Niagara: An Aboriginal Center of Trade

Long before Niagara Falls became a spectacle for tourists, it was the beating heart of Indigenous commerce. For centuries, tribes from across the Northeast gathered here each year, portaging around the cascading waters, trading furs and wampum, exchanging the legendary Erie Stones believed to hold healing powers. This early 20th century work recovers a buried history: the sophisticated trading networks, the annual gatherings, the strategic significance that made Niagara the commercial crossroads of the Iroquois and their neighbors. Porter weaves together archaeological evidence, oral tradition, and early European accounts to reconstruct a vibrant pre-contact economy stretching from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. He traces the first European encounters at this site, documenting the collision between Indigenous sophistication and colonial ambition. The result is a vital corrective to the erasure of Native achievement, a portrait of a continent that was far more complex, interconnected, and commercially advanced than popular history acknowledges.