Erielhonan

The Erielhonan, better known as the Erie or Cat Nation, were an Iroquoian people of the lower Great Lakes, whose longhouse towns dotted the southeastern shore of Lake Erie in western New York and Pennsylvania. Their name may mean 'people of the panther'.

Organized into matrilineal clans across a loose confederacy of three settlement clusters, perhaps twelve thousand strong before epidemics, they farmed the Three Sisters and decorated pottery with panther effigies. Disease halved their numbers.

In 1654 the Seneca and Onondaga turned on them: after a peace embassy was slaughtered, Haudenosaunee fighters with Dutch muskets stormed a last palisade holding two thousand Erie warriors. By 1656 the confederacy was destroyed and most captives were adopted by the Seneca and Onondaga. A remnant fled to Virginia and then the Savannah River, becoming the Westo, broken in the Westo War of 1680 to 1682.