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History

Statue of Logan, a famous Mingo leader, in Logan, West Virginia.

Accounts site the Mingo homelands in the same region archeologists place the Monongahela Culture. An area extending from the area of Wheeling, West Virginia northeasterly into the Appalachian Plateau along various tributary streams of the Monongahela and the Allegheny Rivers with community sites in the highlands above the gaps of the Allegheny.

The putative Mingo homeland is centered in Western Pennsylvania roughly coincident with the areas occupied by the Monongahela culture to which archaeologists assign an end date within a century of the Mingo people's brief appearance in the historical record. The tribe is believed to be an amalgam who fled Indian-on-Indian wars and joined together into a new tribal group, and this was thought to be more unstable than other native groups. This sparsely populated homeland of the Mingo is geographically generally located in the lower reaches of both the Allegheny and Monongahela watersheds and in the (more defensible) highlands above the two located South-southwest of Iroquois lands, South of the range of the Erie people, Northeast of the Shawnee, and East of the Miami people in their highland settlements in the general vicinity of the triangle formed by Pittsburgh, Bedford, Johnstown. Differing interpretations of why the region was nearly depopulated from as early 1600, certainly by the mid-1600s well into the mid-eighteenth century range in blame on continual inter-tribe warfare known as the Beaver Wars, normally blaming the Iroquois Confederation and/or the 'fierce' Susquehannocks. Alternative beliefs are the region was depopulated by a severe disease epidemic, perhaps one even worse than that which eliminated an estimated 90% of the once powerful Susquehannock in 1670-74. Other researchers blame a confluence of these and perhaps other factors, such as a voluntary migration. What is known for certain is the Mingo were likely an amalgamation of disparate peoples who likely banded together for mutual protection against the larger Amerindian groups extant in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in effect forming a new tribe. Some scholars believe the group included a wide variety of broken tribes, so the Mingo served to merge natives from tribal groups normally hostile to one another, in particular some Delaware people and Susquehannock.

Statue of Mingo, Greetings to Wayfarers, in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Statue of Mingo, Greetings to Wayfarers, in Wheeling, West Virginia.

The Mingo may have been an independent but related tribal group, perhaps a splinter tribe of their neighbors, the Erie people, well outside the normal political alignments of the Iroquois Confederacy, as were the Tuscorora who later in 1722 joined the confederacy as the Sixth Nation. More likely, they were like-related remnants of the Susquehannocks (also related to the Erie-Tuscorora-Iroquois tribes) who'd filtered west through the gaps of the Allegheny sometime before or in the aftermath of the collapse of their civilization in 1670-72; some of whom had taken the ancient clan trails south through Virginia triggering Bacon's Rebellion (1676) during their migration, and joined the Tuscorora.

The fact is, there were too few white men exploring west of the Alleghenies before the mid-18th century for anything but stroboscopic glimpses of a few facts that were known about any group of the Inland Woodland peoples. The etymology of the name Mingo derives from the Delaware word, mingwe or Minque as transliterated from their Algonquian language, meaning treacherous or stealthy. In the 17th century, the terms Minqua or Minquaa were used interchangeably to refer to the Iroquois and to the Susquehannock, both Iroquoian-speaking tribes.

The Mingo were noted for having a bad reputation and were sometimes referred to as "Blue Mingo" or "Black Mingo" for their misdeeds. The people who became known as Mingo migrated to the Ohio Country in the mid-eighteenth century, part of a movement of various Native American tribes away from European pressures to a region that had been sparsely populated for decades but some believe became controlled as a hunting ground by the Iroquois during their aggressions in the Beaver Wars. The "Mingo dialect" that dominated the Ohio valley from the late 17th to early 18th centuries is considered a variant most similar to the Seneca language. In geography, the dates correspond to the mid-century ascendancy of the Susquehannock over the Eastern Iroquois and Poconos' Delaware tribes, and the sudden collapse of that culture from disease and defeat suggests

After the French and Indian War (1754-1763), many Cayuga people moved to Ohio, where the British granted them a reservation along the Sandusky River. They were joined there by Shawnee of Ohio and the rest of the Mingo confederacy. Their villages were increasingly an amalgamation of Iroquoian Seneca, Wyandot and Susquehannock; and Algonquian-language Shawnee and Delaware migrants.

Although the Iroquois Confederacy had claimed hunting rights and sovereignty over much of the Ohio River Valley since the late 17th century, these people increasingly acted independently. When Pontiac's Rebellion broke out in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War, many Mingo joined with other tribes in the attempt to drive the British out of the Ohio Country. At that time, most of the Iroquois nations based in New York were closely allied to the British. The Mingo-Seneca Chief Guyasuta (c. 1725–c. 1794) was one of the leaders in Pontiac's War.

Another famous Mingo leader was Chief Logan (c. 1723–1780), who had good relations with neighboring white settlers. Logan was not a war chief, but a village leader. In 1774, as tensions between whites and Indians were on the rise due to a series of violent conflicts, a band of white outlaws murdered Logan's family. Local chiefs counseled restraint, but acknowledged Logan's right to revenge. Logan exacted his vengeance in a series of raids with a dozen followers, not all of whom were Mingos.

His vengeance satisfied, he did not participate in the resulting Lord Dunmore's War. He was not likely to have been at the climactic Battle of Point Pleasant. Rather than take part in the peace conference, he expressed his thoughts in "Logan's Lament." His speech was printed and widely distributed. It is one of the most well-known examples of Native American oratory.

By 1830, the Mingo were flourishing in western Ohio, where they had improved their farms and established schools and other civic institutions. After the US passed the Indian Removal Act in that same year, the government pressured the Mingo to sell their lands and migrate to Kansas in 1832. In Kansas, the Mingo joined other Seneca and Cayuga bands, and the tribes shared the Neosho Reservation.

In 1869, after the American Civil War, the US government pressed for Indian removal to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The three tribes moved to present-day Ottawa County, Oklahoma. In 1881, a band of Cayuga from Canada joined the Seneca Tribe in Indian Territory. In 1902, shortly before Oklahoma became a state, 372 members of the joint tribe received individual land allotments under a federal program to extinguish common tribal land holdings and encourage assimilation to the European-American model.

In 1937 after the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, the tribes reorganized. They identified as the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma and became federally recognized. Today, the tribe numbers over 5,000 members. They continue to maintain cultural and religious ties to the Six Nations of the Iroquois.