Petun to Wyandot

Charles Garrad, Jean-Luc Pilon, William Fox

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Print ISBN:
  9780776621449
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780776621500
• Index: Social Sciences

In Petun to Wyandot, Charles Garrad draws upon five decades of research to tell the turbulent history of the Wyandot tribe, the First Nation once known as the Petun. Combining and reconciling primary historical sources, archaeological data and anthropological evidence, Garrad has produced the most comprehensive study of the Petun Confederacy. Beginning with their first encounters with French explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1616 and extending to their decline and eventual dispersal, this book offers an account of this people from their own perspective and through the voices of the nations, tribes and individuals that surrounded them.

Through a cross-reference of views, including historical testimony from Jesuits, European explorers and fur traders, as well as neighbouring tribes and nations, Petun to Wyandot uncovers the Petun way of life by examining their culture, politics, trading arrangements and legends. Perhaps most valuable of all, it provides detailed archaeological evidence from the years of research undertaken by Garrad and his colleagues in the Petun Country, located in the Blue Mountains of Central Ontario. Along the way, the author meticulously chronicles the work of other historians and examines their theories regarding the Petun's enigmatic life story.

Chapter 1
Background Information

1.0 Overview

François Xavier Garneau (1862: xix) wrote, “There are few countries in America, concerning which so much has been written as Canada, and yet there are few so deficient as we are in histories.” By 1865 the Abbé Etienne Michel Faillon (1865: vii) could add: “Ce qu’on a écrit sur l’histoire Canadienne n’est pas toujours exempt d’inexactitude” (“That which is written on the history of Canada is not always free from error”). The following is not a history per se, and its focus is on but a small part of Canada where some Wyandot people resided for less than a century until 1650. It, too, is a subject of which much has been written which is not free from error.

The term Nation du Petun (Tobacco Nation) was a nickname applied for a short time by the French to a group of Wyandot tribes that resided in what here will be termed the Petun Country from ca. A.D. 1580 to 1650. Other French nicknames applied to Wyandot groups included Neutral and Huron. As it is with this short time that principally concerns us, and because the name ‘Petun’ is so specific, usefully convenient, and in wide use, it will be used here even though we acknowledge that as a name it is as inappropriate a reflection of reality as the term ‘Indians.’

Several authors, including Connelley (1900), Finley (1840), Hale (1894), Hanna (1911), and Tanner (1974), have speculated about the antiquity and history of the Petun and some had also proposed that the Petun had virtually disappeared. The view that, “In the year…1650…the Petun…ceased to exist” (Middleton and Landon 1927 1: 14), is not at all accurate. In fact, it was the nickname Petun that declined to extinction. As Wyandots, the descendants of the Petun thrive to this day, although not all have status under applicable legislation defining so-called Indians. At the time of the Dispersal from Ontario, A.D. 1649-1651, groups of Wyandots went in various directions, some to join the Iroquois Confederacy and otherwise lose their identity, others to migrate in bands principally in opposite directions, east and west; consequently, these groups are here termed the Eastern Wyandots and the Western Wyandots. The principal component of the Western Wyandots, the larger group, were the former Petun, whose descendants today are to be found in Oklahoma, Kansas, and in the Detroit area. The story of their migration from Ontario to their modern locations is summarised in Chapter 11.

Today, the former Petun Country in Ontario between the Nottawasaga River to the east and the Niagara Escarpment to the west, immediately south of Georgian Bay, comprises a part of the former Nottawasaga Township, now known as Clearview Township in Simcoe County; the latter is itself part of the former Collingwood Township, now called the Town of the Blue Mountains in Grey County, and an even smaller part of Mulmur Township in Dufferin County. In this small homeland the evidence of the Petun is archaeologically abundant.

The first group of Europeans known to have entered the Petun Country, who met with the remarkable people living there, included Samuel de Champlain in A.D. 1616. In his account of the expedition, for reasons which he did not explain, he recorded the name of the people of one village, as Nation de Petun (Tobacco People). Later usage, beginning with the Recollet Brother Gabriel Sagard in 1623, expanded the term to include all the villages then in the Petun Country. As Horatio Hale noted, their Huron allies and relatives called them Tionontatés (various spellings), or the People of the Hills, to describe their location. They would have called themselves ouendat (8endat, wendat, Wyandot) (Steckley 1997: 26).

The year 2000 marked the 350th anniversary of the departure of the Petun-Wyandot from the Petun Country in the Collingwood-area homeland. It seemed an appropriate time to heed Bruce Trigger’s call for more work toward a greater understanding of the Petun (Trigger 1985: 221), to take a new look at what is really known about these people, and to commence the writing of this book.

My personal research in the Petun Country commenced alone in 1956, but took on direction and partnership in 1961 as a student of J. Allan Blair of Duntroon, in the heart of the Petun Country. Early in the research we came to understand that archaeology certainly has its place in understanding the Petun, but that it does not provide all the answers. A reconsideration of what the written primary sources actually say, and not what they have been interpreted as saying and constantly misrepresented in the literature, was a good place to start, and will occupy a substantial part of this book. Even so, this book cannot be a wholly comprehensive work on the Petun as so little is known in some areas. This is because our prime concern was to save the archaeological sites remaining from Petun times from unnecessary destruction. Consequently, the remains of most Petun villages are still in the former Petun Country, ready to teach future generations willing to continue this work.

The conclusions reached in this book are the results of multidisciplinary approaches. Archaeology plays some role, but as was noted in the early days of the Royal Canadian Institute, archaeology “is handmaid to its elder sister, history” (Boyle 1886: 2). The results of our examination of archaeological sites and specimens, historical records, oral traditions, language, and the work of others were combined and subjected to accepted interpretational processes to achieve the conclusions presented.

The intention of this book is to record something of the Petun, but its scope cannot be confined to them or the Petun Country, nor can it end with their Dispersal in A.D. 1650 since the Petun continued in other locations and under their proper name, Wyandot. However, the post-1650 period is not the primary subject, and is treated only sufficiently to demonstrate the continuity of the Petun-Wyandot from Petun times to the present day (Chapter 11).

1.1 Knowing Less

Sometimes, when our research forced us to conclude that a long-established and cherished belief, or the revered opinion of an esteemed scholar, or that something we had read and long-accepted from an indisputable source must, in the light of our own work, be wrong, my principal mentor, J. (“Jay”) Blair, would sigh sadly and say: “We know less today than we knew yesterday.” Overcoming our initial alarm at this, we decided it was incumbent on us not only to reach our own conclusions from our own research but, as Jay Blair believed, that it was our responsibility always “To set the record straight.” This we tried to do (Garrad 1982a).

After concluding that much written about the Petun in supposedly authoritative publications was simply not accurate, and sometimes verged on nonsense, being based on spurious guess work and the unquestioning acceptance of what others had written, we decided it was necessary to critically re-examine what are accepted as primary sources to see what they actually said, and to assess how dependable those sources may be, something Alexander von Gernet refers to as “the new scholarship” (1991: 1).

For example, probably the most authoritative long-standing account of the Petun is found in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1910. The entry by James Mooney reads in part:

Tionontati. (‘there the mountain stands’–Hewitt). A tribe formerly living in the mountains s. of Nottawasaga bay, in Grey and Simcoe cos., Ont. They were first visited in 1616 by the French, who called them the Nation du Petun, or Tobacco Nation, from their having large fields of tobacco. In 1640 the Jesuits established a mission among them. The tribe then had 2 clans, the Deer and the Wolf, and 9 villages. On the destruction of the Huron tribes by the Iroquois, in 1648-49, many of the fugitives took refuge with the Tionontati. This drew down upon the latter the anger of the Iroquois, who sent a strong force against them in Dec. 1649. Etarita, one of their principal villages, was surprised during the absence of the warriors, the houses burned, and many of the inhabitants, together with the missionary, massacred. The Tionontati, with the Hurons who had joined them, now abandoned their country and…soon became blended in with the Hurons, and the united tribes were henceforth known under the modernized name of Wyandot. (Mooney 1910b: 755-756)

First published nearly a century ago, this text seems to have been hastily compiled by someone with access to sources but with only a general knowledge, perhaps to meet a publication deadline, and with the assumption that it adequately served a small, insignificant, substantially extinct tribe with which no one is concerned. Appended to the work is a list of 65 names found for the Petun in the historic records. The word Tionontati, the title given the work, is not one of them. The nearest is Tionnontaté, an abbreviation of Tionnontatehronnons. This name and its many variants (see 1.3.9 below) was not as much a name as a descriptive term, not for where a mountain stands, but for any peoples living among or near hills or mountains (e.g., the Algonkian Weskarini living in the Ottawa River Valley). The fact that the name Tionontati was not exclusive to the Petun justifies our continued use of the term ‘Petun.’ The Petun did not live in any mountains at any time, but on the moraines and post-glacial beach ridges below the Niagara Escarpment. Why Champlain called the people Petun, the name the French then used for the tobacco plant, is nowhere explained. There were no large fields of tobacco in this area, and certainly none were visible to Champlain in January 1616. Neither Champlain nor any subsequent Frenchman at any time recorded even seeing tobacco in the Petun Country. The Jesuit Mission of the Apostles to the Petun commenced in 1639. The number of Petun clans ( nations, to the French) at the time is not known. The first mention of the Deer and Wolf as nations (“deux Nations differentes”) did not occur until 1647, after a loss of perhaps 70% of the population. The number of villages varied from over time. The Iroquois attack of December 1649 was preceded by attacks in 1640 and 1647, and therefore was not caused by the arrival of what were termed Huron refugees early in 1649, many of whom, by December that year, had long departed from the Petun Country and removed to Christian Island. The “many of the inhabitants” of the village of Etharita who were captured by the Iroquois were not, in fact, massacred but taken away for adoption. It was the Huron (predominantly or even entirely Wenro, Hurons by adoption some 10 years previously) refugees who became blended with the Petun, not the other way around. The modernised name of Wyandot was neither modern nor the result of the fusion with the refugees. As ouendat, it was the actual self-designation shared by the Petuns, the Hurons, and other Ontario Iroquoians.

The authoritative Canadian counterpart to the Handbook of American Indians is the prestigious Dictionary of Canadian Biography, in which the following even less impressive description of the Petun appears:

Tobacco Nation (Petuns, Tobacco Hurons, Quieuenontatironons or “Mountaineers,” Tion); in French Gens du Pétun, Pétuneux, Tabacs. The Tobacco Nation occupied the territory to the west of Huronia in Bruce Peninsula, to the east of the Blue Mountains. They cultivated tobacco extensively, hence the name Petuns. Besides tobacco, they grew hemp, maize, beans and sunflowers. They lived in nine or ten villages with a total population of around 15,000. Economically, they were completely subservient to the Hurons, marketing their products through them. (Rousseau and Brown 1966: 16)

The translation of Quieuenontatironons as “Mountaineers” is certainly optimistic for a people who lived on glacial moraines and low hills. The Petun never occupied the Bruce Peninsula or ever lived west of the Blue Mountains. The Bruce Peninsula could never have been east of the Blue Mountains. That the Petuns grew, traded or even possessed tobacco, hemp, beans or sunflowers, may be presumed to be usual for all Iroquoians, and implied by Champlain’s comment that the Petun lived like the Huron Bear tribe, who were recorded as doing these things. Nevertheless there is no eyewitness confirmation that the Petun cultivated any of these crops. There were eight Petun villages in 1616 with two more under construction. There were nine in 1639, perhaps five in 1647, and four in 1650. If the Petun population ever reached 15,000 it did not remain at this figure but constantly shrank through historical times (Chapter 10.1.1.12). Their primary Native trading partners were the Neutrals, Odawas, and those Hurons (at first the Rock Nation, and later the Bear) who conveyed Petun furs annually to the St. Lawrence. They were never economically subservient to anyone.

The term Quieunontateronons was one of several variants of ‘Khionontateronons,’ or ‘Etionnontateronnon,’ meaning “people who live where there is a hill or mountain,” “people of the hill,” “people at the mountain,” or “People Where There is a Hill” (Steckley 1981: 8, 1997: 26, 1999: 197; Steckley and Cummins 2008: 57). As noted above, this was the Huron descriptive term for any peoples associated with hills or mountains. It was sometimes applied to the Petun and, more usually, at least by Sagard, to the Weskarini or Petite Nation, an unrelated Algonquin tribe in the hills of the Ottawa River Valley, and not exclusively to either (Garrad 1998c; Sagard 1939: 71, 198-9, 263fn1, 309; Steckley 1990a: 22). The English translation of Quieuenontatironons as Mountaineers has entered the literature (e.g., Hunt 1960: 42), and the French translation as “Les Montagneurs” has also been applied to the Onondagas (NYCD 1853: 252).

Neither the Handbook nor the Dictionary mention that the Petuns provided sanctuary to the Hurons of Ossossané under most difficult circumstances, and went on to play an active role in North American history under their own name as the Wyandot Tribe. The use of the past tense by Rousseau and Brown seems to imply that the Petun had disappeared. Others agree that the Petun were “long extinct” (Chadwick 1897: 29) or “by 1650 [the tribe] was extinct, its survivors taken into the League” (MacDonald 1978: 181-182, 201). As an adopted member of two of the three communities of Petun descendants which thrive to this day as the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, and the Wyandot Nation of Anderdon, I beg to differ. All that disappeared was the use of the French nickname Petun.

The appearance of revised views of the Petun in 1978 (Garrad and Heidenreich 1978) under the authority of the Smithsonian Institution, had little effect on the established image of the Petun. The entry for the Petuns (“Tobacco”) in The Gale Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes (Malinowski and Sheets 1998), the most recent encyclopaedic work on North American Indians in this writer’s local public library, is substantially based on Mooney’s 1910 work. The list of publications suggested for reading by Kenneth R. Shepherd (1998: 304-306) incorporates little awareness of the research done in the intervening 86 years. The Encyclopedia of North American Indians, published in 1996, also shows Mooney’s influence, particularly in using the term Tionontatis, “specialists in growing the sacred plant” (Dickason 1996: 263-264).

There are probably hundreds of publications which repeat the statements cited above with the confident assurance that they must be correct in every word; after all, hundreds of publications all saying the same thing can’t be wrong. We probably believed them all at one time, but we discarded many in the process of meeting Jay Blair’s goal of setting the record straight. There were indeed times when we knew less than we thought we knew previously. At all times we challenged ourselves to justify our adoption of views differing from the mainstream.

The Canadian anthropologist Thomas F. McIlwraith wrote that “an accurate interpretation of the first two hundred years of Canadian history must take cognizance of the Indian point of view as well as that of the white man” (1930: 132). This obvious truism has been noted by other scholars (e.g., Smith 1974: 65; Trigger 1987: 2). In this volume we hope to at least move in the direction of a better understanding of the Petun from their point of view, and to finally know more about them today than we knew yesterday.

1.2 The Method Followed

To write a book about the Petun would seem simple enough if a three-stage approach is adopted:

1. critically review, summarise and reconcile the pertinent written and cartographic primary historic sources, and secondary and more remote sources that make valid contributions;
2. critically review, interpret, summarise and reconcile the current archaeological and other anthropological evidence;
3. combine and reconc...

Table of contents

• ABSTRACT
• RÉSUMÉ
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Foreword
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 - Background Information
• Chapter 2 - Locating the Petun Country
• Chapter 3 - The Origins of the Petun
• Chapter 4 - French Sources
• Chapter 5 - The Mission of the Apostles to the Petun, 1639-1650
• Chapter 6 - Using Native Artifacts to Interpret Petun Sites
• Chapter 7 - Using European Artifacts to Interpret Petun Sites
• Chapter 8 - Petun Subsistence and Economy
• Chapter 9 - Petun Village and Camp Sites Interpreted
• Chapter 10 - The Petun and their Neighbours
• Chapter 11 - After the Dispersal
• Appendix A - Abbreviations Used for Pottery Type Names in the Petun Country
• Appendix B - Summaries of Petun Village Site Faunal Reports
• Appendix C - Linguistic Data
• Appendix D - Petun Wampum Belts
• Appendix E - Names for the Petun
• References Cited
• Index