(Deer Nation). Scholars once believed these peoples to be remnant bands of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, who established villages located near present-day Montreal visited by early French explorers. Archaeologists have excavated large, 16th-century settlement sites north of Lake Ontario, suggesting that this may have been a site of the coalescence of the Wendat people. They later migrated to the area near Georgian Bay, where they were encountered by French explorers in the early 17th century. French explorers encountered the Wyandotte around 1536 and dubbed them the Huron. They were fierce enemies of the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, then based in present-day New York. Obliterated by smallpox epidemics, the Wendat Confederacy became seriously weakened during the early decades of the early seventeenth century. In 1649, it was defeated by the Iroquois and most members migrated southwest for safety, where they settled with Odawa and Illinois tribes. Others moved east into Quebec. Remnants of the associated Wendat and Petun peoples came together as a new group, which became known as the Wyandot or Wyandotte. By the beginning of the 18th century, the Wyandotte people had moved into the Ohio River Valley, extending into areas of what would become West Virginia, Indiana, and Michigan. Around 1745, large groups settled near Sandusky, Ohio. After the American Revolution, a treaty signed with the United States in 1785 confirmed their landholdings. However, the 1795 Treaty of Greenville greatly reduced its size. The 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs reduced the Wyandotte lands drastically, leaving the people only small parcels in Ohio. In 1842, the Wyandotte nation all of its land east of the Mississippi River, under pressure of the United States government policy to remove the Native Americans to the West. It made a treaty with the U.S. government by which it was to be compensated for its lands. The tribe was removed to the Delaware Reservation in present-day Kansas, then considered Indian Territory. During this migration and the early months, it suffered much illness. In 1843, survivors buried their dead on a high ridge overlooking the Missouri River in what became the Huron Cemetery in present-day Kansas City, Kansas. In 1971 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was renamed Wyandot National Burying Ground. After the American Civil War, Wyandotte people who had not become citizens of the United States in 1855 in Kansas, were removed a final time in 1867