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Niagara Frontier | |
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 Niagara Frontier from space | |
 Location of the Niagara Frontier in New York. ██ Niagara Frontier██ Rest of New York State | |
| Country |  United States |
| State |  New York |
| Largest City |  Buffalo |
TheNiagara Frontier refers to the stretch of land in the United States that is south ofLake Ontario and north ofLake Erie, and extends westward toCleveland, Ohio. The term dates to theWar of 1812, when the northern border was in contention between the United States and British forces in Canada. It refers only to the land east of theNiagara River and north ofLake Erie within theUnited States. The western side of theNiagara River, on theCanada/Ontario side, is theNiagara Peninsula; it is considered part of theGolden Horseshoe.
The Niagara Frontier is part of the region known asWestern New York State. The Niagara Frontier also forms the eastern part of theGreat Lakes North Coast. Its southeastern boundary forms what is known asski country, as it includes the northernmost area of the Appalachian Mountain foothills.
TheNational Weather Service office inBuffalo, New York defines the Niagara Frontier as the following:
Other, less common, definitions may include the following areas:
The 17th-centuryJesuit Relations recorded numerous now-obscureIroquoian groups living along the Niagara Frontier. Even at that time it was a frontier zone, albeit between theNeutral,Erie, andFive Nations Iroquois confederacies, which were located to the west, south, and east respectively. One of the few well-attested Niagara Iroquoian groups, theWenro, has never had its homeland concretely located by scholars, though some sites on the south shore of Lake Ontario have been identified with them.[1] There is some historiographical confusion as to which groups were distinct from each other and which may simply have been the same groups known by different names recorded by different chroniclers.[2] One example, the Kakouagoga or Kahkwa people, are only mentioned in a handful of written sources, but may have had their territory near the modern city of Buffalo.[3]
