Point Iroquois: An Important Ojibwe Military Victory

Adam Berger

The Soo Locks opened June 18, 1855, connecting Lake Superior to the other Great Lakes. The St. Marys River soon became a major center for shipping traffic. A navigational beacon was established at Point Iroquois the same year the Soo Locks opened. Equipped with a sixth-order Fresnel lens, this simple wooden tower was an important landmark for ships approaching the river, and helped captains avoid dangerous offshore rocks known to damage vessels. The Point Iroquois Lighthouse was improved in 1871 and remains one of the most picturesque lighthouses on Lake Superior. The lighthouse is now part of the Hiawatha National Forest. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

The Point Iroquois Lighthouse stands on the site of one of the most consequential military actions in Great Lakes Native American history. In 1662, a large Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) war party was obliterated by Ojibwe warriors. Though minor raids may have continued in subsequent decades, this battle marked the last major Haudenosaunee incursion into the Lake Superior region. The early morning ambush Ojibwe defenders launched against raiders at this place blocked the northwestern expansion of Haudenosaunee power, securing Anishinaabe dominance of the eastern Upper Peninsula.

One account of the battle comes from Charles Kawbawgam (circa 1815-1902). Homer Kidder (1874-1950) recorded his version of events when collecting Ojibwe oral histories from 1893 to 1895. Kawbawgam told Kidder that a large Haudenosaunee raiding party came up from the lower Great Lakes and initiated a war dance. Ojibwe, secretly camped at Pointe aux Pins, sent out two scouts who, slipping into spirit forms of a beaver and an otter, went ashore between Whiskey Point and Point Iroquois. Transforming back into humans, the scouts stealthily approached the Haudenosaunee camp, spied on their enemies engaged in celebration, then slipped away, returning to their own people.

Based on information from the two scouts, the Ojibwe determined that the Haudenosaunee war dance would last for four days, and that their best hope of vanquishing this feared enemy was to assault them as they slept at the end of the ceremonies. One woman in the Haudenosaunee camp had dreams about an Ojibwe plot but was ignored when she admonished leaders among her people to be prepared for a sneak attack.

On the fourth day of the ceremony, the Ojibwe sent two more scouts. When they saw the Haudenosaunee go to sleep, they signaled their comrades, who fell upon the invaders near dawn. The Ojibwe slaughtered all the assembled Haudenosaunee but two, who they maimed by cutting off their ears, noses, finders, and toes, and sent away to tell others that if they came into Ojibwe territory they would also be destroyed. The victorious Ojibwe then cut off the heads of the Haudenosaunee dead and put them up on stakes along the beach as a warning to any other enemies who may dare approach this shore.

Bones of the dead surfaced for many years after this massacre. Kawbawgam told Kidder that his grandmother, elderly and with weak eyesight, accidently picked up several bones on this site while gathering firewood. English fur trader Alexander Henry (1739-1824), who visited the place he called Grave of the Iroquois on July 15, 1765, said that he heard similar accounts from older Native guides in his party about finding bones at Point Iroquois.

According to Henry, the Haudenosaunee force consisted of approximately 1,000 warriors, defeated by a much smaller group of about 300 Ojibwe. The Ojibwe force probably included fellow Anishinaabe Odawa, Nipissing, and Amikwa (Beaver) warriors. Henry adds the detail that only one Ojibwe warrior was killed in the ambush, stabbed in the eye with an awl by an old Haudenosaunee woman who happened to be awake stitching moccasins for her family. A description of the event written in the Jesuit Relations by priest Jerome Lalemant (1563-1673) states that there were 100 Haudenosaunee invaders, specifically Mohawk and Oneida, considered the two most bellicose of the five nations that made up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the 1600s. It is not possible to know which account is more accurate in terms of the numbers of combatants involved, and therefore how many Haudenosaunee dead from this event are entombed at Point Iroquois. However, it should be noted that Haudenosaunee raids into the western Great Lakes in 1657 involved more than 1,200 warriors so the higher number is certainly plausible.

The 1662 battle at Point Iroquois was one in a long series of conflicts now known as the Iroquois Wars or the Beaver Wars (approximately 1641-1701). Haudenosaunee traders developed valuable relationships with the Dutch near their home territory in New York in the 1620s, and their military strength quickly increased as they gained access to firearms. By the beginning of the 1640s valuable furbearing species were sufficiently depleted in the area of direct Haudenosaunee control, so warriors went west, seeking new hunting grounds in areas occupied by peoples aligned with the French. 

Haudenosaunee offensives changed political control of the Great Lakes in the decades leading up to the 1660s. They pushed the Wenro out of the Niagara River area in 1638. Haudenosaunee war parties smashed through Wyandot (Huron) homelands around Georgian Bay in 1648, sending refugees flooding west. By 1653, they shattered the Neutral Nation, a confederation of speakers of related Iroquoian languages, pushing them out of the area between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. They broke the dominance of the Erie over the southern shore of Lake Eerie by 1656.

The westernmost Great Lakes were more difficult for the Haudenosaunee to penetrate. An excursion to the west of Lake Michigan in 1655 failed when food became scarce, and warriors turned back after reaching the area around Green Bay, facing resistance from defending forces as they fled. When Haudenosaunee warriors tried to return to Green Bay in 1657, Odawa and Wyandot scouts detected them, and the surprise attack failed.

The Haudenosaunee raid of 1662 apparently met with initial success. The account of events told to Alexander Henry notes that the Haudenosaunee war dance at Point Iroquois included cooking and eating enemy prisoners, the cannibalism serving both ritual and physical functions. Through careful scouting and a well-timed stealth attack the Ojibwe and allied defenders managed to destroy a larger force intent on projecting Haudenosaunee dominance over a portion of the Upper Peninsula.

The Point Iroquois lighthouse was retired from maritime service in 1965 after more than a century of guiding ships to the St Marys River. It has been converted into a small museum operated by the Bay Mill-Brimley Historical Research Society. Though such a function was never intended when it was built to direct shipping traffic, the lighthouse also stands as a monument to the place where the last major Haudenosaunee incursion into Lake Superior was halted, marking the beginning of the end of their ambitions to expand into the northwestern Great Lakes region.