The Eries were another Huron-Iroquois nation who appear to have persistently held aloof from the league. They were seemingly a fiercer and more warlike people than the Attiwendaronks; they fought with poisoned arrows, and were esteemed or dreaded as warriors. Their numbers must have been considerable, since they were an object of apprehension to the nations of the league whose western frontiers marched with their own. They are affirmed by the native historian, Cusick, to have sprung from the Senecas; but, if so, their separation was probably of remote date, as they were both numerous and powerful. The country which they occupied was noted among the French _coureurs des bois_ for its lynx furs; and they gave accordingly to its people the name of “La Nation du Chat.” Their ancient home is still indicated in the name of the great lake beside which they dwelt. But, for some unknown reason, they refused all alliance with the Senecas and the league of their Iroquois kin, and perished by their violence within seven years after the Huron country was laid waste. “To the Eries, and to the Neuter nation,” or Attiwendaronks, says Schoolcraft, “according to tradition, the Iroquois offered the alternative of admission into the league or extermination; and the strangeness of this proposition will disappear, when it is remembered that an Indian nation regards itself as at war with all others not in actual alliance.”[135] Peace, he adds, was the ultimate aim of the founders of the Iroquois oligarchy; and, for lovers of peace on such terms of supremacy, the _casus belli_ would not be more difficult to find than it has proved to be among the most Christian of kings. In the case of the Eries, as of the elder Wyandots of Hochelaga, the final rupture is ascribed to a woman’s implacable wrath.
Father Le Moyne, while on a mission to the Onondagas in 1654, learned that the Iroquois confederacy were excited to fury against the Eries. A captive Onondaga chief is said to have been burnt at the stake after he had been offered, according to Indian custom, to one of the Erie women, to take the place of her brother who had been murdered while on a visit to the Senecas. It is a characteristic illustration of how the feuds of ages were perpetuated. The traditions of the Iroquois preserved little more than the fact that the Eries had perished by their fury. But a story told to Mr. Parkman by a Cayuga Indian, only too aptly illustrates the hideous ferocity of their assailants. It represented that the night after the great battle in which the Eries suffered their final defeat, the forest was lighted up with more than a thousand fires, at each of which an Erie was being tortured at the stake.[136] The number is probably exaggerated. But it is only thus, as it were in the lurid glare of its torturing fires, that we catch a glimpse of this old nation as it vanished from the scene. Of the survivors, the greater number were adopted, according to Indian fashion, into the Seneca nation.