page_title: Buffalo, New York
section_title: Prehistory and European exploration
hierarchical_section_title: Buffalo, New York / History / Prehistory and European exploration
caption_attribution_description: English: Walk in the Water, first steamboat to operate on the Great Lakes.
context_page_description: Buffalo is the second largest city in the U.S. state of New York and the largest city in Western New York. As of 2019's census estimates, the population was 255,284. The city is the county seat of Erie County and serves as a major gateway for commerce and travel across the Canadian border, forming part of the bi-national Buffalo Niagara Region and Buffalo–Niagara Falls metropolitan area. As of 2018, the Buffalo–Niagara Falls metropolitan area had a population of 1,130,152; the combined statistical area, which adds Cattaraugus County, had a population of 1,215,826 inhabitants.
  The Buffalo area was inhabited before the 17th century by the Native American Iroquois tribe and later by French colonizers. The city grew significantly in the 19th and 20th centuries as a result of immigration, the construction of the Erie Canal and rail transportation, and its close proximity to Lake Erie. This growth provided an abundance of fresh water and an ample trade route to the Midwestern United States while grooming its economy for the grain, steel and automobile industries that dominated the city's economy in the 20th century.
context_section_description: The first inhabitants of the New York State are believed to have been nomadic Paleo-Indians, who migrated after the disappearance of Pleistocene glaciers during or before 7000 BCE.
  Around 1000 CE, the Woodland period began, marked by the rise of the Iroquois Confederacy and its tribes throughout the state.
  During French exploration of the region in 1620, the region was occupied simultaneously by the agrarian Erie people, a tribe outside of the Five Nations of the Iroquois southwest of Buffalo Creek, and the Wenro people or Wenrohronon, an Iroquoian-speaking tribal offshoot of the large Neutral Nation who lived along the inland south shore of Lake Ontario and at the east end of Lake Erie and a bit of its northern shore. For trading, the Neutral people made a living by growing tobacco and hemp to trade with the Iroquois, using animal paths or warpaths to travel and move goods across the state. These paths were later paved, and now function as major roads.
  Later, during the Beaver Wars of the 1640s-1650s, the combined warriors of the Five Nations of the Iroquois conquered the populous Neutrals and their peninsular territory, while the Senecas alone took out the Wenro and their territory, c. 1651–1653. Soon after, the Iroquois destroyed Erie nation and territory over their assistance to Huron people during the Beaver Wars.
  Louis Hennepin and Sieur de La Salle made the earliest European discoveries of the upper Niagara and Ontario regions in the late 1600s. On August 7, 1679, La Salle launched a vessel, Le Griffon, that became the first full-sized ship to sail across the Great Lakes before it disappeared in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
  After the American Revolution, the Province of New York—now a U.S. state—began westward expansion, looking for habitable land by following trends of the Iroquois. Land near fresh water was of considerable importance. New York and Massachusetts were fighting for the territory Buffalo lies on, and Massachusetts had the right to purchase all but a one-mile (1600-meter) wide portion of land. The rights to the Massachusetts' territories were sold to Robert Morris in 1791, and two years later to the Holland Land Company.
  As a result of the war, in which the Iroquois tribe sided with the British Army, Iroquois territory was gradually reduced in the mid-to-late-1700s by European settlers through successive treaties statewide, such as the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784), the First Treaty of Buffalo Creek (1788), and the Treaty of Geneseo (1797). The Iroquois were corralled onto reservations, including Buffalo Creek. By the end of the 18th century, only 338 square miles (216,000 acres; 880 km²; 88,000 ha) of reservation territory remained.
caption: Walk-in-the-Water was the first steamboat to sail Lake Erie in 1818; by the 1840s there were about 30 steamboats and 300 schooners and other craft navigating Lake Erie and connected lakes.
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