Tribes of the Ohio Valley: the Mingo

Northern tribes also felt the pressure of encroaching White settlement, causing some to go extinct as a tribal unit, or to fracture into bands which drifted further West.  Some of these groups formed the Mingo tribe of the Ohio Valley.  The Mingo were an Iroquoian-speaking people primarily composed of bands of Seneca and Cayuga who had splintered from their original homelands in New York and migrated to traditional Iroquois hunting ground in Ohio and what is now West Virginia.

Sources differ as to the source and meaning of the word Mingo.  While some believe it was an Algonquian word for treacherous or stealthy, denoting the distaste that others held for this group, some believe it was the Algonquian or primarily Delaware term for all Iroquois.  Because they were breakaways from the main Iroquois tribes, the Mingo were not esteemed by either the Six Nations in New York or other tribes in the Ohio Valley, although they frequently formed alliances with both the Shawnee and the Delaware to deal with White encroachment on their hunting range. 

During Pontiac's War, 1763-1764, the Mingo joined with the Ottawa, the Shawnee and other tribes in rebellion against the British.  Mingo-Seneca chief Guyasuta was one of the leaders of the rebellion and some sources name him as much if not more of a leader than Pontiac.  Another leader, Logan, enjoyed good relations with the White settlers until his family was murdered during the lead-up to Lord Dunmore's War in 1774.  The Mingo also participated in the Northwest Indian War 1785-1795 and Tecumseh's Revolt, 1811-13.  However, by 1830, they were farmers who had determined to co-exist with Settlers as best they could.  The Indian Removal Act of 1830 required them to remove to Kansas, where they shared lands with Cayuga and Seneca who had been removed there. 

During the Civil War, the remaining Mingo were moved again, to Ottawa County in Oklahoma, where more Cayuga Natives joined them from New York.  In 1937, the Mingo became part of the federally recognized Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma, where they maintain close cultural ties to their ancestral tribes, the Iroquois Six Nations.