Wyandotte

Indian Nations
Indian Territory Archives

Wyandotte

The name Wyandotte is an English corruption of the Iroquoian word Wendel, which means "islanders" or "dwellers on a peninsula," About 1600, the French began calling them Huron, meaning "rough," from the French word hure, "head of the wild boar." referring to the roached hair of the warriors that resembled the bristles on a boar's head. The Wyandotte tribe though, never accepted the French name Huron.

When French explorer Jaques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River in 1536-43, he found the Wyandotte in the present province of Ontario, Canada. They were locked in a fierce war with the Iroquois of New York (better known as the Five Nations) In 1649, due to an epidemic of malaria, they lost the war and fled westward, settling along Lake Michigan and around Green Bay, Wisconsin where they took refuge with the Potawatomi. Still pursued by the Iroquois, they were pushed further west, into Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. They took part in the great Ottawa chief, Pontiac's Uprising sided with the French in the French and Indian War, and with the British in the American Revolution. Although divided in the war of 1812, they received a large tract of land in Michigan and Ohio for their support in the war. From 1795-1842, the tribe ceded their lands east of the Mississippi and took a reservation in what would later be named Wyandotte County, Kansas.

In 1855, they were made U.S, citizens and were given individual allotments of land. But white settlement and resulting hardships led 200 members to Indian Territory, where they first lived among the Seneca. With the Omnibus Treaty of 1865, they purchased a reservation on the north side of Seneca lands, In 1893, tribal members received individual allotments of land.

Tribal government was advanced, with women voting to choose officers organized into legislative and judicial courts. The mother's in a chieftan's family chose the candidates for his successor.

Help the Wyandotte Archives Grow, Kindly Submit Data. If you have any cemetery records, bible records, deeds, applications for citizenship in the Wyandotte, etc... please send them to me as an attachment in an e-mail to: Lola Withrow. Please be sure to identify that it is for the Wyandotte. It also needs to be a plain text file, no HTML and no images. This ensures that everybody will be able to read it, no matter what kind of web browser. Here is a help file. Please read the Guidelines

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