end of the lake, where the water was lowered, and can wreak even more havoc.
But, potentially even more unsettling, beneath the storm-tossed water may lurk the form of Lake Erie’s very own “monster” — South Bay Bessie. Said to measure anywhere from five to twenty metres, “Bessie” has been the subject sightings dating as far back as 1793. In the 1870s “Bessie” was again sighted near Buffalo, prompting a posse to gather at the shoreline and begin shooting at anything that moved in the water.3
Sightings of “Bessie” (so named in the 1980s) has been reported off and on throughout the twentieth century, enough that the city of Huron Ohio declared itself to be the “live capture control centre” for the monster, while a group of local businessmen offered $150,000 for its capture.
Most sightings have likened Bessie to a large sea serpent, with a snakelike head and, in some accounts, “blazing eyes.” In 1993 a fisherman near Port Bruce reported being chased ashore by the thing, while the Weekly World News in the same year published a “photo” of the monster wrapped around a sailboat under a headline that read “Monster Sinks Sailboat.”
The latest additions to the myth occurred at Port Dover in 2001 when several swimmers reported being bitten by some large, unknown creature. A local doctor who examined the large bites offered the opinion that the attack came, not from a mystery monster, but rather from a bowfin, a large fish that was attempting to protect its own territory.
If Bessie lives anywhere, it is unlikely to be in Lake Erie’s “dead zone.” This was a region of the lake identified by scientists in the 1970s. The dead zone generally is confined to the central section of the lake where the waters are neither at their deepest nor at their shallowest. Here, while the lowest layers remain cold, the upper layers warm to a degree that they absorb most of the oxygen. As plankton dies, it sinks to the bottom and uses up the little oxygen that remains. Contributing significantly to the dead zone were the excessive amounts of phosphorous being dumped by farms and industries. Stiff new regulations imposed during the 1970s eliminated much of the problem, at least for a time. Then, in the 1990s, the province of Ontario not only ended its pollution-control programs, but simply stopped measuring the phosphorous levels in the lake entirely; cutbacks similar to those that contributed to the E. coli tragedy in Walkerton Ontario.
2 AN “EARTHLY PARADISE” The First Arrivals
What Lake Erie might have looked like before the last ice age will remain a mystery. The vegetation and the animal life lie buried forever. But once the ice sheets began to finally retreat north of the area, the land bridge at the west end of the lake likely witnessed the passage of animals and the humans that followed them.
Following the retreat of the glaciers, Lake Erie’s first human occupants were likely roaming bands of hunters and gatherers belonging to groups who have been named after their weapons, and known as the “Fluted Point” people. Archaeological evidence suggests that they arrived even as the glaciers still hovered only a few hundred kilometres to the north.
Because the waters of Lake Erie were lower at this point, any evidence of these groups in that area now lies below water. As the techniques of sharpening spear points became more refined, the period from 8500 BC to 6000 BC became known as the Plano period. Progressive waves of technical refinements kept sweeping northward, including the development of pottery and pipes. Records place their presence at around AD 1000 But another more advanced group was slowly making its way northward. Known as the Middle Woodland or Mound Builders (due their practice of burying their dead in large mounds) this group practised farming and occupied permanent villages. They are believed to have crossed into Ontario around AD 1300 and were displaced by war or absorption by the earlier occupants.
The Mound Builders belonged to the Iroquoian linguistic group and evolved into the Erie, Petun, and Iroquois nations, as well as the Attiwondaronks and Huron groups, although mound-building itself appears to have ended in Ontario around AD 800.
Much has been written about the Attiwondaronks, or “Atiquandaronk,” as the Huron and Iroquois had derisively called them, meaning those who speak strangely. The term they used for themselves was “Onguiaahra,” from which it is believed the name Niagara originated. These were the first inhabitants of the Erie shore with whom the earliest Europeans came in contact. Archaeological evidence suggests that they moved into Ontario’s southwestern peninsula before AD 1300, settling largely between the Grand River and the Niagara River. South of Lake Erie lived a nation after whom the lake was named, the Ehriehronnons (later shortened to “Erie”), which translates as the “people of the cat” — a reference to the population of panthers that existed at the time.
East of the Niagara River was the land of the Iroquois confederacy, a political union that included the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga. (Later, when the Tuscarora nation joined, they became known as the “Six Nations” — a name they carry to this day.)
North of Lake Erie roamed the Huron, to whom the Attiwondaronks were linguistically related. However, animosity was strong between the Huron and Attiwondaronks on the one side, and the Iroquois on the other. War was never far away. In 1640 the Seneca launched a vicious war against the Attiwondaronks over what they believed was the killing of a Seneca chief named Annenraes. Soon after, when the Iroquois launched their infamous war against the Hurons in 1649 (which featured the notorious torture of the priests Lalemont and Brébeuf), the Attiwondaronks were not spared and by 1653 most of their number had dispersed or been annihilated.
The little that is known of the Attiwondaronks comes from the early French explorers to the region. In 1616, Samuel de Champlain called them the “Neutrals” because of what he perceived to be their refusal to take sides in the traditional wars between the Iroquois and the Huron. Champlain estimated their number at around 4,000 and he observed that they lived by burning trees and planting corn and tobacco in the clearings. Much of Champlain’s knowledge is thanks to his interpreter, Étienne Brûlé, who stayed with them during the summer of 1615.
A Recollet missionary named Joseph de La Roche Daillon spent the winter of 1626 with the Neutrals. He recorded that the Neutrals lived in twenty-eight villages, in addition to scattered seasonal hunting and fishing camps. Although the Neutrals moved their villages once the soil became exhausted, the main centre was called Kandoucho, with other villages being named Ongniaahra (later to become “Niagara”) and Teotongniaton. Overseeing them in Daillon’s time was a chief named Tsohahissen, or Souharissen, although an earlier chief, while peace still held between the Neutral and the Iroquois, was thought to have been a “queen” named Jikonsaseh.1
The next Europeans to record their experience with the Neutrals were the Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Jean de Brébeuf and Joseph Marie Chaumonot. Their remarkable accounts appear in the texts of the Jesuit Relations, a document that has proven to provide invaluable insight into the Ontario’s aboriginal inhabitants of the seventeenth century. In the ten villages where the two priests stayed they estimated the population to be 3,000, while among the forty overall villages they estimated the population to be 12,000. Theirs was not a happy visit, however, for the Hurons had warned the Neutrals in advance of the illnesses inflicted upon their population by the European diseases borne by the unknowing missionaries. Brébeuf then returned to the mission at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons where, along with four other fellow priests, he was tortured and killed.2
Neutral villages consisted of longhouses made of tree boughs covered with large pieces of bark. The middle of the longhouse would contain as much as a dozen
