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Updated: June 7, 2025
Some had sought refuge among the Neutrals and the Eries, and shared the disasters which soon overwhelmed those tribes; others succeeded in reaching the Andastes; while the inhabitants of two towns, St. Michel and St. Jean Baptiste, had recourse to an expedient which seems equally strange and desperate, but which was in accordance with Indian practices.
This time, they carried their bark canoes over their heads like huge shields, to protect them from the storm of arrows; then planting them upright, and mounting them by the cross-bars like ladders, scaled the barricade with such impetuous fury that the Eries were thrown into a panic. Those escaped who could; but the butchery was frightful, and from that day the Eries as a nation were no more.
The names of the Eries, the Andastes, and the Neutral Nation do not appear in any treaty with the United States. Many, doubtless, from all these tribes fled to Canada. Considerable numbers were also, according to the custom of the Five Nations, adopted by the conquerors to make good the waste of war.
For, deep in the secret shadows of that dreadful place where this vile hag, Catharine Montour, ruled it in Catharines-town, dwelt also all that now remained of the Cat-Nation Eries People of the Cat a dozen, it was rumoured, scarcely more and demons all, serving that horrid warlock, Amochol, the Sorcerer of the Senecas.
As the forest rang with the fierce Oneida scalp-yell, very far away along the low-browed mountain flank we could hear the far tinkle of hoof and pebble, where the stolen horses moved; and out of the intense blackness of the hills came faintly the answering defiance of the Senecas, and the hideous miauling of the Eries, quavering, shuddering, dying into the tremendous stillness of the Dark Empire which we had insulted, challenged, and which we were now about to brave.
After their overthrow by the Iroquois, in 1656, many of the Eries were incorporated with the ancestral nation, and contributed, with other accessions from the Hurons and the Attiwandaronks, to swell its numbers far beyond those of the other nations of the confederacy.
To the south of Lake Erie rose the smoke of the fires of the Eries, generally translated "Cats," but, properly speaking, the "Raccoons." Like the Andastes, near the Susquehanna, mentioned in a previous chapter, they were famous warriors, and for years held their own against the Iroquois, but eventually both these nations yielded to the fury of the relentless confederacy.
Like an island in the midst of the vast Algonquin territory was the region occupied by the Huron-Iroquois family. In thrift, intelligence, skill in fortification, and daring in war, this stock stands preëminent among all native Americans. It included the Eries and Hurons, in Canada; the Susquehannocks, on the Susquehanna; and the Conestogas, also in Pennsylvania.
And after a little while we noticed the stars above us, and felt ferns and grass under our feet, and came out into that same glade from whence runs the trail to Yndaia through the western hill cleft. "People ahead!" whispered the Sagamore. "Their Sorceress and six Eries!" "Are you certain?" I breathed, loosening my hatchet. "Certain, Loskiel. Yonder they are halted within the ferns.
To give only one example of these strange recruitings, let us examine the composition of the great family of the Iroquois in Champlain's time. It was a collection of disbanded tribes, who had belonged to the Hurons, to the Tionnontatés, to the Neutral, to the Eries and du Feu tribes.
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