort to carry the place by storm, but in vain; they were killed as fast as they advanced. They hit on the plan of using their canoes as shields; and, bearing these before them as protection, they reached the foot of the intrenchment [sic]. But it remained to scale the large stakes, or tree‑trunks, of which it was built. Again they resorted to their canoes, using them as ladders for surmounting that stanch palisade. Their boldness so astonished the Besieged that, being already at the end of their munitions of war,—with which, especially with powder, they had been but poorly provided,—they resolved to flee. This was their ruin; for, after most of the first fugitives had been killed, the others were surrounded by the Onnontaguehronnons, who entered the fort and there wrought such carnage among the women and children, that blood was knee‑deep in certain places. Those who had escaped, wishing to retrieve their honor, after recovering their courage a little, returned, to the number of three hundred, to take the enemy by surprise while he was retiring and off his guard. The plan was good, but it was ill executed; for, frightened at the first cry of the Onnontaguehronnons, they were entirely defeated. The Victors did not escape heavy losses,—so great, indeed, that they were forced to remain two months in the enemy's country, burying their dead and caring for their wounded."
Given their large numbers, which are known through reports and deduction, it seems implausible that the Erie were entirely annihilated by the Iroquois. Though many were killed in the conflict, and perhaps others died from being displaced from the safety of their homes and the crops they lived upon, many, many Erie likely fled south and west, merging into neighboring tribes—or displacing those tribes themselves—and slipping beyond the reach of European scribes who could record their fate.
Beyond the two months they spent recovering from their ferocious struggle with the Erie, the Iroquois did not occupy the south shore of Lake Erie, nor did they build villages or plant crops there. The lakeshore trail that became Euclid Avenue was still an important highway, and the French and Native tribes may have passed through on it, hunting turkeys, picking wild fruit and trapping. But, after the Beaver Wars swept through, real ownership of northern Ohio, day to day, season to season, reverted to the panthers and rattlesnakes. It was theirs again for the next 80 years.
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An alien tribe appeared suddenly near the James River in the nascent English Virginia colony in 1656 and quickly built a fortified village there. The Powhattan Indians referred to these newcomers as "Ricahecrian," meaning "from beyond the mountains." A combined force of English settlers and allied Powhattan Indians tried to drive them out, but were beaten back.
Were these the Erie? Their origin, the timing of their arrival and skill in fighting make it possible. But no one really knows.
The information in Chapter Four is drawn from the following sources:
Anker, Daniel. "Lessons from Erie Warfare." Western Reserve Studies: A Journal of Regional History and Culture, 1986.
Axelrod, Alan. Chronicle of the Indian Wars. Prentiss Hall, 1993.
Butterfield, Consul Willshire. History of Brule's Discoveries and Explorations, 1610-1626. Helman-Taylor Company, 1898.
Dobyns, Henry F. Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. University of Tennessee Press, 1983.
Kubiak, William J., Great Lakes Indians: A Pictorial Guide. Baker Book House, 1970.
Sultzman, Lee. "Erie." First Nations website. www.dickshovel.com
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. The Burrows Brothers Company, 1899. Volumes 38, 41 & 42.
Vestal, Stanley. King of the Fur Traders. The Deeds and Deviltry of Pierre Esprit Radisson. Houghton Mifflin, 1940.
Vietzen, Raymond C. The Immortal Eries. Wilmot Printing, 1946.