A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier
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These clans were also matriarchal in nature, and any single individual belonged to the same clan as his or her mother. Marriage, furthermore, could never include members of the same clan, even if they were from a different tribe, nation or confederation. As a result, marriage always took place between the members of two different clans and served as a means of linking clans together, which helped create new alliances and ensure friendship. Again, even through marriage, the Wyandot sought to build a complex community via means that helped ensure harmony and prevent conflict.166
Clans played their primary political role within the village, where they constituted the basic level of government. Across the Wyandot, there were four levels of government: the lineage (the segment of a particular clan within the village), the village, the nation and the confederacy. Each lineage, which consisted of about ten matrilineages called ahwatsira, included between 250 and 300 individuals. Every lineage in the village chose a chief of civil affairs and a chief of defense, with the older women, the Clan Mothers, playing the most influential role in the selection process. The key characteristics of the men selected to be chiefs were intelligence, oratorical skill, willingness to work, popularity and courage, and the women of the lineage could dismiss the chief at any time if they thought his performance unsatisfactory.167
The village then formed a council composed of the various lineage chiefs as well as elders from the tribe, known as atiwanens. These councils often met on a daily basis, and although all matters were decided via consensus and no chief had any superiority over the others, one of the lineage civil chiefs would act as the village chief. This position was usually hereditary in nature, and it carried no real authority. Rather, the village chief served as the spokesman, the voice of the community, and it was he who announced the decisions of the village council.168
At the national level, all the village lineage chiefs met as a council, and one person, based on heredity, would act as the principal chief for the people of the nation. Again, this chief had very limited powers and could not be considered equivalent to a European head of state. Interestingly, at the highest level, that of the Wyandot Confederacy, the ruling council was formed from only the civil chiefs of the various nations, indicating they viewed their deliberations to concern primarily matters of peace and not war. The confederacy also had a principal chief, and this man would come from the Attignawantan nation, as it was seen as the senior member of all the nations.169
Furthermore, it is important to understand that, among the Wyandot, a chief was seen as someone who surrendered his own will to that of the people. Their concept of a chief was of a man obliged to submerge his own personality and personal interests in favor of the people he serves—his duty was to incarnate the spirit of the community.170 As Bruce Trigger, the noted Canadian anthropologist, would state:
[Wyandot] chiefs had no constitutional authority to coerce their followers or to force their will on anyone. Moreover, individual [Wyandots] were sensitive about their honor and intolerant of external constraints, and friends and relatives would rally to the support of someone who believed himself insulted by a chief. Overbearing behavior by a chief might, therefore, encourage a violent reaction and lead to conflicts within or between lineages. In the long run, chiefs who behaved arrogantly or foolishly tended to alienate support and would be deposed by their own lineages. The ideal chief was a wise and brave man who understood his followers and won their support by means of his generosity, persuasiveness, and balanced judgment.171
In 1634, French Jesuit priests arrived in Wendake, established a mission and, in doing so, doomed the Wyandot Confederacy to eventual destruction. Champlain had first brought a group of Recollet priests to Wendake in 1623, but their missionary efforts among the Wyandot quickly failed, primarily because their approach demanded that the Wyandot not only accept the Christian god but also abandon all their customs and culture in favor of those of European Christianity. The Jesuits, on the other hand, employed an approach to conversion that showed greater tolerance toward Wyandot culture. So long as a custom did not directly contradict the teachings of the Catholic Church, the Jesuits did not attempt to either eliminate or reform it.172
Using il modo soave, or the “gentle way,” the Jesuits were very successful in their efforts to convert many of the Wyandot to their faith, despite the fact that the Wyandot tended to view them with great curiosity and no small amount of amusement. Outfitted in their distinctive black Jesuit vestments, the Wyandot referred to the priests somewhat derisively as “Black Robes.” These robes were seen by the Wyandot as not only effeminate but ridiculously impractical for a life in the wilderness, as the wearer had great difficulty walking in the dense woodlands, much less climbing in and out of canoes. Further, Wyandot men, who had sparse facial hair and made an almost religious habit of pulling out those few hairs they had with shell tweezers, found the Black Robes’ beards thoroughly disgusting. Moreover, for a race whose culture encouraged the free exploration of sexuality among their unmarried adolescents, the Jesuits’ celibacy seemed both highly curious and more than a little ominous.173
However, as the Jesuits spread their faith, they also sowed the seeds of factionalism among the nations of the confederacy. In the process of conversion, the Black Robes created deep divisions in village communities whose very foundation was built on unity, consensus and tolerance. Converts and traditionalists now began to argue violently and openly, undermining the consensus decision-making process that was the hallmark of Wyandot society. Elders began to lose influence, and village communities, as well as the overall Wyandot community, saw their unity of purpose and corresponding ability to respond to crisis erode away.174
While the erosion of cohesion among the Wyandot might be seen as an “intangible” sort of damage, the Jesuits and other French colonists proceeded to inflict a far more real means of calamity on the Wyandot: disease. In 1634, the first French children arrived in Quebec, and Wyandot traders who visited there during the summer soon became sick with measles and smallpox. Returning to their home villages, they spread sickness like a wildfire in the forest. According to one Jesuit, the symptoms of the illness were severe: “This sickness began with violent fever, which was followed by a sort of measles or smallpox, different, however, from that common in France, accompanied in several cases by blindness for some days, or by dimness of sight, and terminated at length by diarrhea which has carried off many and is still bringing some to the grave.”175 Before the epidemic in this Jesuit’s village ended later that winter, 20 percent of the tribe’s population was dead.
A “Black Robe” travels via canoe to a mission in Wendake in J.C. Hennessey’s painting, Jesuit Missionary en Route. Library and Archives Canada.
Within weeks, these virgin soil diseases touched every longhouse in every village, except, of course, those of the Black Robes, who appeared to have an almost supernatural immunity. Rather than comfort the Wyandot, the Jesuits tried to use this calamity to their advantage, telling the Wyandot that this was a sign of their god’s power and unhappiness that so many clung to their old beliefs, a story many of the Jesuits honestly believed. One of the priests wrote, “With the Faith, the scourge of God came into the country; and, in proportion as the one increased, the other smote them more severely.”176
In response, some Wyandot leaders accused the Jesuits of bringing these calamities to Wendake by encouraging their people to abandon the beliefs that had sustained them for centuries. Father Paul Le Jeune wrote to his superiors that the Jesuits were trying
to disabuse the people of the rumors spread by some Huron Apostates, who attribute to the Faith all the wars, diseases, and calamities of the country. They allege their own experience in the confirmation of their imposture; they assert that their change of Religion has caused their change of fortune; and that their Baptism was at once followed by every possible misfortune. The Dutch, they say, have preserved the Iroquois by allowing them to live in their own fashion, just as the Black Gowns have ruined the Hurons
by preaching the faith to them.177
By 1640, repetitive waves of European diseases had killed almost 60 percent of the Wyandot population in Wendake, leaving only about ten thousand survivors.178 In only six years, a thriving, powerful and prosperous people had been devastated by internal dissent and external bacteria, all sown by the supposed benevolent agents of civilization and the Christian faith. This disaster might have been enough to finish off any society, but the Wyandot now faced a new and even more deadly threat from the Iroquois Confederation.
This eighteenth-century drawing depicts a “savage” Iroquois warrior, like those who attacked the Wyandot in their Wendake homeland. Library and Archives Canada.
As discussed in an earlier chapter, because of their growing fur trade and the decimation of the beaver population from over-trapping in their own territory, the Iroquois began to covet the beaver in the hunting grounds of neighboring nations. This desire was even stronger when the Iroquois looked west to the Wendake. The Wyandot, as stated earlier, were master traders, and as a result, their success drew the Iroquois’ ire. What began as a series of small raids in 1640 exploded into open warfare in 1648 when the Iroquois attacked the village of Teanaostaiae and the mission of St. Joseph. In the resulting fighting, the Iroquois killed almost seven hundred Wyandot, as well as the Jesuit missionary, Father Antoine Daniel.179
The following spring, the Iroquois returned in mid-March, surprising the Wyandot with such an early offensive. Unbeknownst to the Wyandot, a force of some 1,200 Iroquois, mostly Seneca and Mohawk warriors, had spent the entire winter near Lake Ontario, just south of Wendake. As a result, when they attacked the village of Taenhatentaron on March 16, there were no warriors in the palisade watchtowers to give warning. The Iroquois took the village against virtually no resistance, and four hundred inhabitants were either killed or captured. The Iroquois then moved on to the mission village of St. Louis, where they met stiffer resistance from an assembled force of eighty Wyandot warriors. Nevertheless, the Iroquois were soon victorious and either killed or tortured the remaining survivors, including two Black Robes.180
This pattern of Iroquois attacks and Wyandot defeats continued for the next three years. The Iroquois executed a carefully developed strategy designed to exploit Wyandot weaknesses. The Wyandot fought bravely, but in reality, they had lost before the Iroquois even launched their offensive. The seeds of their defeat were sown by the Jesuits, fortified by the diseases the colonists of New France carried among them and brought to blossom through the fratricide caused by an alien religion.
By 1653, the great Wyandot Confederacy was dead, its people driven from their beautiful Wendake forever, and they began decades of wandering in search of a new home. Some would go to Quebec and place themselves under the protection of the French garrison, their descendants being known today as the Hurons of Lorette, while others fled to the Neutrals, the Erie, the Tionontati and other non-Wyandot nations. When some of these nations, such as the Tionontati, were also attacked by the Iroquois, they and their Wyandot guests took refuge on the islands of Lake Huron. For the rest of the surviving Wyandot, their course of wandering led them to Michilimackinac; Manitoulin Island; Green Bay; the Potawatomi; the Illinois; the neighborhood of the Ottawa on Chequamigon Bay, on the south shore of Lake Superior; and again to Michilimackinac. By the late seventeenth century, many had moved to Detroit and the Sandusky River region of Ohio. Here they settled at last, eventually claiming the entire Ohio Country as their own, and here they remained until they left for Kansas in 1842, the last Indian nation exiled from their homes in Ohio.181
VILLAGE LIFE
By the time Phebe arrived in the village, the Wyandot had been in that region of Ohio for almost forty years, but most of their customs and way of life remained unchanged from their days in Wendake. What might have seemed most remarkable to her were the roles of men and women in Wyandot society. Having lived all of her twenty-four years in a patriarchal society where the roles of women were marginalized and the world revolved around decisions made by men, Phebe now found herself in a community where women were not only revered but where they were also the dominating influence in the community’s decision-making process. Although the men might hold all the public offices, the women of the village placed them in those offices and the women could dismiss them, as well. If a war chief wanted to take a teenage boy away from the village, they had to obtain permission from the women of the boy’s lineage. To be sure, women’s daily duties involved the care of children, cooking, maintenance of the longhouse, sewing and working in the fields, while men hunted, fished and performed heavy manual labor, much as in European society. However, there was still an important, innate difference between the worlds of settler and Indian. In Wyandot society, women were seen as the very heart of the community. The men might kill to provide necessary subsistence and material needs, but the women of the Wyandot community nurtured it and provided spiritual culture, which was considered of the utmost importance in Wyandot life.182
As for the village itself, it likely covered about two acres, all surrounded by a strong palisade consisting of as many as three to four rows of stakes arranged in a rough oval around the village. Outside the palisade were acres of cornfields that surrounded the village. Most Wyandot settlements contained about two dozen longhouses, called yannonchia. Each of these were windowless structures about 150 feet long, although archaeologists have unearthed some that were as long as 250 feet. While longhouses appeared shaggy and dilapidated to the naked eye, they were actually marvels of construction. Built on a wooden frame and covered with slabs of bark, they had to be strong enough to withstand the gale-force winds and heavy snowfalls of a Canada or Ohio winter. As a result, their walls employed vertical support poles, sharpened at one end and pushed or twisted into the ground down to a depth of two to three feet. These poles were then reinforced with horizontal ones that were lashed to them with either shredded bark or rope, and both types of poles were approximately two to four inches in diameter. The roof of the longhouse consisted of additional poles attached to the uprights and then bent to form a semicircular arch. The entire frame was covered with slabs of bark, which had been either soaked or steamed to make them more pliable.183
This photo shows a re-created Wyandot longhouse at “Ska-Nah-Doht” Huron Village, Longwoods Road Conservation Area, Delaware, Ontario, Canada. This modern re-creation is probably similar to the one in which Phebe Cunningham lived during her three years as an adopted member of the Wyandot. Courtesy of James P. Rowan.
Once Phebe entered the Wyandot village, her status and future had to be determined. When she told her story to her granddaughter, Phebe said that the village chief was a kind, elderly man named Darby, and in fact, today there is a Little and Big Darby Creek as well as the Darby township in Ohio that are his namesakes. She added that she “was not treated badly after she became acquainted with the Indians and their white captives, some of whom became her friends.”184 Interestingly, Phebe apparently said nothing else regarding her time with the Wyandot, although some nineteenth-century accounts say she was given to the dead warrior’s family as a servant but not adopted. From what is known about the Wyandot culture, this is extremely unlikely, and therefore, it is almost certain that she was adopted.
Why Phebe did not tell anyone about her life and likely adoption is probably related to the racism and social mores of her times. It was one thing for a man to relate his stories of being adopted into the tribe and of being accepted into the warrior culture, but for a woman, matters were different. To the typical white settler, uneducated in the culture of the Native American world, adoption might imply she became the property of a male with all the sexual rights that might entail. In a society where many said any white woman should prefer death to suffering the sexual “depredations” of a savage, it is understandable, perhaps, that she was reluctant to add any detail to her story. Of course, as we now know, no Wyandot male would have ever forced himself on her. In the Wyandot community, sexual activi
ties by unmarried members of the tribe were common and even encouraged, but they were virtually always consensual, and rape was almost unknown.
What did almost certainly happen upon Phebe’s arrival in the village was a decision by the Clan Mothers to adopt her. While these elder women of the community might deliberate her fate, adoption of women and children into a Wyandot tribe was essentially automatic. Furthermore, given the Wyandots’ love and care for their own children, it is hard to imagine that, once they learned the fate of Phebe’s children, the women of the village could not help but feel some empathy for her. The story that Phebe was given to the family of the dead warrior makes sense, as the Wyandot typically would give captives over to adoption by families who had lost members during a raid. In fact, in some cases, when a captive woman was given to a family to replace a lost female matriarch, the new adoptee would actually assume the role of her predecessor and be the leader of her longhouse.185
Phebe then would go through the adoption rituals. First, she would be required to run a gauntlet composed of the village women. Her gauntlet most likely consisted of two parallel lines of women, who stood facing one another with just enough space between the lines for her to run. The length of any particular gauntlet varied based on the size of the village, but at times it could be several hundred yards long. At the end, there would be an objective to reach, usually a council house, a village chief or some specific object. As Phebe ran the gauntlet, the women struck her with fists, clubs, switches and briars. However, the thrashing a woman received would typically be much lighter than that administered by warriors on a male captive. This process was not seen so much as one in which anger and grief were expressed but, rather, one in which the women were beating the “whiteness” out of Phebe.186