Petun
[2] A number of disease epidemics were documented in Huron–Petun societies between 1634 and 1640, which have been linked to the arrival of settlers from urban Europe; this decimated their population.
[3] Although they each spoke Iroquoian languages, they were independent of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee), based south of the Great Lakes in present-day New York State.
The powerful Iroquois sent raiding parties against the smaller tribes in 1648–1649 as part of the Beaver Wars associated with the lucrative fur trade, and virtually destroyed them.
[5] Numerous sources connect the name, Petun, to the cultivation and trade of tobacco by the historical Iroquoian society that existed at the time of the arrival of Europeans.
"[6] This widespread claim was later echoed by other sources such as the Smithsonian Institution's Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico in 1910, which referenced "large fields of tobacco.
[11] One of the earliest traceable claims for notable tobacco production by the Petun is in the table of notes accompanying a 1632 map attributed to Champlain, but which was not wholly his creation.
[13] French colonial traders in the Ohio Valley transliterated the Mohawk name as Guyandotte, their spelling of how it sounded in their language.
They named the Guyandotte River in south-western West Virginia for the Wendat people, who had migrated to the area during the Beaver Wars of the late seventeenth century.
J. V. Wright, who in the mid- and late 20th century wrote extensively on the prehistory of Ontario, attributes this to warfare, with the Pickering dispersing and assimilating the Glen Meyer.
[19] Immediately before contact with Europeans, later Ontario Iroquoians had developed into two separate cultural groupings: the Huron–Petun to the north, and the Neutrals and their close relatives, the Erie, to the south.
[21] The arrival of the French in the area by the early 17th century allowed for a brief period of extensive written records about the Huron, Petun, and Neutrals.
[2] Modern scholarly analysis finds no evidence of large-scale mass death or depopulation events immediately preceding this epidemic wave,[3] implying that populations had remained relatively consistent before this despite migrations.
The Dutch, well-established in their New Netherland colony and trading up the Hudson and Delaware rivers, were also desirous of furs and were willing to supply the Iroquois with European firearms.
That winter, a thousand-strong Iroquois army of mostly Seneca and Mohawk warriors secretly camped north of Lake Ontario, and in the spring they were unleashed on the Huron.
[26] However, a large group of Huron and Petun refugees fled to the upper Great Lakes, where they took refuge with the Odawa and Potawatomi.
In 1843, they were all resettled in Wyandotte County, Kansas and in 1867, the American government gave them land in Indian Territory, now northeastern Oklahoma.
