development helped avoid rivalries and civil discord by separating brothers from one another, making it harder for them to form factions of male kinsmen. It was a useful enough survival mechanism that even some of the patrilineal Great Lakes Indians, peoples like the Potawatomis and Mesquakies who traced descent through the father’s line, were also matrilocal or bilocal.6
The Hurons’ matrilineality and matrilocal dwelling customs probably reflect the importance of women, who did all of the Hurons’ farming, to the nation’s survival. While the Hurons also practiced hunting and fishing, agriculture provided about 80 percent of their calories. Even though they lived close to the 120-frost-free-day line that marked the northern limit of maize cultivation, the Hurons grew such a large surplus of corn that they could trade it with the Ojibwas and other Indians of the northern Great Lakes. In the early seventeenth century, Huron traders learned that the thick pelts of northern beavers and other mammals were valuable to Europeans, and they initiated a multiparty exchange of Huron corn for Ojibwa furs for European goods. The merchandise they obtained from French traders gradually improved the Hurons’ standard of living without altering their basic lifeways. Durable iron axes and blades made it easier to fell trees, build longhouses, and improve the Hurons’ bone- and wood-carving practices; light metal cooking pots made it easier to prepare food; and firearms gave Huron warriors an advantage in their periodic wars with the Iroquois.7
While individual families owned the Hurons’ crops and trade routes, the nation avoided gross inequalities of wealth and promoted social stability with regular rituals of redistribution. Huron men and women expected their leaders to hold feasts and dances for them, some to serve as displays of hospitality and some to help heal the sick. All Hurons participated in a massive redistributive ceremony known as the Feast of the Dead, held every twelve years in the town of Ossossane, during which families dug up, skinned, and reinterred their deceased relatives. They accompanied these last rites with the display and distribution of thousands of presents. (The Hurons reinterred their dead after their relatives’ “second souls,” which they believed to remain with the body after the initial physical death, had passed on.) Hurons also redistributed goods as part of their legal culture: the families of those accused of murder had to pay sixty gifts to the victim’s family, unless they wanted to invite violent retribution, while thieves’ victims could confiscate their attackers’ possessions.8
The Hurons’ social cohesion began to break down in the 1630s, however, because of two additional imports from Europe: Old World diseases and Catholic Christianity. Europeans had acquired the former from their domestic animals or via overland trade with eastern and southern Asia, and over the centuries many Europeans had acquired immunity to diseases like smallpox and measles, usually after surviving a bout with them in childhood. Isolated from Eurasian disease pools and lacking domestic animals, Native Americans had no familiarity with crowd diseases. When they caught them, everyone in the community became sick at once, leaving no one to care for the afflicted, gather firewood, or bring in crops. Traders and travelers carried imported diseases to Huron towns, and the results proved deadly: in 1635, 1636–37, and 1639–40, epidemics of scarlet fever, influenza, and smallpox spread through the Hurons’ longhouses and killed thousands of people. Neither the Hurons nor the Jesuit missionaries residing with them could fight either illness. Huron medicine, prescribed by holy men like the hunchbacked Tonneraouanont and the reclusive Tehorenhaegnon, focused on treating the sick with feasts, dances, herbal remedies, and enchantments. The Jesuits, who considered such healers demonic “sorcerers,” prescribed instead palliatives (like sugar), Masses, and bleeding of the sick. None of these treatments drove away the demons or divine disfavor to which sorcerers and missionaries ascribed illness. Some, like communal gatherings and bloodletting, probably worsened patients’ condition or infected others. Lacking effective medicinal techniques, nearly half of the Huron people died by the mid-1640s.9
The Hurons experienced further stress in the 1640s when a minority adopted Christianity, a faith brought to Huron country by Jesuits in the previous decade. The Jesuits, a new order of teachers and missionaries, sought to convert the non-Christian peoples of the world to Catholicism—and to European moral norms—during an era in which Catholic reformers also sought to wipe out superstition and disorder among European peasants. The techniques of conversion resembled those employed by other Catholic missionaries in Europe, relying heavily on visual images, music, and charitable gifts of food and medicine. Jesuit missionaries had a lasting impact on those Hurons who converted; two hundred years later, travelers to Huron-Wyandot communities in northern Ohio noted that some Huron words had apparently been adapted from Latin.10
However, by requiring converts to avoid traditional marital customs and religious observances, the Jesuits segregated Christian from non-Christian Indians. Most Hurons disliked Jesuits’ separation of the “saved” from the unsaved, which broke the traditional bonds of community and kinship. One, referring to the missionaries’ offer of heaven to those who broke from their unconverted kinsmen, said in 1637, “For my part, I have no desire to go to heaven; I have no acquaintances there, and the French who are there would not . . . give me anything to eat.” Some converts faced mistrust or persecution from “pagan” kinsmen who opposed the Christians’ abandonment of their old social obligations. This growing division within Huron communities, combined with the confederacy’s losses from disease, made them more vulnerable to external attack, which came with great force in the form of the Iroquois.11
Residing in the Finger Lakes country on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, the Five Nations of Iroquois strongly resembled their Huron rivals. Their ancestors had developed “Three Sisters” agriculture (beans, maize, and squash) around 1000 CE, at roughly the same time as the Hurons. They used the output of their fields, fisheries, berry patches, and hunting territories to sustain a substantial population, roughly twenty thousand people in 1600. They maintained large fortified towns, whose heavy palisades caused some European observers to call them “castles,” and therein dwelled in large multifamily longhouses. They organized their society around matrilineal families and clans, and they even had a creation story resembling that of the Hurons, focusing on the Sky Woman—which probably reflected the social importance of Iroquois women. One critical difference distinguished the two groups, however: the Iroquois traded less with their Indian neighbors and fought them much more frequently. In the sixteenth century, the Iroquois had developed a sophisticated mechanism for preventing conflict among themselves: the League of Peace. The chiefs of this ceremonial body, whom Iroquois matrons appointed to their positions, used elaborate rituals of condolence to settle grievances between Mohawks and Oneidas, or between Cayugas and Onondagas. Neighboring nations like the Hurons and Montagnais, however, remained outside the league and thus remained enemies.12
French firearms and iron weapons gave the Hurons an early military advantage over the Five Nations, but in the late 1620s the Iroquois began buying guns from the Dutch at Beverswyck (present-day Albany). Having leveled the military playing field, in the 1640s Iroquois raiders intercepted Huron trading parties and robbed them of their furs, wherewith they purchased more weapons and ammunition. The primary goal of Iroquois warfare in this period, however, was to obtain captives, to replace the population losses they suffered because of epidemic disease in the 1630s. (Ethnohistorians call this kind of warfare “mourning war.”) In 1648 and 1649, two large Iroquois war parties invaded Huronia, destroyed several of the Hurons’ towns, and killed or captured about two thousand people. The Iroquois tortured and executed a few captives, but they adopted most of them into their extended families and made them part of the Five Nations.13
The Hurons who evaded death or capture burned their remaining towns to prevent the Iroquois from plundering them, then dispersed from the ruins of their homeland. Some joined with a neighboring Iroquoian nation, the Petuns, which had also come under Iroquois attack, and moved west. These emigrants initially (1651–52) settled at Sault Sainte Marie, a plain adjacent to the Bawating Rapids on the Saint Mary’s River, which several Ojibwa clans used as a fishery and gathering place. Some settled at Michilimackinac (“The Great Turtle”), the district south of Mackinac Strait. In these places of refuge, they became the progenitors of a new Indian nation, the Wyandots, who would
