The Erie People and the Lake That Carries Their Name

You are driving along the edge of the only Great Lake that touches Pennsylvania, and the name of that lake tells you everything about who lived here first. Lake Erie takes its name from the Erielhonan, the people Europeans sometimes called the Cat Nation, who occupied the southern shore for centuries before any European foot touched this ground.

The Erielhonan were an Iroquoian-speaking people, farmers and hunters who built permanent longhouse villages along the lakeshore. They were drawn to this shore by the game, the clean water, and the cool winds blowing in off the lake from the north. By the early sixteen hundreds, they may have numbered as many as twelve thousand people spread across dozens of villages between here and what is now Ohio.

What happened next is one of the most complete erasures in American history. The Erielhonan had almost no access to European firearms, while their neighbors to the east, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, had been trading with Dutch merchants for decades and were well-armed by comparison. War broke out between the two peoples in the mid sixteen fifties. A delegation of Erie people had gone to meet with the Onondaga nation to negotiate, and the talks collapsed violently when one of the Iroquois was killed in a dispute. That accidental death triggered a war that the Erie, outgunned and outmaneuvered, could not survive.

By sixteen fifty-six, the Erielhonan had ceased to exist as a political nation. Their survivors were absorbed into the Haudenosaunee, and their villages vanished. The French who came shortly after found no Cat People to meet. Only the lake remained to carry the name forward, four words compressed into two letters, the abbreviated memory of a whole civilization.

Everything here, the harbor, the peninsula, the city itself, was built on ground where that civilization once stood.