Wyandot People
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40 free Wyandot People trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Wyandot are a Great Lakes people whose story runs from farming towns in what is now Canada to a modern nation in the American heartland. Along the way they were allies of French explorers, hosts to missionaries, signers of famous treaties and founders of a frontier town. This quiz covers the fun facts people look for: what the name means, how families lived and farmed, the creation story, well-known chiefs, the wars and removals that scattered the people, and the surprising things named after them today. The questions are written so that kids, students and curious adults can all play. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of the five Great Lakes is named after the French word for the Wendat and Wyandot people?
Lake Huron
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.
Q 02Which farm animal has an American breed called the Wyandotte, developed in the 1870s and named after the Wyandot people?
Chicken
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.
Q 03Which stick-and-ball sport is said to have been named by the missionary Jean de Brébeuf after watching Wendat players?
Lacrosse
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.
Q 04Wendat and Wyandot farmers grew the Three Sisters, a trio of maize, beans and which other crop?
Squash
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.
Q 05Which large shared homes, each sheltering many related families, did the Wendat and Wyandot build in their villages?
Longhouses
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.
Q 06In the Wyandot creation story, a woman falling from the Upper World lands on the back of which animal?
Turtle
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.
Q 07Jean de Brébeuf wrote a hymn in the Wendat language around 1642 to celebrate which holiday?
Christmas
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.
Q 08The Wyandotte Nation, the only federally recognized Wyandot tribe, has its headquarters in which US state?
Oklahoma
Oklahoma became the tribe's home after a final removal in 1867. Its offices sit in a small town that is itself called Wyandotte.
Q 09The French nickname for the Wendat is thought to come from hure, a word for which animal's bristly head?
Boar
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.
Q 10The wars that scattered the Wendat ancestors of the Wyandot in 1649 are named after which fur-bearing animal?
Beaver
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.
Q 11The Wyandot of Upper Sandusky were the last Native nation removed from which US state, in 1843?
Ohio
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.
Q 12The removal of the Wyandot followed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a law signed by which US president?
Andrew Jackson
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.
Q 13In traditional Wendat and Wyandot villages, who did most of the planting, tending and harvesting of the crops?
Women
Q 21The Relations, yearly reports describing Wendat life in the 1600s, were written by missionaries of which Catholic order?
Jesuits
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.
Q 22Sainte-Marie, a mission built in Wendat country in 1639, was the first European settlement in which Canadian province?
Ontario
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.
Q 23Wendake, the reserve of the modern Wendat Nation, is an enclave inside which Canadian provincial capital?
Quebec City
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.
Q 14A child in traditional Wendat and Wyandot society belonged to the clan of which relative?
Their mother
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.
Q 15The Petun, who merged with Wendat refugees to form the Wyandot, were named by the French after which crop?
Tobacco
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.
Q 16Which disease caused the deadliest of the epidemics that killed about half of the Wendat between 1634 and 1640?
Smallpox
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.
Q 17In 1763, Wyandot warriors joined a months-long siege of a British fort led by which Odawa chief?
Pontiac
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.
Q 18Which French explorer visited the Wendat homeland in 1615 and joined one of their war parties?
Samuel de Champlain
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.
Q 19Which confederacy of five nations, armed with Dutch guns, destroyed the Wendat homeland in 1649?
Iroquois
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.
Q 20The name Wendat, which became Wyandot, is usually translated as dwellers on which kind of landform?
A peninsula
A peninsula fits the old Wendat homeland, which had water on three sides. The name is sometimes translated as islanders instead.
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.
Q 24The Wyandot leader Kondiaronk helped broker a Great Peace among 39 nations in 1701, signed in which city?
Montreal
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.
Q 25Kondiaronk, the Wyandot chief and famed orator at Michilimackinac, was known to the French by which animal nickname?
The Rat
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.
Q 26In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac invited the Wyandot to settle beside his new fort at which future city?
Detroit
Detroit began as Fort Pontchartrain, and the Wyandot moved there from Michilimackinac. A mission for them opened across the river in 1728.
Q 27Tarhe, a Wyandot chief nicknamed the Crane, is the namesake of which kind of US Army aircraft?
Helicopter
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.
Q 28The Wyandot under Tarhe signed the Treaty of Greenville after the Northwestern Confederacy lost which 1794 battle?
Fallen Timbers
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.
Q 29The Wyandot war chief Roundhead took a leading role in the confederacy of which Shawnee leader in the War of 1812?
Tecumseh
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.
Q 30The Wyandot chief Leatherlips, who had favoured peace with settlers, was executed in 1810 on a charge of what?
Witchcraft
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.