Which Fort? What Nation?
Where was the Iroquois fort that Champlain attacked in 1615? Which Iroquois nation was he fighting? This question has given rise to a controversy that has continued through two centuries.
Champlain’s accounts of the battle are unclear on both issues. He called the enemy that he was attacking the Entohonorons, which was his understanding of their name in the Huron language. Experts on Iroquoian languages conclude that this word might have applied to the Oneida or Onondaga nation, or even the Cayuga. It does not clearly identify any one of these three Iroquois nations.
The precise location of the battleground would solve the problem, but on this question historians have disagreed. Most scholars are of one mind in tracing Champlain’s route from Huronia to the Iroquois country, as far as the town of Brewerton at the outlet of Lake Oneida. They also agree that the fort was on a lake nearby with small streams on either side of it. But which lake, and where exactly? Local historians who know the ground have made claims for many sites in upstate New York. At issue here is not only the location of the fort but also the identity of the Iroquois nation that occupied it.
In the mid-nineteenth century, E. B. O’Callaghan, Francis Parkman, and the Abbé Laverdière believed that the fort stood on Lake Canandaigua, twenty-five miles south of Rochester, New York. This site was in the far west of Iroquoia, the homeland of the Seneca nation, “keepers of the western door” of the confederacy. On further examination, this location was inconsistent with Champlain’s account of his route. The distances were too great given the time available, and no positive evidence of any kind has been found to support it. Parkman abandoned this idea in later editions of his work.1 Other historians have put in a claim for Lake Cayuga and argued that Champlain was attacking the Iroquois nation of the same name. But this also would have required an impossibly long march to the west, and no evidence supports it.
A third thesis came from antiquarians John S. Clark and Lambertus Ledyard, who argued that Champlain attacked an Oneida town on Nichols Pond, in Fenner, Madison County, New York, twenty miles southeast of Syracuse. On that site, amateur archaeologists found Indian artifacts that persuaded many scholars in the mid-twentieth century. As late as 1972, most students of Champlain believed this was the site, and that Champlain was fighting the Oneida Nation. Samuel Eliot Morison strongly supported this interpretation.2
Professional archaeologists William Ritchie and Peter Pratt excavated the site and found the remains of a precontact Oneida village there, but they concluded that it had been abandoned a century before Champlain’s attack. They also discovered that the palisade on this site did not match Champlain’s description of the fort he attacked, and Nichols Pond was for many centuries (and is today) more a swamp than a lake. We walked the terrain in the summer of 2007 and found that it does not match Champlain’s account.3
Pratt, the leading expert on this question, concludes from many years of study that Champlain’s fort stood at the south end of Lake Onondaga on a site presently occupied by the Carousel Shopping Mall in the city of Syracuse, New York. I visited the site in 2007 and observed that the location and the terrain matches descriptions in Champlain’s accounts. The ground has been much disturbed by development, but many Indian artifacts were found there. That evidence supports the presence of a large Onondaga fort in Champlain’s era. Tests of time and distance confirm that the location of this site fits the chronology of Champlain’s narrative in those terms. Many ethnohistorians now agree. Other sites have also been suggested on the north and east sides of Lake Onondaga, but they are problematic in other ways, by dates of occupation, terrain, and watercourses.4
In light of present evidence, the most probable location of the fort was between two streams on the south end of Lake Onondaga. Champlain was attacking one of the principal towns of the Onondaga nation, who had been very active in raiding fur-trading routes to the north.