The Potawatami, an Algonquian tribe of North America closely related to the Ojibwa and Ottawa, have split away from the other tribes by 1500 and settled in the western part of lower Michigan.

Champlain and Recollect Father Joseph Le Caron leave the Huron country on May 22, 1616, and visit the Petun and Ottawa of the Great Lakes.

Champlain is back in Quebec on July 11 before heading back to France on July 20.

This will turn out to be Champlain's last stay in North America.

Having secured Canada, he has helped create French America, New France, or L'Acadie.

The Iroquois launch a devastating attack into the heart of Huronia in 1649, destroying several key villages and killing hundreds, if not thousands, among whom are the Jesuit missionaries Jean Brebeuf, Charles Garnier, and Gabriel Lallemant, all of whom are considered martyrs of the Catholic Church.

Following these attacks, the remaining Hurons, reduced from fifteen thousand to five hundred members, disperse to seek refuge on the islands in the Great Lakes, leaving the Ottawa to later fill the vacuum in the fur trade with the French.

The Iroquois Confederacy of five nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—continue to battle the Hurons, another Iroquoian tribe, for control of the fur trade.

Iroquois raids throughout the 1640s and 1650s devastate New France and drastically reduce the Hurons and their Algonquian allies.

Abraham Wood, sometimes referred to as "General" or "Colonel" Wood, an English fur trader (specifically the beaver and deerskin trades) and explorer of Virginia, is based at Fort Henry at the falls of the Appomattox in present-day Petersburg.

Built in 1646 to mark the legal frontier between the white settlers and the natives, Fort Henry is near the Appomattoc tribe with whom Abraham Wood trades.

From the fort’s inception, and for the next forty-five years or so, it is the only point in Virginia at which natives can be authorized to cross eastward into white territory, or whites westward into native territory.

All natives are at first required to display a badge made of striped cloth while in white territory, or they could be murdered on the spot.

This circumstance gives Wood, who commands the fort and privately owns the adjoining lands, a considerable advantage over his competitors in the "Indian trade".

Several exploration parties are dispatched from Fort Henry by Wood during these years, including one undertaken by Wood himself in 1650, which explores the upper reaches of the James River and Roanoke River.

The prehistoric origins of the Shawnees are uncertain.

The other Algonquian nations regard the Shawnee as their southernmost branch.

Algonquian languages have words similar to the archaic shawano (now: shaawanwa) meaning "south".

However, the stem shaawa- does not mean "south" in Shawnee, but "moderate, warm (of weather)".

In one Shawnee tale, Shaawaki is the deity of the south.

Some scholars have speculated that the Shawnee are descendants of the people of the prehistoric Fort Ancient culture of the Ohio country; other scholars disagree.

No definitive proof has been established.

Europeans report encountering Shawnee over a widespread geographic area.

The earliest mention of the Shawnee may be a 1614 Dutch map showing the Sawwanew just east of the Delaware River.

Later seventeenth-century Dutch sources also place them in this general location.

Accounts by French explorers in this same century usually located the Shawnee along the Ohio River.

According to one legend, the Shawnee are descended from a party sent by Chief Opechancanough, ruler of the Powhatan Confederacy 1618-1644, to settle in the Shenandoah Valley, and led by his son, Sheewa-a-nee, for whom they are named.

Edward Bland, an explorer who accompanies Abraham Wood's expedition in 1650 and writes The Discoverie of New Brittaine, notes that in Opechancanough's day there had been a falling-out between the "Chawan" chief and the weroance of the Powhatan proper (also a relative of Opechancanough's family), and that the latter had murdered the former.

Historian Alan Gallay speculates that the Shawnee migrations of the middle to late seventeenth century were probably driven by the Iroquois Wars that began in the 1640s.

The Shawnee become known for their widespread settlements and migrations, and their frequent long-distance visits to other native groups.

Their language is to become a lingua franca among numerous tribes.

Together with their experience, this will help make them leaders in initiating and sustaining pan-native resistance to European and American expansion.

The surviving Huron have fled their territory to seek assistance from the Anishinaabeg Confederacy in the northern Great Lakes region.

The Odaawaa Nation (Ottawa) temporarily halts Iroquois expansion further northwest.

With the Hurons' withdrawal, the Iroquois control a fur-rich region and have no more native tribes blocking them from the French settlements in Canada.

The Iroquois launch a similar attack against the Erie in 1654 but with less success.

The Erie, or Nation of the Cat, an Iroquoian group of Native Americans, live from western New York to northern Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie.

In the competition in the fur trade, the Erie have alienated the surrounding tribes by encroaching on their territories.

They have also angered their eastern neighbors, the League of the Iroquois, by accepting refugees from Huron villages that had been destroyed by the Iroquois.

Though rumored to use poison-tipped arrows (Jesuit Relations 41:43, 1655-58 chap. XI), the Erie are disadvantaged in armed conflict by having few firearms (if the Erie tribe did use poison on their arrows, it would make them the only tribe in North America to do so.)

The Erie territory in 1650 is estimated to have twelve thousand members.

The war between the Erie and the Iroquois has lasted for two years.

The Iroquois have by 1656 almost completely destroyed the Erie confederacy, who have refused to flee to the west.

The Erie tribe no longer exist as a unit, but dispersed groups will survive a few more decades before being absorbed into the Iroquois.

Anthropologist Marvin T. Smith (1986:131–32) has theorized that some Erie fled in the late 1650s to Virginia and then South Carolina, where they become known as the Westo.

Subsequent work by John Worth (1995:17) and Eric Bowne (2006) strongly supports Smith’s hypothesis.

The Iroquois Confederacy has seized control of the Illinois Country as far west as the Mississippi River by the late 1650s.