40 Fun Facts About Wyandot People

Which of the five Great Lakes is named after the French word for the Wendat and Wyandot people?

Lake Huron takes its name from the label French explorers gave the Wendat who lived near its shores. The same explorers also called it the fresh-water sea.

Which farm animal has an American breed called the Wyandotte, developed in the 1870s and named after the Wyandot people?

Chicken breeders in the United States named the Wyandotte for the Wyandot people. The bird lays brown eggs and was first known as the American Sebright.

Which stick-and-ball sport is said to have been named by the missionary Jean de Brébeuf after watching Wendat players?

Lacrosse is said to owe its name to Brébeuf, who thought the players' sticks looked like a bishop's crosier, la crosse in French. He watched Wendat men play in the 1630s.

Wendat and Wyandot farmers grew the Three Sisters, a trio of maize, beans and which other crop?

Squash completed the Three Sisters, the mainstay of the Wendat diet. Growers raised several varieties of each plant and saved the seeds of the best.

Which large shared homes, each sheltering many related families, did the Wendat and Wyandot build in their villages?

Longhouses filled a typical Wendat town, which had 30 or 40 of them and was home to 900 people or more. One building could hold twenty families.

In the Wyandot creation story, a woman falling from the Upper World lands on the back of which animal?

A giant turtle rises from the waters to give the falling woman a place to rest. The Wyandotte Nation's flag shows the same animal at its centre as a symbol of the earth.

Jean de Brébeuf wrote a hymn in the Wendat language around 1642 to celebrate which holiday?

Christmas is the subject of the hymn, which is counted as Canada's oldest song for the season. It is still sung in churches of many denominations.

The Wyandotte Nation, the only federally recognized Wyandot tribe, has its headquarters in which US state?

Oklahoma became the tribe's home after a final removal in 1867. Its offices sit in a small town that is itself called Wyandotte.

The French nickname for the Wendat is thought to come from hure, a word for which animal's bristly head?

Boar bristles came to French sailors' minds when they saw the upright hairstyle of Wendat warriors, tradition says. A rival theory ties the nickname to a French word for a ruffian.

The wars that scattered the Wendat ancestors of the Wyandot in 1649 are named after which fur-bearing animal?

Beaver pelts fed the European fur trade that lay behind the fighting. The wars ran on and off from 1609 until a peace treaty in 1701.

The Wyandot of Upper Sandusky were the last Native nation removed from which US state, in 1843?

Ohio lost its last reservation when the Wyandot gave up their land at Upper Sandusky. That July hundreds gathered at their stone church to lay flowers on the graves before leaving.

The removal of the Wyandot followed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a law signed by which US president?

Andrew Jackson signed the act, which pushed eastern nations to lands west of the Mississippi. The policy reached the Wyandot in 1842, when they gave up their last land east of the river.

In traditional Wendat and Wyandot villages, who did most of the planting, tending and harvesting of the crops?

Women ran the fields, while men cleared the land, hunted and fished. Each family worked its own plot, which went back to the community when it was no longer used.

A child in traditional Wendat and Wyandot society belonged to the clan of which relative?

Their mother's line decided a child's clan and standing, a system called matrilineal kinship. It made her older brother a bigger figure for her sons than their own father.

The Petun, who merged with Wendat refugees to form the Wyandot, were named by the French after which crop?

Tobacco was petun in an old French word, and the Petun were known for growing and trading it. Their own name for themselves meant people of the hill.

Which disease caused the deadliest of the epidemics that killed about half of the Wendat between 1634 and 1640?

Smallpox was the deadliest of the illnesses that swept the Wendat in those six years. They had no immunity to the diseases that arrived with European traders and settlers.

In 1763, Wyandot warriors joined a months-long siege of a British fort led by which Odawa chief?

Pontiac led the coalition that surrounded the fort, and the war that followed carries his name. Wyandot fighters also helped ambush British reinforcements at the Battle of Bloody Run.

Which French explorer visited the Wendat homeland in 1615 and joined one of their war parties?

Samuel de Champlain had allied with the Wendat years earlier, and his 1615 journey set out from a village near Lake Simcoe. Lake Champlain, between New York and Vermont, is named after him.

Which confederacy of five nations, armed with Dutch guns, destroyed the Wendat homeland in 1649?

Iroquois war parties about a thousand strong burned two mission villages in March 1649. Within weeks the Wendat set fire to fifteen of their own towns and fled.

The name Wendat, which became Wyandot, is usually translated as dwellers on which kind of landform?

A peninsula fits the old Wendat homeland, which had water on three sides. The name is sometimes translated as islanders instead.

The Relations, yearly reports describing Wendat life in the 1600s, were written by missionaries of which Catholic order?

Jesuits wrote the key record of the peoples who became the Wyandot. In 1649 they burned their own base in Wendat country rather than see it captured.

Sainte-Marie, a mission built in Wendat country in 1639, was the first European settlement in which Canadian province?

Ontario's first European settlement stood near modern Midland and lasted only ten years. A reconstruction of the mission now operates as a living museum.

Wendake, the reserve of the modern Wendat Nation, is an enclave inside which Canadian provincial capital?

Quebec City surrounds the village where Wendat refugees settled for good in 1697, after decades of moving from place to place. The settlement was long known as Lorette.

The Wyandot leader Kondiaronk helped broker a Great Peace among 39 nations in 1701, signed in which city?

Montreal hosted the treaty, but Kondiaronk died a few days before the signing. His mark was added to the document after his death to honour his part in it.

Kondiaronk, the Wyandot chief and famed orator at Michilimackinac, was known to the French by which animal nickname?

The Rat, Le Rat in French, was a famously shrewd negotiator: he once ambushed a party of peace delegates and convinced them the French had ordered the attack.

In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac invited the Wyandot to settle beside his new fort at which future city?

Detroit began as Fort Pontchartrain, and the Wyandot moved there from Michilimackinac. A mission for them opened across the river in 1728.

Tarhe, a Wyandot chief nicknamed the Crane, is the namesake of which kind of US Army aircraft?

A heavy-lift helicopter, the Sikorsky CH-54 Tarhe, carries his name. The match is deliberate: its civilian version is called the Skycrane, and it hoists loads slung beneath its spine.

The Wyandot under Tarhe signed the Treaty of Greenville after the Northwestern Confederacy lost which 1794 battle?

Fallen Timbers was fought among trees toppled by a tornado. Tarhe is said to have been the only Wyandot chief to survive it, and he became a leading voice for peace.

The Wyandot war chief Roundhead took a leading role in the confederacy of which Shawnee leader in the War of 1812?

Tecumseh had Roundhead as an early supporter, and Roundhead led the warriors who beat the Americans at the Battle of Frenchtown. The chief Tarhe, by contrast, preferred peace with the United States.

The Wyandot chief Leatherlips, who had favoured peace with settlers, was executed in 1810 on a charge of what?

Witchcraft was the charge, though it is widely believed to have been cover for politics: he had sold land and opposed a growing war movement. A monument now marks the place.

In which Wendat ceremony, held when a village moved, were relatives' remains reburied together in one communal grave?

The Feast of the Dead drew guests from other villages, and sharing one grave bound the communities together. Jean de Brébeuf watched one in 1636 and wrote a detailed account.

In 1906 the Wyandot lawyer Lyda Conley and her sisters stood armed guard over what in Kansas City?

A tribal cemetery was about to be sold for development, so the sisters built a shack on it and moved in. Conley argued the case at the US Supreme Court, and Congress later blocked the sale.

The Wyandot leader William Walker was elected the first provisional governor of which territory in 1853?

Nebraska Territory then took in present-day Kansas as well. The federal government never accepted Walker's election, but it pushed Congress to organise the region the following year.

Quindaro, a Kansas river town bought from and organised by Wyandots in 1856, became a stop on which famous route?

The Underground Railroad ran through Quindaro, whose people helped those escaping slavery in Missouri. The town's Wyandot name means a bundle of sticks, or strength through numbers.

Removed to Kansas in 1843, the Wyandot bought their new land from which nation they had once sheltered?

The Lenape, also called the Delaware, sold them 23,000 acres beside the Kansas River. They were repaying a kindness, since the Wyandot had earlier given them a home in the east.

Missionaries of which Christian denomination built a stone church for the Wyandot at Upper Sandusky in 1824?

Methodist preaching reached the Wyandot through the missionary John Stewart, whose converts included influential chiefs. In 2019 the church's land was deeded back to the Wyandotte Nation.

The old Wendat homeland, called Wendake, lay between Lake Simcoe and which large bay of the Great Lakes?

Georgian Bay got its present name in 1822, when a Royal Navy surveyor named it for King George IV. Wendat villages had stood near its southern shore two centuries earlier.

In 1755 Wyandot warriors helped rout which British general's army at the Battle of the Monongahela?

Edward Braddock was mortally wounded in the defeat and died during the retreat. George Washington, riding with him, helped the survivors get away.

Among the Wendat ancestors of the Wyandot, healers called arendiwane found the cause of an illness by consulting what?

Dreams brought the healer a spirit called an oki, which might appear as a fire, a ghost or a bird and explain the cure. The visions of the dying were trusted most of all.

Why did Wendat and Wyandot farming towns pack up and move to a new site roughly every ten years?

The soil wore out after about a decade of crops, and the nearby forest grew too thin to supply firewood.