Wyandot, Tionontati, Tobacco -- Ontario -- History, Tobacco, Ontario, Neutral Nation 

"It is an almost universally accepted fact that tobacco (nicotiana augustifolio) originated with the Aztecs and the Mayan Indians of Central America at least two thousand years ago. The herb was unknown to the old world until the discovery of America in 1492 but its soothing fascination for mankind was a well established fact long before the white man witnessed smoking among the Indians in the fifteenth century.

In the early part of the seventeenth century when the first white fur traders and Jesuit missionaries from New France came to live among the Hurons on Georgian Bay, they found the Neutrals along Lake Erie, producing a large volume of tobacco which they called Petun. Tobacco was in big demand for medicinal and religious rituals as well as pleasure among all tribes in America, and the Tobacco Indians traded their petun on a wide scale throughout the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River area. From artifacts found in their graves their trade may have extended to the Eskimos of Hudson Bay and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a story of the lives and culture of these first farmers of Ontario who were practically exterminated by the Iroquois almost a century and a half before the advent of the first white pioneers in Upper Canada."--Back cover.