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Introduction

VIEWING A PHYSICAL MAP OF NORTH AMERICA, ONE IS STRUCK, AS one’s eyes move southward from the Arctic, by the countless thousands of large lakes gouged into the landscape. Products of glacial scouring during the last Ice Age, these immense freshwater reservoirs have long furnished human beings in Canada and the northern United States with a superabundance of resources: fish, timber, wild game, and transport, allowing lakeside peoples more easily to trade over long distances. The northern part of the continent contains six of the ten largest lakes (by surface area) in the world. Four of these, plus Lake Ontario, form part of an interlinked inland sea at the southern edge of the former Lauren-tide Ice Sheet, a sea commonly known as the Great Lakes.¹

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Great Lakes and their shorelands became the industrial heart of the United States, a vast marshaling zone for raw materials and the locale of some of the most productive commercial and industrial cities in the hemisphere. By then, however, the Great Lakes already had a very long history of human habitation, production, and trade, dating to the end of the Ice Ages. For all but a century or so of that history, most of the people who lived, worked, fought, and prayed in the Lakes region, who grew their crops in its fertile lowlands and valleys, who fished in its mighty freshwater seas and plied the waters of the Lakes and their tributary rivers with their birch-and-cedar canoes, who traded goods both exotic and mundane and built monumental mounds and smaller but still impressive longhouses and lodges, and who married and bore children and buried their dead there, were Native Americans.²

The Great Lakes Indians left (and continue to produce) a substantial record of their lives and achievements: archaeological sites, stories and myths, visual images and pictograms, recorded interviews and speeches, documents written by European observers, and writing generated by literate Indians. This grew particularly intricate and detailed after 1600, when Native Americans in the region began their sustained encounter with Europeans and European-Americans, who introduced them to alphabetic script and routine record keeping. Like material artifacts, oral traditions, and other forms of nonwritten evidence, textual documents require interpretation for modern readers to account for the biases of record keepers and to provide historical and cultural context. Since the 1950s, scholars have employed the interpretive tools of anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists to interpret European records and develop a more Native-centered history of American Indians. These scholars generally call themselves ethnohistorians.³

Ethnohistorians began applying their tools to the history of the Great Lakes Indians from the inception of their field, and by the 1970s and ’80s they had produced a number of sensitive, thoughtful, book-length analyses of the changes occurring within particular Lakes nations. In 1991 the historian Richard White published a synthetic overview of Indian-white relations in the entire region, which had a powerful impact not only on ethnohistorians but on all American historians. White argued that Europeans and Indians enjoyed a rough balance of power on the Great Lakes frontier, and that this compelled them to create a “middle ground,” a complex of diplomatic protocols, trading customs, and other “creative misunderstandings” that governed their relationships with one another until the nineteenth century. White’s study provided an influential metaphor to all students of frontiers and borderlands, not just the Great Lakes region, and it was not for several years that scholars began to challenge it, arguing that the Lakes Indians enjoyed even greater cultural independence and political power than White already ascribed to them. Indians generally held the upper hand in their dealings with a French empire that claimed but could not enforce sovereignty over the Lakes region and Mississippi valley. Other historians argued that both the British Empire and the early United States labored under such restraints on their resources that Native Americans remained an independent political force in the region until 1815—even later in the north. The Lakes country now appears to have been not a middle ground but (borrowing Kathleen DuVal’s term) a “native ground.”⁴

Contact and conflict with the French, British, and American empires became one of the central dynamics of Lakes Indian history from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Empires wanted Native Americans’ resources and loyalty, and Native Americans desired European alliance and trade goods. The other factor dominating the lives of Lakes Indians was their struggle to survive and to preserve their customs and stories and agency, a practice Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance,” in a changing physical and social milieu. The primary goal of this book is to explore these two struggles: one for political independence within a world of foreign empires, and one for cultural survival in an environment vastly altered by European goods, diseases, animals, and people. Like DuVal, Michael McDonnell, Cary Miller, and Michael Witgen, I will argue that in their dealings with Euro-American empires, the Lakes Indians often had the upper hand, for the Great Lakes was a region where France, Britain, and the early United States reached their logistical limits. The French and British had to make numerous accommodations to Lakes Indians’ norms and expectations in order to maintain even a tenuous claim on their loyalty. While the early American republic proved less willing to accommodate Native Americans, it learned that it had to do so. In its dealings with the southern Lakes Indians, the new United States relied as much on diplomacy and trade as on force, and it drew the sword only when not one but two Indian confederacies directly challenged it, during the 1790s and 1810s.⁵

More disruptive than imperial conflict were the other effects of European contact, like exposure to new diseases or to new technologies they could not easily replicate. Epidemic disease and warfare slowly bled out the Lakes Indians’ population, reducing it from approximately 170,000 in 1600 to a little more than 50,000 by the 1830s, while the fur trade led to intensified conflict between neighboring nations. Some compensated for land or population loss by intermarrying with Europeans, and epidemic diseases lost some of their edge as survivors became immune or as depleted nations (like the Iroquois) adopted war captives. Most avoided replacing all of their indigenous manufactures with European imports, continuing to wear skin and hide clothing, use bows and arrows, and manufacture canoes well into the eighteenth century. Some sought better prices for goods by trading with competing empires’ merchants, and men and women avoided relying on animal pelts as their sole saleable good, instead developing more diverse commercial economies: marketing food and clothing to white traders and miners, mining lead, working as boatmen, and raising livestock.

By the 1830s, the American “empire” had acquired a sufficiently large population, army, and treasury to undertake the kind of conquest that neither the French nor the British dreamed of: effacing Native Americans from the landscape of the Lakes country. Even during the removal era, though, when fifty thousand Lakes Indians faced off against a nation of thirty million Americans, Native peoples found ways to resist and even thwart American power. Some managed to delay emigration for a decade or more, some hid out in Wisconsin or Michigan or took refuge in British Canada, and between one-third and one-half of the Lakes Indians, with the help of sympathetic white settlers and officials, managed to avoid removal altogether. Those who did move faced sickness, death, and the trauma produced by loss of homelands and loved ones, but the survivors built new homes north of the Lakes and west of the Mississippi River. Most modern Americans should take little pride in their ancestors’ behavior toward Native Americans, but one can certainly appreciate the Lakes Indians’ demonstration of human toughness, resilience, and cultural durability.

* * *

Of the ten main chapters of Peoples of the Inland Sea, chapter 1 summarizes the long pre-Columbian history of the Great Lakes region, whose first human inhabitants arrived over ten thousand years ago. The early Lakes Indians began developing complex societies, with fixed settlements, ceremonial centers, and extensive trading networks, about three thousand years ago. One of these societies, the Mississippian culture, built settlements so large that the biggest of them, Cahokia, would have been a fair-sized city in medieval Europe.

Europeans surveying the mounds and earthworks that these pre-Columbian cultures built assumed that the post-Columbian inhabitants of the Lakes region had degenerated from more civilized predecessors. Actually, as chapter 2 observes, seventeenth-century Lakes Indians shared much in common with their “mound-builder” ancestors, as well as with each other. Though the 170,000 Native Americans living near the Great Lakes in 1600 belonged to more than a dozen different nations, most of them farmed, lived in towns, engaged in long-distance trade—the ethnic name of one nation, the Odawas, meant “traders”—and had complex social and political organization. Moreover, the early-modern Lakes Indians shared a common history of cultural disruption, if not trauma, in the wake of their first encounters (direct or indirect) with Europeans. Many succumbed to epidemic disease, or to Iroquois raiders whom the Dutch and English had armed, or had to abandon their homes and become refugees. Most succumbed to the lure of French merchandise, which improved their standard of living but also accustomed them to using goods they could not themselves manufacture.

By the end of the seventeenth century, where the narrative of chapter 3 begins, most of the Lakes nations shared another common trait: they had become military allies of the French empire. French officials viewed the Lakes Indians as future subjects and addressed them as the king’s “children,” but in practice France was the dependent partner in the relationship. Native American warriors defended, directly or indirectly, France’s scattered outposts in the “upper country,” and they effectively backed the kingdom’s claim to the interior of North America. Hence the repeated concessions that Indians were able to procure from French officials: millions of livres’ worth of gifts,⁶ tacit permission to trade with the British, and the use of Native legal customs when prosecuting interethnic crimes. French officials certainly understood this imbalance in their relationship with the Lakes Indians, and their insecurity eventually propelled them into the military buildup that precipitated the Seven Years’ (or “French and Indian”) War. Chapter 4 explains how that war strained and broke French power in North America, but it also observes that the same conflict demonstrated the power of France’s Indian allies. Lakes Indian raiding parties took hundreds of captives and essentially paralyzed two large British colonies, while several thousand other warriors took part in early French offensives and came to Montreal to offer their services as late as 1760. Only an ill-timed smallpox epidemic, skillful diplomacy, and a huge injection of military resources allowed Britain to neutralize the Lakes Indians and defeat the French army defending Canada.

Few British officials either tried or wanted to understand how much the French-American empire had depended on Native Americans, and how militarily powerful those Indians remained. And until they received a clear demonstration in Pontiac’s War, fewer still appreciated how readily the Great Lakes Indians could organize an autonomous military alliance. Chapter 5 explains how the Lakes nations undertook that extensive and coordinated attack on the British posts in their homeland. The motives driving Pontiac’s allies included “nativism,” the belief that whites and their material goods would poison Native Americans,⁷ but they also included opposition to British policies and nostalgic allegiance to the French. France’s political withdrawal from North America and Britain’s shift to a more accommodating Indian policy helped prevent another anti-British alliance from forming after the insurgency ended in 1764–65. Peace proved short-lived, however, thanks to the land hunger of colonial governments and Britain’s inability—and its unwillingness—to restrain colonial settlers.⁸

When those same settlers and colonies rebelled against the British Empire in the 1770s, the balance of power in the Great Lakes region finally began to tip against Native Americans. Chapter 6 observes that many of the southeastern Lakes nations entered the Revolutionary War on Britain’s side because colonial governments had injured them in ways analogous to Britain’s injury of the colonists, taking the Delawares’ and Shawnees’ principal source of autonomy and wealth—namely, their lands. Other Indians from the region fought for Britain to ensure access to trade goods or win martial glory; still others managed to sit out the war. As in earlier imperial conflicts, Lakes Indian warriors raided colonial settlements but could not permanently dislodge white settlers. Rebel militias then counterattacked and severely damaged Native American towns in Ohio—indeed, as chapter 7 notes, their raids in the 1770s and 1780s swept most of the future state of Ohio clear of human habitation. Neither side, however, could deal the other a knockout blow during the War for American Independence, or indeed until the 1790s.

By that time, the American rebels had created a powerful national government that could project substantial military power into the southern Lakes region. Chapter 7 reveals that this political revolution in the United States coincided with a similar Lakes Indian movement toward political confederation, on a more ambitious scale than the pan-Indian alliance of the 1760s. By 1786 the confederates had created the United Indian nations, a military alliance with its own foreign relations and capital towns. While the United Indians remained open to a diplomatic settlement with the United States, their warriors continued to harry American settlements in Kentucky and in the new Northwest Territory, and they decisively defeated two federal armies sent against them in 1790–91. Gradually, however, the confederacy began to reveal signs of weakness: its constituent nations disagreed with and occasionally even fought one another, and its British allies and trading partners declined to risk a war with the Americans on the United Indians’ behalf. The Americans, for their part, had begun building a stronger national government in the 1790s, one with sufficient resources to build forts, maneuver large armies, and win battles far from their Ohio valley bases. One of these battles, at Fallen Timbers in 1794, proved so successful that it compelled the United Indians to sign the Treaty of Greenville and break up their confederacy.

After 1795 the Americans became the dominant population in the southeastern Lakes region. Within a few years they began pressuring the southern Lakes Indians for land cessions that would enlarge the American empire’s settlements and solidify its political power. Yet, as chapter 8 points out, the Lakes Indians still retained a lot of control over their own fates. Many, particularly in the northern Lakes country, continued to maintain their political autonomy and practice commercial hunting as they had done for over a century. Some, chiefly in the southern Lakes country, continued a shift to commercial agriculture that they had begun in the early 1700s. A third political and cultural strategy, proposed by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh, emphasized a revival of nativism and the creation of a new, self-sufficient Indian nation-state. This last strategy, however, demonstrated the limits on Lakes Indian political autonomy, insofar as American officials like William Henry Harrison viewed it as a threat to the American regime’s sovereignty and its steady transfer of land from Indians to white Americans. Ultimately, the Americans responded to Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh’s movement with violence, and they crushed their confederacy on the battlefield within a couple of years during the War of 1812.

In many respects, the United States performed badly in that war, failing to obtain most of its military and political objectives. Chapter 9 notes, however, that the Americans did manage to win a major political and diplomatic victory: Britain largely withdrew its traders and officials from the Lakes country after 1815, giving the Americans a much freer hand with the Lakes Indians. During the next fifteen years, American expansion into the region proceeded in earnest, as soldiers garrisoned strategic points in the upper and western Lakes, treaty commissioners bought up most of the remaining Indian lands in Michigan and the southern Lakes states, American traders drew Lakes Indians ever more deeply into debt, Protestant missionaries tried to remake Native Americans in their own image, and American settlers engulfed southern Lakes Indian towns and turned them into enclaves in a white man’s country.⁹

The Lakes nations could survive this invasion, and they even turned some of the invaders to their own advantage, but by the late 1820s the American national government had decided that it would not tolerate remnant Indian communities in the eastern United States. A combination of racism, fear of racial violence, desire for Native American resources, and a belief that Indians impeded economic progress propelled the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the relocation of the entire eastern Indian population to reservations west of the Missouri River. Over the following two decades, federal commissioners used a combination of economic pressure, veiled threats, and fraud to relocate nearly all of the southern Lakes Indians to modern Kansas and either removed or confined to small reservations the larger Indian nations of the northern Lakes region.

Chapter 10 demonstrates that removal occurred in the face of widespread resistance by Native Americans, and that the Lakes Indians fought hard against forced emigration and against political dissolution after removal. The Ojibwas, most of the Odawas, and the Menominees managed to remain in the Great Lakes region, and individual families and communities of Ho-Chunks, Miamis, and Potawatomis either illicitly returned to their homelands or moved to Upper Canada. Those Lakes Indian nations compelled to move west continued to exercise autonomous control over their collective fates, to manage their own economic affairs, and to organize new tribal governments and institutions. It was not until the 1860s that rapacious white settlers and another shattering continent-wide war forced many of them to migrate to new homes in Oklahoma or the Dakotas.

* * *

Such are the chronological boundaries of this book. Its geographic focus deserves some explanation here, as does the author’s particular definitions of “Lakes region” and “Lakes Indians.” Peoples of the Inland Sea studies the Native American peoples of the six American states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) located south and west of Lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior, and of those parts of Ontario situated north and east of Lakes Huron, Ontario, and Superior. The Six Nations Iroquois, who historically lived in the geographic borderland between the Lakes and the Atlantic seaboard, have a similarly liminal presence here. The book does not provide a detailed overview of their history, but it does discuss Iroquois relationships with the other Lakes Indians, their alliances and struggles with the French and British empires (and the United States), and the migration of many into Canada and Wisconsin.

While defining my terms, I should note that Native American nomenclature is often a thorny subject, since Indians’ self-labels (or eponyms) often differ from the national names that their indigenous neighbors or European explorers gave them. Generally, I have employed the ethnic names most commonly found in anglophone records, as a courtesy to readers wishing to conduct more research in specific Indian peoples’ histories. Naturally, there are exceptions and qualifications to this rule. I employ the term “Ohio Iroquois” in referring to the so-called Mingoes, who received their derisive common name from the Six Nations Iroquois. The Ho-Chunks would not have appreciated the defamatory moniker that Anglo-Americans gave them, “Winnebago,” so I do not use it here. When referring to more than one of the Three Fires peoples, I use the name “Anishinaabe” (plural “Anishinaabeg”) and employ the modern spelling “Odawa” for the nation that Anglo-Americans spelled “Ottawa.” For the Indians of the Illinois confederacy, I generally use the plural form “Illiniwek” and the singular adjective “Illini.” American treaties generally use “Sac” and “Fox” to refer to the two interrelated nations that I spell “Sauk” and either “Fox” or “Mesquakie.”¹⁰

“Native American” and “American Indian” are not names that Indians used for themselves before the nineteenth century, although because one of the first pan-Indian movements on the continent originated in the Lakes country, I found it appropriate to use both labels here. In accordance with modern usage, I have reserved the unmodified term “American” for the citizens, generally white, of the republican empire that fought, traded with, and ultimately displaced so many Native Americans. As part of their larger nation-building project, Revolutionary and Jacksonian-era Americans took for themselves a national label that properly belonged to Indians, thereby engaging in a kind of discursive removal of indigenous Americans. This book cannot easily offer redress for this expropriation, but I hope that my readers will not take it for granted.¹¹