Part 2 of 3

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The Neutrals and Barbican Heights 

What we do know is that the Neutrals, like other Iroquoian groups, lived in semi-permanent longhouse villages supported by agriculture. Longhouses were impressive structures that could house up to 80 people, or an entire extended family. Villages moved every 10-20 years as soil and hunting became less productive. One such village has been identified within the modern boundaries of St. Catharines, though there were likely many more through the centuries. The site in question is at Barbican Heights, which is now a residential subdivision. A 1979 archaeological dig revealed a significant settlement that may have had about 1500 residents. The dig focused on a ten-acre area, but the full extent of the site cannot be determined with certainty because it is framed on two sides by highway 406. The village was positioned on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, and the ancient Indigenous highway known as the Mohawk Trail likely passed right by it. The Neutrals recognized the strategic and natural advantages of the escarpment, plentiful moving water, and fertile soil just as later settlers would in the following centuries.  

The Barbican Heights dig was led by William Noble, head archaeologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, where most of the findings are still held. The St. Catharines Museum is not aware of any items related to Barbican Heights or the Neutral Nation in our collection. The dig yielded thousands of artifacts including pottery shards, flint tools, smoking pipe fragments, and beads made of wood, bone, shells, and other materials. Wampum from the south and metal tools of French origin were also found, confirming Neutral participation in a wide-reaching trade system. Numerous food and agricultural items were found including carbonized beans, corn, plum pits, grape seeds, and raspberry seeds – all native species that are still farmed in Niagara today. There were also more than 8000 animal bones, and a small amount of human remains. 

The village itself may have contained around 30 longhouses, though only 15 were located during the excavations. Noble noted that the longhouses here featured tapered ends, which was a different design than he had seen at other Neutral sites further west. He took this as evidence for cultural differences between communities and as supporting the understanding of the Neutrals as a confederacy of subset nations. The dig found evidence of a surrounding palisade wall and, curiously, another wall that seems to have separated the village into two sections. Archaeologists also excavated 22 household garbage dump sites called middens, yielding many of the artifacts. 

Like the related Wendat and Haudenosaunee, the Neutrals had complex societal and political structures. They were a confederacy of smaller nations, at least five and possibly more, who lived in approximately 40 villages across Southwestern Ontario. The band who lived at Barbican Heights was likely Ongiara and, given the village’s size and strategic position, it may have been this subset nation’s capital. This village is one in a line of similar sites that have been discovered along the escarpment, whose dates suggest that they may have been occupied by the same community as they slowly moved eastward every 15 years or so (read more here and here). If that is true, the group that was living at Barbican Heights until around 1630 may have been the same group that was living on Grand Island on the Niagara River in 1647 when the Haudenosaunee invasion began.  

Looking at the Barbican Heights Neutral community in this light helps to bring out the human and local elements in what may otherwise seem like routine archaeological cataloguing. The very people whose homes and personal effects have been found in St. Catharines – just like yours and mine can be – may be the same individuals who lost their lives defending their homes and families a few years later. A child who grew up in “St. Catharines” in the 1620s, playing lacrosse, paddling the Twelve, and eating fresh Niagara-grown grapes, plums, and corn, may have had no choice but to be a warrior 20 years later, losing his or her life to a musket – a terrifyingly destructive weapon of unknown origin. 

European Contact 

Etienne Brulé was likely the first European to step foot in Niagara and make contact with the Neutrals. Brulé, who was only 18 when he began his voyages into the Canadian interior in 1610, was on assignment from French explorer Samuel de Champlain. His job was to trek into unknown territory ahead of more official missions in order to learn travel routes and languages, and to establish a relationship with the Indigenous Peoples. Brulé left no written records of his own but some of his exploits were recorded by peers. He spent most of the next 23 years living among the Wendat, but also visited the Neutrals and spoke fondly of them. Brulé was likely the first European to see Niagara Falls, as well as Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Superior. 

After Brulé came the Récollet and Jesuit missionaries. Though best known for having spent a significant amount of time with the Wendat in Huronia, they did journey into Neutral villages as well. Joseph de La Roche Daillon, a French Récollet, was the first Christian missionary to venture into Neutral Territory, spending the winter of 1626-27 in six villages. Daillon was apparently welcomed initially, and came under the protection of a chief Souharissen, who had authority over several villages. Daillon described the Neutrals as very hospitable and their territory as “incomparably larger, more beautiful, and better than any other of these countries,” and producing large quantities of corn, beans, squash, and other vegetables. He described their manner and customs as similar to that of the Wendat. Their languages were different, though mutually intelligible. During his first few months with the Neutrals, Daillon described himself as the “happiest man in the world”. Daillon did also report that, despite remaining “neutral” in feuds between the Wendat and Haudenosaunee, the group engaged in violent warfare with other nations, especially the Mascouten of present-day Michigan. According to the European record, Daillon’s time with the Neutrals was cut short due to rising hostilities toward him brought on by a Wendat smear campaign. The Wendat apparently wanted to maintain a monopoly on trade with the French and spread rumours that Daillon was an evil sorcerer who was bringing illness to the Neutral villages (read on for the kernel of truth in this). Whatever the reason, Daillon was back in Huronia by spring. 

Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit with vast experience with the Wendat, made his attempt with the Neutrals about 13 years later, traveling to 18 villages along with Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot. Brébeuf composed a dictionary highlighting differences between Wendat and Neutral language while Chaumonot made a map of their territory. This mission ended up mirroring Daillon’s, lasting maybe five months until rumours and hostilities drove the Jesuits back to Huronia. This was the last Jesuit mission into Neutral territory and perhaps the last European foray into Niagara until after the Neutrals’ demise a decade later. 

The Beaver Wars and Other European Factors 

As I have mentioned a few times already, the Neutrals were effectively wiped out by an invading Haudenosaunee force around 1649. However, as is so often the case in colonial-era North American history, the story is not so simple, and some, if not most of the blame for these events belongs to Europeans.  

Throughout much of the 17^th century, an intermittent war was being fought between the Haudenosaunee on one side and the Wendat and Anishinaabe allies on the other. This conflict, however, was really a proxy war between the three main colonial powers in the region: England, France, and the Netherlands. The conflict was all about the fur trade and it is now generally referred to as the Beaver Wars. Tribes fought against each other in the hopes of monopolizing trading rights with the Europeans. The Europeans provided weapons and seemed to be in no great hurry to settle matters, since the competition meant more furs and better prices for them. 

By the 1640s, beavers were becoming rarer in the Haudenosaunee’s home territory in upstate New York. They made the decision to cross the Niagara River and claim the Neutral territory as their new hunting grounds. The Haudenosaunee were able to defeat the Neutrals with great speed and efficiency because they were well armed with guns provided by the Dutch and the English – who stood by and waited to benefit from the conquest. The Neutrals, whom the French had still not been able to formalize trade relations with, had little means to defend themselves. The Wendat, equipped with French guns, were able to put up a longer stand, but soon they too were all but obliterated.  

There is, however, another factor that likely influenced the decisions and outcomes of the Beaver Wars. European disease, from smallpox to the common cold, had a devastating effect on Indigenous Peoples on both sides of the conflict. With no natural immunity, people died by the thousands and populations decreased drastically in the first half of the 17^th century. Haudenosaunee may have been especially motivated to move into what is now Southern Ontario in the hopes of recovering numbers. As previously noted, the Haudenosaunee, Neutrals, Wendat, and other groups in the vicinity were all closely related ethnolinguistically, and it had been a well-established Iroquoian war practice to take prisoners for the purposes of assimilation and marriage – but perhaps not previously on this scale. In this campaign across the Niagara, the Haudenosaunee may have absorbed as many as they killed or dispersed, though it is impossible to estimate numbers. Indeed, there are members of the modern-day Haudenosaunee and Wendat Nations who claim descent from the Neutral, Erie, Petun, or Wenro – none of which survived the Beaver Wars as distinct nations. 

I’ll conclude the story of the Neutral Nation next week in Part 3, in which I’ll have a look at how the residents and societal structure of Niagara rapidly changed in the century following the Beaver Wars. 

Sean Dineley is a Public Programmer at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre