Wenrohronon

The name "Wenrohronon" refers to living near a "place of floating film." This is likely a reference to the oil springs at what is now Cuba, New York. The oil associated with the Wenro was the first recorded petroleum known in the United States to Europeans. The Wenro showed this oil to French missionary Joseph de La Roche Daillon when he traveled the Genesee River to Cuba Lake. == Territory ==

In the 1630s, French missionaries wrote that the Wenro's territory was north and east of the Erie, east of the Neutral across the Niagara River, and west of the Genesee River valley and the Genesee Gorge across where the Seneca had their home. Through the first half of the 17th century, sources report the Wenrohronon inhabited lands along both ends of the Lakes Erie and Ontario and their connecting river, the Niagara River. This range ran from the west side of the lower Genesee River valley around Rochester, New York (opposite to the territory of the Seneca) and extended westerly along the right bank (eastern) shores of the Niagara River (opposite lands occupied by the Neutral Confederacy on the Canadian side of today's river) and from lands at its source (Lake Erie, in the vicinity of Buffalo) continued a comparatively shorter distance along the southern shores at the eastern end of Lake Erie. While the terminal southern and western end of this range is unknowable, the extent along the southern shore of Lake Ontario from Rochester to Buffalo) is about . North to south, it is likely their lands extended up from Lake Ontario farther southerly more than the approximately shown on the map, possibly to the drainage divide (and Genesee River gorge area) formed atop the terminal moraine left behind by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, but in all likelihood, into a shared hunting ground shared with the Erie near the headwaters of the Allegheny River. The Wenro's history was primarily recorded in the Jesuit Relations. Their villages were described by Jesuit missionaries as having been reduced to relatively fewer permanent settlements than their neighbors by internecine warfare in the late 16th century before becoming known to the few French who encountered them. Protected by the gorges of the Genesee River on the east, their small territory likely contained few valuable resources save for hunting lands, and their survival between the oft-warringWendat and Haudenosaunee was because they managed to trade simultaneously with both and their presence was valuable as a buffer state. ==History==

17th century The Wenro were recorded by Franciscan missionary Joseph de La Roche Daillon in 1627, who encountered them at the site of Oil Springs. Daillon noted their use of crude petroleum (then a largely unknown substance) as a medicine. The editors of American Heritage Magazine writing in the American Heritage Book of Indians suggested the French visitors encountered the Wenro shortly after they had lost an internecine war, probably with the Senecas, accounting for the relatively small size of their territory, Later in the 1640s and 1650s, To a greater degree than their successive stunning defeats of the Wendat, the Tionontati, the Neutrals and the Shawnee (in Ohio), the Wenro were ultimately conquered by the Haudenosaunee League in a manner closer to the later destruction of the Susquehannocks, and the Erie nations. 19th century Haudenosaunee law allowed for survivors to be adopted (assimilated) into the victorious nations, to the point that one French observer in the 1870s estimated the majority of Haudenosaunee citizens were adopted. == Today ==

Today, descendants of the Wenrohronon are enrolled in the Wyandotte Nation, located in Northeastern Oklahoma. ==Language==

Wenrohronon was an Iroquoian language and thus was related to Susquehannock, Wyandot, Erie and Scahentoarrhonon. ==See also==