Huron

Huron, city, United States

Huron (hyr`än'), city (1990 pop. 12,448), seat of Beadle co., E central S.Dak., on the James River; inc. 1883. A shipping and trade center for a large livestock and grain area, it has meatpacking, lumbering, and tourism industries, and asphalt and mining equipment are manufactured. It is also the administrative center for a number of state and federal agencies. Huron was the hometown of Hubert Humphrey. The city is the seat of Si Tanka Huron Univ. The South Dakota State Fair is held annually in Huron.

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Huron, indigenous people of North America

Huron (hyr`än'), confederation of four Native North American groups who spoke the Wyandot language, which belongs to the Iroquoian branch of the Hokan-Siouan linguistic stock (see Native American languages). Their name for themselves was Wendat, Huron being the name applied to them by the French. In the early 17th cent. they occupied the region between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay in Ontario and numbered some 20,000. Their culture was substantially that of the area of the Eastern woodlands. They lived in palisaded villages and cultivated tobacco.

In 1615, when Samuel Champlain visited the Huron, they were at war with the Iroquois. The long-standing enmity between the Huron and the Iroquois reached a climax in 1648, when the Iroquois, armed with Dutch firearms, invaded Huronia and subsequently disrupted (1649) the Huron confederacy. It was at this time that Father Jean de Brébeuf, who established (1626) a Roman Catholic mission among the Huron, and other Jesuit missionaries were killed by the Iroquois. The survivors of the Huron fled in all directions—southwest to the Tobacco Nation, south to the Neutral Nation, southeast to the Erie, and northeast to a French fort near Quebec. The implacable Iroquois hunted the Huron everywhere; in 1649 the Iroquois attacked the Tobacco Nation, causing the migration of these people in company with the Huron. In 1650 the Neutral Nation was invaded by the Iroquois and practically wiped out, and in 1656 the Erie were almost exterminated.

The Huron who had fled to Quebec ultimately received a small reservation at Lorette, where many still live, but the remnants of the Huron and Tobacco Nation went, under pressure from the Iroquois, first to Michigan, then to Wisconsin and Illinois, where the Sioux attacked them. The Tobacco Nation and Huron eventually settled (1750) in villages near Detroit and at Sandusky, Ohio. In Ohio they became known to the British as the Wyandot and as such fought with the British against the Americans in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. After the War of 1812 possession of their lands was confirmed by the United States, but by 1842 they had sold their tracts and moved to what is now Wyandotte co., Kans. In 1867 they were settled in NE Oklahoma, where they reside as citizens, their tribe having been terminated in 1959. There were some 2,500 Wyandot in the United States in 1990. About 1,500 Huron live in Canada.

Bibliography

See B. G. Trigger, The Huron Farmers of the North (1969).

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Huron

Iroquoian-speaking North American Indians who were living along the St. Lawrence River when contacted by the French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534. Traditionally, the Huron lived in villages of longhouses, each of which housed several families. Corn agriculture was the mainstay of the Huron economy. Huron social and political organization was based on matrilineal clans. Each clan had a chief who represented the group at village and band councils; a clan's senior women were responsible for selecting its chiefs. The Huron were bitter enemies of the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, with whom they competed in the fur trade. Several Huron bands formed the Wendat Confederacy to defend against the Iroquois; the Iroquois destroyed the alliance in 1648–50 and caused its members to disperse to what are now the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and the U.S. states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. During the French and Indian War the Huron allied with the French against the British and Iroquois. Early 21st-century population estimates indicated some 4,000 individuals of Huron descent.

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Huron

1. Lake. a lake in North America, between the US and Canada: the second largest of the Great Lakes. Area: 59 570 sq. km (23 000 sq. miles)

2. a member of a North American Indian people formerly living in the region east of Lake Huron

3. the Iroquoian language of this people