Wendat

The Wendat, called Huron by the French, were an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of four nations living in Wendake, between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe in what is now Ontario. Their palisaded longhouse villages held some 20,000 to 40,000 people. Their relatives the Tionontati, the French Petun or Tobacco, lived to the southwest.

Samuel de Champlain met them in 1615, and Atironta of the Arendarhonon had allied with the French at Quebec in 1609. From 1634 to 1640 measles and smallpox devastated them. Supplied with Dutch firearms, the Haudenosaunee began large attacks in 1647 and destroyed Wendake in 1649, scattering them. The refugees fled west to the Odawa and settled near Detroit around 1701 as the Wyandot.