Iroquois origins of modern Toronto

Aug 5th, 2006 | By C. M. W. Marcel | Category: Heritage Now

It used to be said that modern Toronto began in the late 18th century, when John
Graves Simcoe pitched Captain Cooks canvas house more or less in the middle of the
present city downtown, on behalf of the British empire on which the sun never dared to
set.
Nowadays many who take an interest in such things have come to see that the deepest
origins of the place stretch further back into the middle of the 17th century. And the
earliest founders were the same Great Lakes Iroquois who are protesting unsettled land
claims in Caledonia, Ontario, some distance to the south and west, in the summer of
2006.
1. A last quick look at the old story
The old story about Lieutenant Governor Simcoes founding moment, some students of
the subject will rightly protest themselves, is still apt enough, if what you mean by
modern Toronto is the urban streetscape of the present-day city
downtown.
But if what you mean is raw human settlement, meant to exploit the
surrounding resource hinterland in the interests of a rising new world
economy (the original of todays city with the heart of a loan shark), the
Toronto where Simcoe pitched Captain Cooks unusually large tent in the
summer of 1793 was already about a century and a quarter old.
As Mrs. Simcoe noted in her still interesting diary, when the British partys sailing ship
arrived at the entrance to Toronto harbour, at the end of July 1793, St. John Rousseau,
an Indian trader who lives near, came in a boat to pilot us. The family of Jean Baptiste
Rousseau had done business in what was then called Toronto for a few decades at that
juncture. Ancestors of his immediate Mississauga neighbours had been in the area for
perhaps as long as a century.
Still more to the point, in the summer of 1793 Rousseaus house and fur-trade outpost
was on the east bank of what is now known as the Humber River, not too far south of an
old Iroquois village and fur-trade outpost called Teiaiagon. This was established
sometime in the 1660s or 1670s along with another Iroquois village and trading

outpost called Ganatsekwyagon, more or less at the Lake Ontario mouth of what is now
called the Rouge River.
On any comprehensive long view, it was the Iroquois trading villages of Teiaiagon and
Ganatsekwyagon, perhaps as many as 130 years before Lieutenant Governor John
Graves Simcoe, that planted the very first seeds of modern Toronto Canadas largest
metropolis today (and the sixth or seventh largest in North America). The villages
themselves lasted for no more than a generation. But they set in motion a chain of
events whose initial Indian-European culmination (or, in an earlier lexicon, French
and Indian) was the outpost at Fort Rouill, or Fort
Toronto, in the early 1750s.
This old French fort was burned to the ground by its
fleeing 15-man garrison, in the face of invading British
forces in the summer of 1759. Yet the resilient Toronto
trading outpost of Jean Baptiste Rousseau and his
Mississuaga neighbours in the early 1790s shows how the
continuing economic and geographic logic of Teiaiagon and Ganatsekwyagon had
survived the final mere military defeat of the old French empire in America, a
generation before.
The streetscape founder Governor Simcoe himself (just a local variation on,
e.g., Governor James Oglethorpe in Georgia, some 60 years earlier) was lured to the
location by his own perceptions of this same logic. So it was, as the pioneering and still
engaging early Toronto historian Percy Robinson explained in the 1930s, from the
house of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, at the foot of the Toronto Carrying-Place on the east
bank of the Humber, that Simcoe and his party set out on the morning of September 25,
1793, on an exploring trip to Matchedash Bay due north of Toronto on the alluring
sidebar to Lake Huron known nowadays as Georgian Bay.
If you really want to know how and why the modern Toronto metropolis got started, that
is to say, the story of Teiaiagon and Ganatsekwyagon in the 17th century is the serious
place to begin. And in a number of ways it may have more to do with the story of
Toronto today, in the early 21st century, than John Graves Simcoe and Captain Cooks
canvas house.
[CW EDITORS' NOTE: this is a very long piece, especially intended for the few who
may be deeply interested in the dark past. Other readers may just want to scroll down
to the last and more present-minded section 15 below.]

2. Dark prelude: Iroquois conquest of Huronia

The indispensable immediate background to the establishment of Teiaiagon and
Ganatsekwyagon in the 1660s and 1670s is the shattering conquest of the northern
Iroquoian-speaking peoples that the French called the Huron (or the Huron-Petun) and
the Neutral, in present-day Southern Ontario, by the southern Five Nations Iroquois
from what is now northern New York State during the
late 1640s and early 1650s.
This Iroquois conquest of the region north of the Great
Lakes is the culmination of the surprisingly dramatic
first chapter in the written history of the modern
Canadian Province of Ontario when adventurers and
missionaries from France first met and mingled with the
remarkable Huron Confederacy and its neighbours,
during the first half of the 17th century.
(And the quite substantial literature that French missionaries produced about this
encounter must have informed the provocative concept of the noble savage, later
advanced by the European political theorist Jean Jacques Rousseau [17121778], who
helped prepare the way for the French Revolution of 1789.)
In its broadest context, rivalry and conflict between the Huron and the Five Nations
Iroquois in the Great Lakes pre-dates the arrival of Europeans. (Traditional Iroquoian
warriors, who fought with wooden clubs and bows and arrows without iron
arrowheads, even wore a kind of armor made of thin pieces of wood laced together
with cords.)
But Huron-Iroquois warfare quickly became entangled with the wilderness struggle for
mastery among rival European nations, that accompanied the formative long westward
expansion of the multicultural Indian-European fur trade in northern North America
(and in various more southerly parts of the continent as well)
In very broad brush strokes, the Huron became allied with the French, headquartered in
present-day Quebec City and Montreal, on the St. Lawrence River (which led to the
Atlantic Ocean). The Five Nations Iroquois became allied with first the Dutch and then
the English, headquartered in present-day Albany and New York City on the Hudson
River (which also led to the sea which led in turn to the markets of Western Europe,
during the infancy of what we call the world economy today).

To make a long and very intriguing story very short, by the early 1650s the Five Nations
Iroquois from what is now northern New York State had emerged awesomely
triumphant in the first cataclysmic Beaver Warof the early modern age in the Great
Lakes. The Huron, between present-day Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, and their socalled Neutral neighbours, at the western end of Lake Ontario, had been effectively
driven from the region.
Yet during these early acts in a much longer drama aboriginal peoples
were still only very vaguely attached to their new European allies. As
we can appreciate nowadays, the Five Nations Iroquois had struck a
first great blow for the political and economic interests of what would
later become the anglophone Empire State of New York. But, for the
time being, French power north of the lakes did not suffer the same
dark fate as the Huron and Neutral confederacies.
Something of the economic and geographic culture of the Huron (or
Wendat, as the people said themselves), which still lay at the bottom of this French
power in the region, also still survives today.
As explained in the 1930s, by the eminent fur-trade historian Harold Innis first
Canadian-born Chairman of the Department of Political Economy at the University of
Toronto (and an inspiration for the 1960s career of the communications guru Marshall
McLuhan): The struggle waged between the Iroquois and the Huron was a prelude to
the struggle between New York and Montreal, which dominated the economic history of
Ontario.
3. Empty north shore and the Iroquois war with the Susquehannocks
Even during the early 17th century, the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario, where
modern Toronto now stands, was an unoccupied native hunting ground. Present-day
archaeology, however, has shown that, perhaps as late as the 16th century, it had been a
place of recurrent human habitation, stretching back for millennia.
It would even seem that something of what became the more
northerly Huron Confederacy, discovered by the French in the
early 1600s between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, had originally
been located in todays Toronto region. Perhaps during earlier
phases of struggle waged between the Iroquois and the Huron,
some among the later Huron had moved from the southern to the
northern end of the long inland canoe portage or Toronto Passage between Lake
Ontario and Georgian Bay (or the lower and upper Great Lakes).
In any case, once the Iroquois had emerged triumphant in the first cataclysmic Beaver
War north of the lakes, in the early 1650s, the strategic economic and geographic logic of

the north shore of Lake Ontario reasserted itself with a helping hand from continuing
(and often quite bloody) Iroquois military adventures, further south.
Even today this story remains shrouded in the romantic mists of what early Europeans
saw as the primeval lakes and forests of northeastern North America. Yet it is clear
enough that, from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence all the way south to the James River in
Virginia, the arrival of the Dutch, English, French, and Swedish close to the Atlantic
coast in the earlier 17th century helped stimulate and shape conflicts among native
North Americans further inland.
In the early 1660s, northern New Yorks increasingly warring and ambitious Five
Nations Iroquois Confederacy of the (from east to west) Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga,
Cayuga, and Seneca was also involved in a struggle with still other, more southerly
Iroquoian-speaking peoples, focused around the Susquehanna River in the present-day
Mid-Atlantic States, and known as the Susquehannocks (and also called the Andastes in
some French sources still extant).
It is clear enough as well that, for whatever exact deeper
reasons, the Five Nations Iroquois had developed their
own unusually strong and cunning awareness of the
opportunities for vast new wealth and power that the
early global economy had brought to the North
American interior. By the middle of the 17th century, the
descendants of Hiawatha (near legendary political
founder of the Five Nations Confederacy, in, say, 1570,
or the 1550s, or as early as 1390?) had formed a fierce resolve to make the most of the
new opportunities as such things were then understood in the romantic but also
sometimes sinister and violent lakes and forests.
(The Iroquois had never read Machiavelli, founder of modern European political
thought in the political jungle of Renaissance Italy, during the late 15th and early 16th
centuries. But they somehow acquired their own understanding of his central message
all the same.)
4. Iroquois villages on the north shore, 1660s1680s
Like others, the meticulous late 20th century archaeological and anthropological
historian of the 17th century Great Lakes, Bruce Trigger, has also drawn attention to the
(still quite crude and uncertain) European firearms of the era.

The Five Nations Iroquois were apparently

readily able to obtain this most advanced
military technology of the day from the Dutch
and then the English at New York. But this was
only an advantage insofar as it was against
the northern native allies of the less
forthcoming French (and especially the Neutral
who altogether lacked guns).
In the south things were different. As Professor
Trigger similarly explained in the 1970s: Aid
sent from the English colony of Maryland [and
New York was still Dutch at this point] permitted the Susquehannocks to withstand a
major Iroquois attack in 1663. [Among other things, the Susquehannock villages
were defended by European cannon.'] As the war continued, many Cayugas fled from
their tribal territory and settled along the north shore of Lake Ontario.
Some Oneidas and Senecas subsequently joined this northward movement and for
economic and geographic as well as strictly military and security reasons. Percy
Robinson set out a still serviceable earlier 20th century account of the resulting new
Iroquois villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario, as long ago as the 1930s.
By the late 1660s, Robinson urged, various Five Nations Iroquois had established
themselves where the trails led off into the interior, to the richer hunting grounds of the
north. Beginning at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, the names of these Iroquois villages
are
Ganneious on the site of the present town of Napanee, a village of the Oneidas [also,
to be very up to date, the 1980s birthplace of today's teen-throb pop-singer Avril
Lavigne, who was recently married in southern California];
Kente on the Bay of Quinte, Kentsio on Rice Like, Ganaraske on the site of the present
town of Port Hope, villages of the Cayugas who had fled from the menace of the
Andastes to a securer position beyond the lake;
Ganatsekwyagon at the mouth of the Rouge and Teiaiagon at the mouth of the Humber,
villages of the Senecas who had established themselves at the foot of the two branches of
the Toronto Carrying-Place and were thus in command of the traffic across the
peninsula to Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay.
(And finally, for who knows exactly what deeper reasons again, Percy Robinsons list
leaves out a last if apparently small Seneca village that almost certainly ought to be
included, even from his unique early 20th century Torontonians point of view. This was
Quinaouatoua or Tinawatawa, on the portage or carrying-place from the western end of

Lake Ontario to the Grand River, and thence to Lake Erie more or less in the presentday city of Hamilton: and the former earlier 17th century homeland of the Neutral
confederacy.)
5. North by northwest: the strategic economic geography of the Toronto
Passage
Even the more easterly Iroquois villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario, which seem
to have started as refuges from the conflicts of the 1660s with the more southerly
Susquehannocks, also had a strategic geographic and economic logic, tied to the
advancing Indian-European fur trade.
The Kawartha Lakes waterway, stretching in a
leisurely arc from Georgian Bay on Lake Huron to
the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario, was at least
one (rather long) shortcut between the so-called
upper and lower Great Lakes.
More exactly, from points along the north shore
beneath the Kawartha Lakes, so to speak,
Iroquois middlemen could lure fur pelts from the
Algonkian-speaking peoples of the far northern
and northwestern interior towards the Dutch and then the English at Albany and New
York. In the absence of such arrangements these same pelts would most likely go down
the more northerly and easterly Ottawa River, to the French at Quebec City and
Montreal.
Yet as Percy Robinsons account implies, the Kawartha Lakes passage from the lower to
the upper lakes was a minority option for northern Algonkian hunters who preferred the
scenic aboriginal canoe route south. The wilderness commercial magnetism of the
shorter and more direct inland portage or Toronto Passage (or Carrying-Place),
running more or less due north from the nicely harboured northwestern shore of Lake
Ontario to Georgian Bay, was much stronger than the leisurely attractions of the more
easterly Kawartha Lakes.
As Percy Robinson notes as well, there were two branches to the more southerly reaches
of this Toronto Passage. Ganatsekwyagon, near the Lake Ontario mouth of todays
Rouge River, was the Seneca village on the easterly branch of the passage. Teiaiagon,
near the mouth of the Humber, was on the westerly branch.
There are suggestions in the sources readily at hand today that Ganatsekwyagon may
have been established earlier than Teiaiagon. More or less at the mouth of the Rouge
and far enough east of the interfering Toronto Islands (or peninsula as it was then, and
would be until a great storm in the middle of the 19th century), Ganatsekwyagon was

arguably the more immediately obvious strategic location at the foot of the Toronto
Passage to the north (and northwest). And it is clear from surviving written records that
it had been established by the late 1660s.
Robinsons still engaging if almost too richly detailed pioneer study of the 1930s appears
to assume that Teiaiagon had also been established by the late 1660s. But in an early
1980s article the historical geographer Victor Konrad stressed that this is only an
assumption. As yet no written records have been discovered that actually mention
Teiaiagon in the 1660s.
Konrad seems to suggest as well that Teiaiagon may have effectively replaced or
gradually succeeded Ganatsekwyagon as the Senecas main Toronto Passage village, in
the 1670s. Soon enough, on this hypothesis, it became clear to those involved that the
westerly branch of the Passages southern end on the Humber River was the more
profitable route.
If this is true, it had to do with subsequent subtler appreciations of the shoreline
geography and with developments among both the native Seneca from northern New
York and the French newcomers on the St. Lawrence River (who, unlike the conquered
Huron and Neutral confederacies, continued to assert an increasingly strong grip on the
Great Lakes interior, as the 17th century wore on).
6. Algonkian hunters, Iroquoian middlemen, and the English conquest of
the Dutch
Some have always found it hard to acceptthat the North American Great Lakes region
was thrown into such vast turmoil in the 17th century All for a Beaver Hat, in such
places as Amsterdam, London, and Paris. That is nonetheless the message that the early
modern regional history ultimately conveys.
The crucial point of the final Huron-Iroquois
conflict of the late 1640s and early 1650s,
however, had not exactly been who would
get to hunt for the furs that formed the
essential raw materials of an increasingly
fashionable gentlemens beaver-hat industry
in Western Europe. The best hunters of the
best furs for European hats were the more northerly Algonkian-speaking peoples.
The Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the Huron and the Iroquois were more
technologically developed farmers and traders and warriors. Such Algonkian-speaking
peoples as the Algonquin, Chippewa, Cree, Mississauga, Ojibwa, and Ottawa were still
primarily hunters and gatherers (though, especially among the Algonquin, also
manufacturers of prized and commercially very crucial elegant birch-bark canoes).

What the Huron and Iroquois finally fought over was who would be the more ambitious
aboriginal middlemen, profitably mediating the relationship between the Algonkianspeaking hunters of the interior and the European merchants, closer to the Atlantic
coast.
In the early 1650s part of the vanquished Huron Confederacy had fled to what is now
the village of Lorette, near Quebec City. But in some respects, the ultimate effective
strategists among the French seem to have been not too unhappy about the shattering
Iroquois conquest of their Huron allies. The French increasingly preferred to deal
directly with the Algonkian-speaking hunters themselves, without aboriginal
middlemen.
(On one ancient theory that seems to have been debated for a few centuries now,
without any quite convincing conclusion, the predominantly Catholic Christian and less
economically individualist French just got on better with the Indians than the
predominantly Protestant and more individualist Dutch and English. And so they did
not need aboriginal middlemen to the same degree, in their Indian-European business
dealings.)
Yet by the middle of the 17th century the Iroquois conquest of Huronia had at least put
the Five Nations Confederacy in command north of the Great Lakes for the time being.
The rise of the Iroquois villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario during the 1660s
confirmed the point.
To add to this plot, Peter Stuyvesants surrender of the old Dutch New Amsterdam (New
York) and Fort Orange (Albany) to the English, on August 16, 1664, also began to alter
the wilderness balance of Indian-European power in the Great Lakes, to the ultimate
Iroquois advantage.
(And as the eminent old English historian Sir George Clark has explained, in one of his
books of the 1930s, Stuyvesants surrender of the early Dutch North American
enterprise closed the gap in the English possessions along the American coast-line and
gave us the command of the trade-route from the Great Lakes through the HudsonMohawk gap to a seaport appointed by geography to become one of the worlds great
cities now called New York.)
7. French-Iroquois Treaty of 1667
The Five Nations Confederacy would not remain in command on the north shore of Lake
Ontario forever (or even all that long).

In the later 1660s the French began taking their own aggressive
actions to restrain, among other things, the flow of furs from the
north-shore Iroquois trading villages to the new English (and
surviving old Dutch) traders and merchants at Albany and New York
as opposed to the French themselves at Quebec City and Montreal.
The first French step in what quickly enough unfolded as a quite
systematic strategy was to strike a blow against the Five Nations
military might (already weakened by the ongoing struggle with the
Susquehannocks to the south, at the edge of the rising English Mid-Atlantic colonies). In
1665 French imperial officials sent a military force known as the Carignan-Salieres
regiment off into the wilderness of Canada or New France.
Then, as the historical geographer Victor Konrad has explained: In the spring of 1666,
the Viceroy and the Governor of Canada, with 28 companies of foot and all the militia of
the colony, marched into the country of the Mohawks [the most easterly of the Five
Nations Iroquois].
The vaunted military might of the French Sun King Louis XIV had some trouble
adjusting to the rugged lakes and forest of northeastern North America. As the leaves
returned to the trees in the spring of 1666, Konrad goes on: The Mohawks retired into
the woods and all the French were able to do was burn some villages and murder some
old Sachems.
Yet, in the parallel report of Bruce Trigger, this was enough to secure a French-Iroquois
treaty embracing the whole confederacy in 1667, after the Carignan-Salieres
Regiment had burned the Mohawk villages and food supply. (Though the exact status
of the especially fierce Mohawks themselves remained somewhat ambiguous in the
written version of the treaty that survives in the National Archives of Canada, for the
present time.)
Whatever else, the French had made it very clear that (unlike the Huron and the
Neutral) they would not be dispersing from the region north of the Great Lakes, in any
then foreseeable future.
8. The French at Ganatsekwyagon, Fort Frontenac, and the rise of Teiaiagon
Even under the French-Iroquois treaty of 1667, the new Iroquois villages remained on
the north shore of Lake Ontario. The Iroquois would still be in command there for a
while yet. The next step in the ongoing French plot, however, was to send Christian
missionaries to the villages, to aid the resident heathen in their spiritual lives (as the
Huron had been aided in the darker past).

Dollier de Casson of the Sulpician order has left us an account

of these beginnings: It was in the year 1668 that we were
given the task of setting out for the Iroquois, and
Quint [Kent in Percy Robinson's lexicon] was assigned to us
as the centre of our mission because in that same year a
number of people from that village had come to Montreal
and had definitely requested us to go and teach them in their
country
The next year as Percy Robinson put it in the 1930s the Sulpician M. de Fnelon, the
fiery half-brother of the famous Archbishop of Cambrai in company with another
missionary, M. dUrf, passed the winter of 1669 and 1670 in the village of
Ganatsekwyagon, a fact which is commemorated by the name Frenchmans Bay, which
clings to the inlet near the mouth of the Rouge. This is the first recorded residence of
white men in the neighbourhood of Toronto.
(In the early 21st century we would more aptly just say non-aboriginal people: white
men being a mere minority in Toronto today though they were almost certainly at
least somewhat less than a democratic majority in Robinsons day too.)
In 1669 as well (on Robinsons account again) possibly before the arrival of Fnelon and
dUrfe in the village of Ganatsekwyagon two notable explorers, Pere and Joliet,
camped for a time at that village before crossing le passage de Toronto to the Georgian
Bay. They were on their way to Lake Superior in search of the great copper mine
reported to exist in that region. It has been thought that this was not the first visit of
Pere to the locality, and that he visited the site of the city of Toronto in the preceding
year; he was the first French trader on Lake Ontario.
Only a few years later, the French plot north of the lakes started to grow still thicker. In
1673 the local agents of Louis XIV established their own military outpost at Cataraqui,
where Lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence River (on the site of the present-day city of
Kingston). It was called Fort Frontenac after perhaps the most able and ambitious of
all French governors of Canada or New France, the Comte de Frontenac (16721682, and
then again 16891698).
The construction of Fort Frontenac actually began
during negotiations between Governor Frontenac and a
delegation of Iroquois [from the various north shore
villages] in July 1673. Both the earlier and later 20th
century students of early modern Toronto, Percy
Robinson and Victor Konrad, urge that Fort Frontenac
was intended to rival or even replace Ganatsekwyagon further west, and serve as a fur-

trade outpost channelling beaver pelts northeast to Montreal and Quebec City, instead
of southeast to Albany and New York.
In the fall of 1674 Frontenac himself wrote to Louis XIV in France that the Iroquois
have given their word not to continue the trade, which as I informed you last year,
they had commenced to establish at Ganatsekwyagon, with the Ottawas, which would
have absolutely ruined ours by the transfer of the furs to the Dutch.
To complicate matters, the Dutch had recaptured New York from the English in the
summer of 1673. But it was returned to the English for good in a treaty of November
1674.
Robinson has speculated that subsequently the English and the Iroquois, foiled by Fort
Frontenac in their trade at Ganatsekwyagon, which they had reached along the north
shore of Lake Ontario, now began to trade at Teiaiagon, which they reached by following
the south shore round the western end of the lake.
Unlike Ganatsekwyagon, Teiaiagon had not been represented at the summer 1673
Iroquois negotiations with Count Frontenac, during which the construction of Fort
Frontenac was pointedly begun (and ultimately matched with a companion Oneida
village).
Konrad seems to suggest that Teiaiagon itself may only have been established in
response to Fort Frontenac, and, conceivably, to the Iroquois promise that they would
not trade with the English and the Dutch at Ganatsekwyagon. One way or another, the
construction of Fort Frontenac seems to have increased the relative importance of
Teiaiagon.
9. King Phillips War, Bacons Rebellion, and La Salle at Teiaiagon
Any notion that Teiaiagon would become an exclusive resort of English and Dutch
traders was refuted by the prompt enough appearance there of the legendary French
adventurer who explored the Great West of the Mississippi Valley, and claimed the
vast continental heartland of Old Louisiana for the King of France, Ren Robert Cavalier
Sieur de La Salle. (And this was not the present modest state of Louisiana but the
much larger region of the Mississippi basin, that Thomas Jefferson would
finally purchase from Napoleon in 1803, for 60 million French francs.)
By 1675 the Comte de Frontenac had granted the land surrounding
Fort Frontenac to La Salle. And in the course of his subsequent
adventures Ren Robert Cavalier would (in Percy Robinsons words)
cross the Toronto Carrying-Place from Teiaiagon on three and
possibly four occasions.

Meanwhile, two great if still often under-appreciated conflicts on the more southerly
Atlantic coast, in 1675-1676, cast some big ripples on the north shore of Lake Ontario as
well.
King Phillips War in New England was the first appallingly bloody full-scale conflict
between the new Anglo-American settlement frontier and the aboriginal peoples of
North America. Still further south, the coterminous Bacons Rebellion was a more
untidy frontier rebellion against a new planter or tidewater aristocracy (with its own
early fur-trade connections), mixed in with Indian-European conflict.
One immediate consequence, as Bruce Trigger has explained, was that the final
breaking of the power of the Susquehannocks in 1675 did not come about as the result of
an Iroquois victory, but because of an attack by European backwoodsmen from
Maryland and Virginia. This nevertheless relieved the earlier pressure from the south
on the Great Lakes Iroquois.
With the Susquehannocks broken, the strictly
military and security logic behind the Cayuga
north shore villages, east of Teiaiagon and
Ganatsekwyagon, also began to fade.
Meanwhile again, as recounted by Percy
Robinson, La Salle crossed the Toronto
Carrying-Place in 1680 from Teiaiagon to
Michilimackinac [where Lake Huron and Lake
Michigan meet], and in 1681 from
Michilimackinac to Teiaiagon on his way to Fort Frontenac, and again in the same year
on his way back to Michilimackinac.
In the magisterial text of the earlier 20th century New England historian Samuel Eliot
Morison, La Salles greatest adventure began in the last month of 1681, when with
23 Frenchmen and 31 Indians, mostly refugees from King Phillips War, he struck out
for the Mississippi.
10. Teiaiagon at its height
The Teiaiagon that figured in La Salles adventures would seem to have been a typical
enough Great Lakes Iroquoian village of its era.

There is a consensus nowadays that it was located on a

modest hill on the east bank of the Humber River, not too far
north of the rivers Lake Ontario mouth. (The site is now
known as Bby Point [pronounced Baa-bee, or as some local
anglophone residents today say, "Bobby"]. The name
commemorates a notable French Canadian family from the
Windsor-Detroit area, represented on Lieutenant Governor
Simcoes Legislative Council. They would be granted the land
in the late 18th century in preference to the more deserving Jean Baptiste Rousseau,
whose family may have been too French and Indian for the new British imperial
officialdom.)
On a reasonable guess in the early 21st century, the village of Teiaiagon was home to at
least a few hundred and possibly considerably more Seneca in the late 1670s and early
1680s. They lived in a number of longhouses, and Percy Robinson urges: We may be
sure that Teiaiagon was protected by a stout palisade and fortified with all the skill
which the Iroquois could command.
Outside the palisade were cornfields, tended by the women of the village (on forest land
cleared by the men) and providing the great bulk of the local food supply,
supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering.
The written sources still extant offer a few intriguing
snapshots of life at Teiaiagon at its height. According to
Robinson in the 1930s again, sometime in the 1670s a party
of La Salles men from Cataraqui were at Teiaiagon and
engaged in a drunken debauch a rather melancholy beginning
for Toronto the good!
Robinson goes on to quote his French source directly: The Carnival of the year 167 six
traders from Kataraak8y named Duplessis, Ptolme, Dautru, Lamouche, Colin and
Cascaret made the whole village of Taheyagon drunk, all the inhabitants were dead
drunk for three days; the old men, the women and the children got drunk.
Robinson notes as well: The same document mentions the fact that two women were
stabbed at Tcheiagon (Teiaiagon) in 1676 as the result of a drunken brawl, possibly the
same occasion.
We also know that a French ship of about 10 tons sought refuge from a Lake Ontario
storm at the mouth of the Humber River, on November 26, 1678.
One of those on board was Father Hennepin, a Rcollet missionary from Fort Frontenac,
and he has left an account: We came pretty near to one of the Iroquoese Villages
calld Tejajagon We barterd some Indian corn with the Iroquoese, who could not

sufficiently admire us, and came frequently to see us on board our Brigantine The
wind turning then contrary, we were obligd to tarry there til the 15th of December,
1678, when we saild from the Northern Coast to the Southern, where the River
Niagara runs into the Lake.
Percy Robinson tells us too that La Salle himself actually
wrote a letter dated at Teiaiagon, during one of his visits in
the early 1680s. On just which of his visits the letter was
written appears somewhat unclear in Robinsons text. But
the still-towering New England historian of the 19th century,
Francis Parkman, has also written about La Salles second
visit of 1681:
At the beginning of autumn, he was at Toronto, where the long and difficult portage to
Lake Simcoe detained him a fortnight. He spent part of it in writing an account of what
had lately occurred to a correspondent in France, and he closes his letter thus: This is
all I can tell you this year. I have a hundred things to write, but you could not believe
how hard it is to do it among Indians. The canoes and their lading must be got over the
portage, and I must speak to them continually, and bear all their importunity, or else
they will do nothing I want.
11. A gathering storm
In the earlier 1680s all the Iroquois villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario began to
acquire increasingly short leases on life as both the French and Iroquois plots in the
Great Lakes region thickened again.
To start with, the breaking of the Susquehannocks to the south in
1675, during Bacons Rebellion, had freed the imagination of
Hiawathas most Machiavellian descendants among the the Five
Nations Confederacy. And as Bruce Trigger has reported, the
Iroquois were driven to launch a full-scale war against the Illinois in 1680.
The Illinois commanded the vast fur-trade hinterland south of the most westerly Great
Lakes (as the name of the current state of the union whose great metropolis is Chicago
still suggests). In a second (or third?) cataclysmic Beaver War of the Great Lakes region,
the fierce Five Nations Iroquois from northern New York would clear this new midwestern hinterland too.
Yet La Salle and others had already begun to open up the same area for the French. On
Triggers account, the French-Iroquois peace of 1667 itself made it easier for the
French not only to trade in the north but also to extend their trade routes through the
lower Great Lakes into the Illinois country. When they attacked the Illinois, the

Iroquois were not in conflict merely with Indian traders but with Frenchmen who were
competing with them for furs.
The French by this point were also firming up their own more direct and intimate
alliances with the aboriginal hunters of the interior. In the same 1667 French-Iroquois
treaty it had already been declared that the Huron or Algonkians were subjects of the
said Lord King, Louis XIV, or living under His protection. And the French
subsequently strengthened their practical relationships with the more northerly
Algonkian-speaking peoples of present-day Ontario who were learning more about the
old country of the Huron and the Neutral, from the Iroquois traders at Teiaiagon and
Ganatsekwyagon themselves.
Something of the dark fate that all this background foretold for all the Iroquois villages
on the north shore of Lake Ontario is hinted at in Percy Robinsons report (from a
French source) that in 1682 the Iroquois were plundering three Frenchmen at
Teiaiagon, named Abraham, Lachapelle, and Leduc.
(Remarkably enough, an early 21st lady named Adrienne Leduc has a website
called Letter to La Salle, where she writes: I cast my thoughts back to Teiaiagon, now
Baby Point, Toronto There, in the summer of 1682, the Senecas plundered the canoes
of three Frenchmen Lachapelle, Leduc, and Abraham. The three traders lost their
cargoes but luckily kept their scalps. One of these men was my husbandss ancestor.)
Despite the plundering, the Seneca at Teiaiagon (and Quinaouatoua at the western end
of Lake Ontario, somewhere around the present city of Hamilton) seem to have been
more friendly towards the French than their four more easterly fellow nations of the
Iroquois confederacy an inclination that would have a few subsequent echoes over the
next three generations. Another larger destiny, however, was blowing in the wind.
In Bruce Triggers words: Having dispersed the Indian nations that had surrounded
them, the Iroquois were now forced to enter an era of more direct involvement with the
European powers that were establishing themselves in North America. For the most
part, the Five Nations Iroquois would finally be fierce allies and wilderness agents of the
English at Albany and New York, not the French at Quebec City and Montreal. And a
vast new conflict between the French and the Iroquois was brewing in both the
northern and the western Great Lakes.
12. Dark fate of the Iroquois villages on the north shore
Things started badly for the French, when in 1682 Count Frontenac was replaced as
Governor of Canada or New France by the less able and ambitious Sieur de la Barre
(16821685).

In 1684, as the later 20th century historian of France in America, W.J.

Eccles, has explained, La Barre set off from Montreal to avenge an
Iroquois attack on a French outpost in the Illinois country, at the
head of a force of 800 men, accompanied by 378 allied Indians.
Alas, this first French campaign was a complete fiasco. La Barres
supply system was inadequate, and Spanish influenza, brought with
the troop ships, spread through the ranks of his motley army. By the time he reached
Fort Frontenac at the eastern end of Lake Ontario he commanded a force that could
barely stand, let alone engage the Iroquois.
When Louis XIV heard the subsequent shameful details the next year, La Barre was
recalled in disgrace. He was replaced by the Marquis de Denonville (1685-1689)
brigadier of the Dragoons, a veteran soldier regarded as one of the better officers of the
kingdom. And Denonville was finally provided with an additional 1,600 Troupes de la
Marine from France.
In 1687 (Eccles continues) Denonville launched a well-organized campaign against the
Senecas, in their northwestern New York homeland.
Like the Mohawks who had faced the Carignan-Salieres regiment
some 20 years before, most of the Seneca just adroitly retired into the
woods. But Denonville destroyed their villages and food supplies and
inflicted some casualties, even though he failed to make them stand
and fight. In the end, the demonstration that the French could
march an army, more than 2,000 strong counting the Indian
auxiliaries, into the country of the most distant and powerful [or at
least most populous] of the Iroquois nations was not without effect.
Whether Denonville also destroyed whatever was left of the Seneca and other Iroquois
villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario in his campaign of 1687 has remained a
murky point down to the present.
It is clear enough that he followed the north shore of Lake Ontario back to Fort
Frontenac, after his assault on the Seneca homeland in northwestern New York and
that he paused at the mouth of the Humber and then stopped at Ganatsekwyagon. What
the historical geographer Victor Konrad calls Indian allies of the French were
apparently already in control at Ganatsekwyagon at this point. And Percy Robinson,
among others, has wondered in print whether the governor employed the morning
spent at the mouth of the Humber raiding and destroying the Seneca village of
Teiaiagon.
There are also a few strong hints in the sources readily at hand today that Denonvilles
aggressive campaign of 1687 prompted the Five Nations Confederacy to recall all its

pioneering people in the villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario back to the more
southerly homeland in northern new York. (The original logic of the Cayuga refugee
villages to the east of Teiaiagon and Ganatsekwyagon had in any case begun to fade as
early as the late 1670s, once the power of the more southerly Susquehannocks had been
broken in Bacons Rebellion. )
What both the earlier and later 20th century historians of early modern Toronto agree
on is that by the end of the 1680s the Iroquois had, for whatever exact reasons,
abandoned their villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario. So Percy Robinson tells us
that no mention of Teiaiagon has been found in any document later than 1688. And
Victor Konrad has similarly reported that: By 1688 the Iroquois were restricted to
south of the Lake.
13. French and Mississauga Toronto
In fact, Denonvilles adventures of 1687 only precipitated a new era of fierce and bloody
French-Iroquois warfare that would not abate until the early 18th
century.
More exactly, the late 17th century marked the first extended
conflict between the French and their Algonkian and other
aboriginal allies on the one side, and the Iroquois and their English
allies on the other. And if the Indian-European alliances were
somewhat tighter at this point than they had been a half-century
before, it still seems not altogether clear for us today just who was leading whom, where
and when.
What is clear enough is that, at some point between the late 1680s and about 1700 (a
new French-Iroquois treaty of 1701 is an often-used convenient closing date), more
northerly Algonkian-speaking peoples, ostensibly allied chiefly with the French, moved
onto the north shore of Lake Ontario.
(It might even be said, somewhat figuratively, that they took over the Iroquois villages of
the early 1660s to late 1680s. As the historical geographer Conrad Heidenreich has
urged, the Iroquois abandoned their villages on the north shore, but these villages did
not disappear. They continued to be marked, e.g., on published European maps until
the middle of the 18th century. Map publishers in Europe were not quite aware that
Algonquian-speaking Indians from the north now occupied the north shore sites. And
since the same locations were occupied, the original [Iroquois] village names
remained on the maps.)
What is still debated among local historians today is just how Algonkian peoples arrived
on the north shore of Lake Ontario during the late 17th century. On some accounts
based on aboriginal oral traditions whose exact interpretation remains in dispute The

Ojibwa of Southern Ontario conquered the area from the Iroquois, with perhaps
occasional guns and ammunition from the French on the St. Lawrence River. Other
readings of the story suggest a more peaceful migration, to a north shore that had
already been effectively vacated by Denonvilles exploits of 1687.
What is also clear enough, however, is that, in whatever way they may or may not have
arrived, a branch of the wider Ojibwa first nation known as the Mississauga had moved
in to what was left of Teiaiagon and Ganatsekwyagon by the early 18th century. Drawing
on published volumes in the New York Colonial Documents series, Percy Robinson and
others have urged that these new Mississauga settlements were at least at first
themselves vaguely allied with the Iroquois on the south shore of the lake and through
them with the English at Albany and New York.
Yet if this is true, it did not stop the French from strengthening
their position at Toronto as the 18th century wore on first with a
so-called Magasin Royal (or kings store) in the 1720s, and then
with Fort Rouill, or Fort Toronto, in the 1750s. By the time of the
final struggle between France and England in North America,
during the world-wide Seven Years War (17561763), the Toronto-region Mississauga
were more or less on the side of the French (and more or less on the side of the English
were the Iroquois in northern New York).
14. The United Kingdom and the United States in North America
After Great Britain finally succeeded France as the European imperial power north of
the Great Lakes, at the end of the Seven Years War (still frequently known in the USA
today as the Old French and Indian War), English fur traders from Albany and New
York were active among the Toronto Mississauga. In the early 1770s Ferrall Wade was
one such trader whose career has survived in records still extant. Jean Baptiste
Rousseaus father, however, was in the area at about the same time, on behalf of the
merchants in Montreal and Quebec City.
Then, after the American War of Independence (17761783),
what remained of the British empire in America ironically
took over the old role of the French empire in the true
north, strong and free. For its own good reasons, Canada or
New France remained loyal to the once-rival anglophone
European empire it had only so recently joined. It did not
become part of the new independent United States of
America (despite a special provision for its eventual
admission, in article 11 of the original US Articles of
Confederation).

History has many cunning passages (according to the 20th century Anglo-American
poet T.S. Eliot, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri and died in London, England). After
the birth of the new American Republic, the British empire found itself defending the
old French (and Indian) economic and geographic interests of Montreal and Quebec
City, north of the Great Lakes. And it was John Baptiste Rousseau, born in and first
married to a girl from Montreal and not Ferrall Wade or any other trader from Albany
or New York who went out to meet Lieutenant Governor Simcoes ship in Toronto
harbour, at the end of July 1793.
Just to keep everything still more ironically diverse (if also somewhat further confused),
the end of the War of Independence or American Revolution, in 1783, finally brought
some Iroquois from northern New York back to the region north of the lakes, that they
had in one way or another abandoned about a century before.
During the great military conflict that gave birth to the new Democracy in
America some among what had by this point become the Six Nations Iroquois in
northern New York (with the earlier 18th century addition of the Tuscarora from North
Carolina) had remained loyal to the British empire as well for their own
good reasons.
When the war ended, the British Crown purchased land from the
Mississauga north of the lakes for these loyal Iroquois in the Grand
River valley north of Lake Erie, and by the Bay of Quinte on Lake
Ontario. They became among the first northward-moving United Empire
Loyalists in a new British North American Province of Upper Canada (the
immediate legal and institutional precursor of the free and democratic
Canadian Province of Ontario today as most recently incarnated in the independent
modern Canadas Constitution Act 1982).
These loyal Iroquois migrants from northern New York and their descendants would
help defend Canada (and the British empire) again in the War of 1812, and, much later,
in the First and Second World Wars of the 20th century. And it is the same present-day
Grand River Iroquois who are rather fiercely locked into a troubling land-claim protest,
in Caledonia, Ontario, in the summer of 2006.
15. Survivals of Teiaiagon and Ganatsekwyagon (and the old Toronto
Passage) in the city region today
Though there can be no doubt that the Seneca village of Ganatsekwyagon was located
somewhere near the mouth of the Rouge River in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s, exactly
where has remained something of a mystery down to the present. But there has
been considerable speculation on the subject in the early 21st century, among local

ecological and environmental activists concerned to preserve the natural heritage of the
Rouge River valley.
Something of the aboriginal canoe culture of 17th century
Ganatsekwyagon survived into the 20th century as well as
reflected in a 1960s verse by the Toronto bank-clerk-poet
Raymond Souster (also associated with the Montreal poets
Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, in a venture known as Contact
Press). The verse is called On the Rouge: I can almost see /
my fathers canoe / pointing in from the lake, / him paddling,
/ mother hidden / in a hat Lost finally, perhaps forever, /
behind ferns swallowing banks drifting the summer / labyrinths of love.
The less mysterious later 20th century consensus about the location of Teiaiagon, at
Baby Point on the Humber River, may somehow reflect its ultimately thicker and more
prominent history in the later 17th century.
A website on present-day Toronto neighbourhoods reports that Baby Points rich
history dates back to the 1600s when it was a prosperous Seneca Nation village. In 1816
the HonourableJames [formerly Jacques] Baby finally settled on this peninsula
overlooking the Humber River. His estate there was a virtual Garden of Eden. A lush
apple orchard occupied much of the land [on ground nicely prepared by the old Iroquois
cornfields?], and salmon swam in the Humber River.
The website goes on: Babys heirs continued to live in Baby Point until 1910. Then the
site ultimately wound up in the hands of developer Robert Home Smith who began
developing the Baby Point subdivision in 1912. Most of the resulting upscale housing
for upwardly mobile Torontonians of the day was built in the
roaring 1920s.
The place still exudes a virtual Garden of Edenambience in
the early 21st century. And if you spend a gentle summer
afternoon walking the eccentrically circular Baby Point Road
in 2006, it can seem easy enough to sense some ghosts of
Teiaiagon 330 years ago with the 1920s houses of the local new-world bourgeois (or
booboisie, as H.L. Mecken said) standing in for the village palisade, guarding tennis
courts where Iroquois longhouses once stood.
The first major technological update of the 17th century Toronto Passage or canoe
portage, from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay (via Lake Simcoe), was Lieutenant
Governor Simcoes own Yonge Street the so-called longest street in the world, begun
in the late 18th century. It remains the central backbone or main street of the Toronto
metropolis today.

A second key update was the mid 19th centuryOntario,

Simcoe & Huron Railway from downtown Toronto to
Georgian Bay. It was originally designed as a shortcut
linking steamship routes on the lower and upper Great
Lakes. It went on to become part of the later Canadian
transcontinental network reincarnated as Canadian
National Railways in the 1920s (and now one of the
largest railway systems in North America whose
glory is reflected in the CN Tower on the present
Toronto waterfront, still sometimes locally said to be the tallest free-standing structure
in the world).
The most recent Toronto Passage technological update has been the multilane Highway
400, built in the second half of the 20th century. It runs due north from Toronto to the
Georgian Bay and Muskoka cottage-country hinterland. It also finally links Toronto with
the east-west Trans Canada Highway. You can still sometimes see trucks with Alberta
licence plates on Highway 400, bearing present-day trade goods from the Canadian
north and west. And then Highway 401 leads to Montreal (or, in the other direction, the
old French fort at Detroit), and what is still quaintly known as the Queen Elizabeth Way
ultimately leads to Albany and New York.
(All this can also help you remember that when the
legendary North West Company fur trader and map
maker David Thompson started a crucial last journey in
the spring of 1811, on his quest to establish the Montrealbased Canadian fur trade along Canadas Pacific Coast, he
was accompanied by nine men four French Canadians, two Salish-speaking Sanpoil
interpreters, and two Iroquois, Charles and Ignace. And the North West Company
itself was the first organization to operate on a continental scale in North America.)
From a more diffuse and still more intriguing perspective, those who wonder just where
the almost dazzling multiracial diversity of Toronto today ultimately comes from could
do a lot worse than look back to the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s when the modern
metropolis had its earliest beginnings, on the Indian-European Middle Ground at
Teiaiagon and Ganatsekwyagon.
These two founding villages of early Toronto were intermittent homes to various
aboriginal peoples of Canada and various Europeans, haphazardly thrown together in a
new destiny by the early rumblings of a global economy. Ultimately there would also be
Africans and even some Asians in the Canadian fur trade they were pioneering. La Salle
first thought that the Mississippi River would take him to China. And the Indians were
mistakenly called Indians because early Europeans in North America thought they were

quite close to India, of course. (And nowadays India actually is at least much closer to
North America than it used to be.)
Percy Robinsons report that two women were stabbed at Tcheiagon (Teiaiagon) in
1676 as the result of a drunken brawl raises as well the prospect of what section 35 of
the CanadianConstitution Act 1982 calls the Mtis peoples of Canada the mixed-race
Indian-Europeans who would go on to form another unique human creation of the
transcontinental Canadian fur trade of the late 18th and earlier 19th centuries. And in
the summer of 2006 the Toronto Starpublished an interesting article by Andrew Chung
on the New Mtis, who are increasingly alive on the streets of the city today.
Finally (and at last), in 1930 the University of Torontos eminent fur-trade historian,
Harold Innis (born and raised on a family farm in more or less the same southwestern
Ontario as John Kenneth Galbraith) wrote in the conclusion to what is still almost
certainly the most interesting and overall best book ever written on modern Canadas
past: We have not yet realized that the Indian and his culture were fundamental to the
growth of Canadian institutions.
Three-quarters of a century later, Canadians are at least closer to
this realization than they used to be, but they have still not taken
the last decisive step. When they do, aboriginal rights and
aboriginal land claims may become less thorny issues than the Six
Nations land-claim protest is in the summer of 2006, at Caledonia,
Ontario, in the Grand River valley.
Among many other things, what section 35 of the Constitution Act 1982 calls the
aboriginal peoples of Canada were the earliest founders of the present-day countrys
largest metropolis in an exact and thoroughly demonstrable historical sense.
Whatever else may or may not be true, they no doubt still deserve much more credit
(and respect) for this and many other contributions to modern Canada than they
have yet to receive from their fellow Canadians (in Toronto and every other part of the
country as well)..
C.M.W. Marcel would like to thank his colleagues at the Linsmore Institute in Toronto.
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1. Andrew September 17th, 2009 1:28 pm
Dear Mr./Mrs. Marcel,
One thing that was unclear to me is that, after explaining that the 5 Nations had routed
the Iroquois on the North shore of Lake Ontario in the Beaver wars, and who were savvy
with new technology, and who were eager to exploit and accumulate wealth, were all of
the sudden (without explanation) themselves being routed by the Susquehannocks and
moving to the same North shore of Lake Ontario?

Cheers,
Andrew
2. C.M.W. Marcel September 17th, 2009 11:15 pm
Thanks for your question Andrew.
I tried to quickly suggest one key difference between the Iroquoian-speaking
Susquehannocks to the south of the Five Nations and the Iroquoian-speaking Huron
and Neutral to the north. Like the Five Nations, the Susquehannocks enjoyed a good
supply of the latest military technology (guns and even cannon in the Susquehannocks
case) from their closest European neighbours (the English in Maryland for the
Susquehannocks). On Bruce Triggers reading in particular, the French were less
forthcoming with the Huron and especially the Neutral to the north.
Somewhat more background on the Susquehannocks relations with the English in
Maryland might have made this side of things a bit clearer. There was a period of
hostility between these two parties. But in the 1660s they developed a rather extensive
alliance. Along with English guns and cannon, some 50 Englishmen apparently fought
on the Susquehannocks side against the Five Nations. It seems that the Five Nations
were also temporarily weakened by an outbreak of smallpox (one of the diseases
introduced to aboriginal peoples everywhere in the Americas by Europeans) in the mid
1660s, when pressure from attacking Susquehannocks prompted some Cayugas to flee
to the north shore of Lake Ontario. (Which of course by this point was a vacant hunting
ground.)
All the Iroquopian peoples of the wider region from the Susquehannocks in the south
to the Five Nations and the Huron and Neutral in the north had similar strong
military traditions of their own, and a long history of internal warfare before the arrival
of Europeans. And it seems that in much of this history the Susquehannocks in the
south were typically allied with the Huron and Neutral in the north, against the Five
Nations in the middle.
Just why it was the Five Nations who developed such special eagerness to exploit and
accumulate wealth after the arrival of Europeans, as you nicely put it Andrew, remains
something of a mystery I think perhaps ultimately linked to the mystery behind the
subsequent eager economic expansion of the Empire State of New York (where the
Five Nations lived). In any case commercial energy is not quite the same as military
might.
As far as military might goes, by the mid 1670s the Five Nations detente with the
French (also related to their settlements on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and the
French-Iroquois treaty of 1667) had strengthened their position relative to the
Susquehannocks. And then, as Bruce Trigger notes the final breaking of the power of

the Susquehannocks in 1675 did not come about as the result of an Iroquois victory, but
because of an attack by European backwoodsmen from Maryland and Virginia. in
Bacons Rebellion, at the same time as King Phillips War further north.
So, you might say, the same European neighbours who helped the Susquehannocks
against the Five Nations militarily in the 1660s finally, albeit rather inadvertently,
helped the Five Nations against the Susquehannocks in the 1670s.
I hope all this makes things a little clearer for you and certainly apologize if it only
further confuses what is a complex story, that we still do not altogether understand in its
full complexity.
Cheers, (Mr.) C.M.W. Marcel.