The Wyandot: Keepers of the Ohio Country

Étienne Brûlé was barely more than a boy when a French captain left him among the Wendat to learn their language. It took him three winters to learn to listen. The people the French called Huron lived in palisaded towns on a peninsula of good corn country above the freshwater sea they called the Sweet Sea, today's Georgian Bay: perhaps twenty to thirty thousand people in a confederacy of four nations, the Bear, the Cord, the Rock and the Deer.

The fevers came in French canoes, and war with the Haudenosaunee finished what the fevers began. By 1650 the Wendat homeland was lost and its people scattered east and west. Those who went west, known as Wyandot, rebuilt at Detroit and later in the Sandusky country. The book follows them through the wars for the Ohio Country, the Treaty of Greenville and the Sandusky reserves, and the mission schools that divided them, to 1843, when they became the last nation removed from Ohio. The road ran on to Kansas, citizenship and the Civil War, the long silence of the early twentieth century, the termination fight of the 1950s, and today's Wyandotte Nation.

The language Brûlé struggled over did not die with the old country. At Wendake, near Quebec City, descendants of the Wendat who fled the wars of the 1640s are teaching it to their children again.