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2

The European Disruption

A MOSAIC OF HUMAN SOCIETIES ADORNED THE GREAT LAKES country in the era of European colonization. There were Algonquian speakers and Iroquoian speakers, patrilineal and matrilineal cultures, people who resided in longhouses and those who built smaller dwellings or temporary shelters. The Native American nations of the region also had much in common. The majority of them, or more precisely the majority of Lakes Indian women, practiced agriculture, and most of the region’s people lived in settled villages and towns. All of the Lakes Indians traded with one another, and their commercial networks extended hundreds of miles to the north, east, and west. All gave young men the responsibility for becoming warriors, and all fought internecine wars with their neighbors for glory and captives. The Lakes Indians even shared some of the same mythologies, with several attributing their origins to divine or celestial realms, many describing the material world as a great island supported on the back of a giant turtle, and most believing that they shared the world with powerful manitous that influenced human affairs. These similarities were not merely coincidental: they demonstrated that the contact-era Lakes Indians had been interacting with one another and sharing goods and ideas for centuries.¹

The web of interaction that Native Americans created would later magnify the destructive impact of European colonization. Trade routes carried new diseases, which decimated the Huron-Wendat and Iroquois confederacies at the eastern end of the Great Lakes. Old warpaths now provided passage to Iroquois raiders and Illiniwek slavers armed with European guns. French intruders found that, with a little help from their Indian allies, they could employ Native American paths and waterways to penetrate to the center of the continent. Having initially come to North America to trade and evangelize, the French would by the end of the seventeenth century use these routes to build and supply churches, forts, and settlements. All of these became instruments of an empire with which most Lakes Indians felt compelled to align themselves.

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The first Europeans to encounter the Great Lakes Indians came from France, a western European kingdom with roughly the same population as fifteenth-century Mexico. France was an old land, colonized by modern humans long before the first Paleo-Indians arrived in North America, but its culture and institutions developed much more recently. The kingdom’s principal language and its bookish, bureaucratized Catholic faith derived ultimately from the Romans, who had bloodily conquered Gaul (as France was then known) in the first century BCE and ruled it for five hundred years. The agricultural staples that fed the French people, grain and livestock, had been domesticated several millennia earlier, but the productivity of early-modern France’s farms, and thus the subsistence of its twenty million people, depended on medieval innovations like crop rotation and the horse collar. The machinery (mine pumps and powered bellows) that allowed French smiths to manufacture cheap metal wares, the goods most desired by France’s Indian trading partners, came into use even more recently, in the fifteenth century. Even France’s ruling class experienced significant change, with the old warrior-aristocracy of the Middle Ages losing power to wealthy merchants and guild masters, who used their money to buy land, educate their children, and acquire honorable offices in the royal government. France was still a rural, parochial, and often violent society, but its people increasingly devoted themselves to industry, commerce, and exploration.²

The first Frenchmen to spend significant time in North America and trade with its Native peoples were humble fishermen from marginal coastal provinces, like Brittany and the Basque country. Early in the sixteenth century, these men began outfitting voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to the Grand Banks, a region of shoals off the coast of Newfoundland. There, currents deflected by the steep banks churned up nutrients that sustained huge quantities of plankton, which in turn fed millions of codfish. Cod was a protein-rich fish that fishermen could preserve for months, and for which there was a considerable demand among Europe’s protein-starved working population. Cod became North America’s first profitable transatlantic export, and by the 1550s hundreds of fishing vessels from France and other nations were plying the Grand Banks.³

To dry and salt their catch, cod fishermen landed on the coasts of Newfoundland, Labrador, and Quebec and spent weeks or months at temporary encampments. There some encountered Miqmaq and Montagnais Indians, who from an early date began to barter with these uninvited guests, exchanging food and animal furs for knives and glass beads. The Indians’ furs, particularly the wooly pelts of American beaver, proved valuable to French hatters, and Canadian furs became the second significant North American export to Europe. Even while a series of religious wars (1562–98) disrupted the French economy, French mariners continued to catch cod and purchase beaver pelts, and around 1600 some established a semipermanent trading rendezvous on the Saint Lawrence River.⁴

Since American furs were a luxury item with a low production volume and high value, French merchants believed it possible to establish an effective monopoly over the fur trade, and in the early 1600s several companies of courtiers and merchants asked the king to grant them such a monopoly. In 1607 one of these partnerships asked mariner Samuel Champlain to help them find an appropriate site in Canada for a trading base and settlement. Champlain persuaded his sponsors to choose the narrows of the Saint Lawrence River, a site relatively secure from attack and closer than Tadoussac to the homelands of the region’s principal Indians. The result was the outpost of Quebec (1608), which grew into both a successful trading center and the nucleus of French settlement in North America.⁵

Quebec occupied the land of the Montagnais Indians, but its principal trading partners, who accounted for over two-thirds of the furs sold to the Company of New France, belonged to a Great Lakes nation, the Hurons. The Hurons were members of the Northern Iroquoian cultural and language group, whose progenitors, according to archaeologist Dean Snow, probably migrated to the Great Lakes region after 900 CE, at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period (900–1300) that preceded the Little Ice Age. By the seventeenth century CE, there were about twenty thousand Hurons residing in a cluster of towns east of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Huron towns consisted of several dozen wooden longhouses, each housing upwards of thirty people; their largest communities had two thousand inhabitants. Like other Iroquoians, the Hurons were matrilineal, tracing familial descent through the mother’s side of the family, and they were also matrilocal, which meant that married men resided in their wives’ households. The latter development helped avoid rivalries and civil discord by separating brothers from one another, making it harder for them to form factions of male kinsmen. It was a useful enough survival mechanism that even some of the patrilineal Great Lakes Indians, peoples like the Potawatomis and Mesquakies who traced descent through the father’s line, were also matrilocal or bilocal.⁶

The Hurons’ matrilineality and matrilocal dwelling customs probably reflect the importance of women, who did all of the Hurons’ farming, to the nation’s survival. While the Hurons also practiced hunting and fishing, agriculture provided about 80 percent of their calories. Even though they lived close to the 120-frost-free-day line that marked the northern limit of maize cultivation, the Hurons grew such a large surplus of corn that they could trade it with the Ojibwas and other Indians of the northern Great Lakes. In the early seventeenth century, Huron traders learned that the thick pelts of northern beavers and other mammals were valuable to Europeans, and they initiated a multiparty exchange of Huron corn for Ojibwa furs for European goods. The merchandise they obtained from French traders gradually improved the Hurons’ standard of living without altering their basic lifeways. Durable iron axes and blades made it easier to fell trees, build longhouses, and improve the Hurons’ bone- and wood-carving practices; light metal cooking pots made it easier to prepare food; and firearms gave Huron warriors an advantage in their periodic wars with the Iroquois.⁷

While individual families owned the Hurons’ crops and trade routes, the nation avoided gross inequalities of wealth and promoted social stability with regular rituals of redistribution. Huron men and women expected their leaders to hold feasts and dances for them, some to serve as displays of hospitality and some to help heal the sick. All Hurons participated in a massive redistributive ceremony known as the Feast of the Dead, held every twelve years in the town of Ossossane, during which families dug up, skinned, and reinterred their deceased relatives. They accompanied these last rites with the display and distribution of thousands of presents. (The Hurons reinterred their dead after their relatives’ “second souls,” which they believed to remain with the body after the initial physical death, had passed on.) Hurons also redistributed goods as part of their legal culture: the families of those accused of murder had to pay sixty gifts to the victim’s family, unless they wanted to invite violent retribution, while thieves’ victims could confiscate their attackers’ possessions.⁸

The Hurons’ social cohesion began to break down in the 1630s, however, because of two additional imports from Europe: Old World diseases and Catholic Christianity. Europeans had acquired the former from their domestic animals or via overland trade with eastern and southern Asia, and over the centuries many Europeans had acquired immunity to diseases like smallpox and measles, usually after surviving a bout with them in childhood. Isolated from Eurasian disease pools and lacking domestic animals, Native Americans had no familiarity with crowd diseases. When they caught them, everyone in the community became sick at once, leaving no one to care for the afflicted, gather firewood, or bring in crops. Traders and travelers carried imported diseases to Huron towns, and the results proved deadly: in 1635, 1636–37, and 1639–40, epidemics of scarlet fever, influenza, and smallpox spread through the Hurons’ longhouses and killed thousands of people. Neither the Hurons nor the Jesuit missionaries residing with them could fight either illness. Huron medicine, prescribed by holy men like the hunchbacked Tonneraouanont and the reclusive Tehorenhaegnon, focused on treating the sick with feasts, dances, herbal remedies, and enchantments. The Jesuits, who considered such healers demonic “sorcerers,” prescribed instead palliatives (like sugar), Masses, and bleeding of the sick. None of these treatments drove away the demons or divine disfavor to which sorcerers and missionaries ascribed illness. Some, like communal gatherings and bloodletting, probably worsened patients’ condition or infected others. Lacking effective medicinal techniques, nearly half of the Huron people died by the mid-1640s.⁹

The Hurons experienced further stress in the 1640s when a minority adopted Christianity, a faith brought to Huron country by Jesuits in the previous decade. The Jesuits, a new order of teachers and missionaries, sought to convert the non-Christian peoples of the world to Catholicism—and to European moral norms—during an era in which Catholic reformers also sought to wipe out superstition and disorder among European peasants. The techniques of conversion resembled those employed by other Catholic missionaries in Europe, relying heavily on visual images, music, and charitable gifts of food and medicine. Jesuit missionaries had a lasting impact on those Hurons who converted; two hundred years later, travelers to Huron-Wyandot communities in northern Ohio noted that some Huron words had apparently been adapted from Latin.¹⁰

However, by requiring converts to avoid traditional marital customs and religious observances, the Jesuits segregated Christian from non-Christian Indians. Most Hurons disliked Jesuits’ separation of the “saved” from the unsaved, which broke the traditional bonds of community and kinship. One, referring to the missionaries’ offer of heaven to those who broke from their unconverted kinsmen, said in 1637, “For my part, I have no desire to go to heaven; I have no acquaintances there, and the French who are there would not . . . give me anything to eat.” Some converts faced mistrust or persecution from “pagan” kinsmen who opposed the Christians’ abandonment of their old social obligations. This growing division within Huron communities, combined with the confederacy’s losses from disease, made them more vulnerable to external attack, which came with great force in the form of the Iroquois.¹¹

Residing in the Finger Lakes country on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, the Five Nations of Iroquois strongly resembled their Huron rivals. Their ancestors had developed “Three Sisters” agriculture (beans, maize, and squash) around 1000 CE, at roughly the same time as the Hurons. They used the output of their fields, fisheries, berry patches, and hunting territories to sustain a substantial population, roughly twenty thousand people in 1600. They maintained large fortified towns, whose heavy palisades caused some European observers to call them “castles,” and therein dwelled in large multifamily longhouses. They organized their society around matrilineal families and clans, and they even had a creation story resembling that of the Hurons, focusing on the Sky Woman—which probably reflected the social importance of Iroquois women. One critical difference distinguished the two groups, however: the Iroquois traded less with their Indian neighbors and fought them much more frequently. In the sixteenth century, the Iroquois had developed a sophisticated mechanism for preventing conflict among themselves: the League of Peace. The chiefs of this ceremonial body, whom Iroquois matrons appointed to their positions, used elaborate rituals of condolence to settle grievances between Mohawks and Oneidas, or between Cayugas and Onondagas. Neighboring nations like the Hurons and Montagnais, however, remained outside the league and thus remained enemies.¹²

French firearms and iron weapons gave the Hurons an early military advantage over the Five Nations, but in the late 1620s the Iroquois began buying guns from the Dutch at Beverswyck (present-day Albany). Having leveled the military playing field, in the 1640s Iroquois raiders intercepted Huron trading parties and robbed them of their furs, wherewith they purchased more weapons and ammunition. The primary goal of Iroquois warfare in this period, however, was to obtain captives, to replace the population losses they suffered because of epidemic disease in the 1630s. (Ethnohistorians call this kind of warfare “mourning war.”) In 1648 and 1649, two large Iroquois war parties invaded Huronia, destroyed several of the Hurons’ towns, and killed or captured about two thousand people. The Iroquois tortured and executed a few captives, but they adopted most of them into their extended families and made them part of the Five Nations.¹³

The Hurons who evaded death or capture burned their remaining towns to prevent the Iroquois from plundering them, then dispersed from the ruins of their homeland. Some joined with a neighboring Iroquoian nation, the Petuns, which had also come under Iroquois attack, and moved west. These emigrants initially (1651–52) settled at Sault Sainte Marie, a plain adjacent to the Bawating Rapids on the Saint Mary’s River, which several Ojibwa clans used as a fishery and gathering place. Some settled at Michilimackinac (“The Great Turtle”), the district south of Mackinac Strait. In these places of refuge, they became the progenitors of a new Indian nation, the Wyandots, who would play a significant role in the region over the next two centuries.¹⁴

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The Huron/Wyandots first took refuge in the homeland of the Odawa¹⁵ and Ojibwa Indian nations, who along with the Nipissings and Potawatomis made up the confederacy of Algonquian-speakers known as the Anishinaabeg, or First People. The Anishinaabeg had resided in the Great Lakes region for several centuries before the Hurons and other Iroquoians moved into the eastern Lakes country. By the seventeenth century they probably numbered thirty or forty thousand, divided into kinship groups that traced descent from totemic animal ancestors—beaver, otter, pike, catfish, crane, moose, or heron. Residing on the northern Great Lakes, at or above the climatic boundary for farming in the region, they relied on fishing, hunting, and wild plant foods for their subsistence. The Potawatomis and some of the Odawas raised corn in fields they visited seasonally. The Ojibwas traded with the Hurons for agricultural produce, supplying their trading partners with most of the furs they resold to the French at Quebec and receiving in return maize and French goods. The Ojibwas would later become Huron/Wyandot allies against the Iroquois, who found the Anishinaabeg formidable adversaries. Ojibwa warriors defeated several Iroquois war parties between 1653 and 1662, nearly annihilating the raiders in the last of these battles.¹⁶

The Anishinaabeg, particularly the Ojibwas, Odawas, and Nipissings, covered great distances to hunt, fish, and trade. Nipissing families traveled as far north as James Bay, while the Odawas (“Trading People”) would range up to fifteen hundred miles in a season, using large birch-and-cedar canoes that could cross open waters out of sight of shore, carrying up to four tons of cargo and passengers. One could not, however, call any of these nations nomadic. All spent a large part of the year in sedentary farming or fishing villages, and when hunting or trading, several bands usually kept their camps within one to two days’ travel of one another, so that they could pool resources or help other bands in an emergency. The northern Anishinaabeg bands also used an arc of rendezvous sites, including Michilimackinac, Manitoulin Island, and Lake Nipissing, to gather during the summer months. Like the Hurons, the Anishinaabeg held at their gatherings periodic Feasts of the Dead, in which hundreds of people interred their relatives’ bones and helped other families, some of them from other nations, lay their dead to rest. Participants in these feasts also performed military and social dances, elected new chiefs, and received gifts from their leaders, reaffirming the social bonds that held bands together. These were not the only institutions that united the Anishinaabeg. Intermarriage joined the members of different clans in bonds of kinship (since women had to marry outside of their clan), and medicinal and lore-keeping societies known as midewiwin, founded sometime before the arrival of Europeans, tied together different kinship groups and different nations.¹⁷

Strong and cohesive as the Anishinaabeg clearly were, the Huron/Wyandots feared that their new homes in the Huron-Michigan-Superior confluence region remained vulnerable to Iroquois attack. In 1652 they moved west to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they lived on several islands near the mouth of that inlet. Several years later the refugees moved onto the mainland and into the valley of the upper Mississippi River, settling for three years on an island in Lake Pepin (sixty miles south of present-day Minneapolis) and for another year near the headwaters of Wisconsin’s Black River. Much of the region through which they passed had fertile soil and an abundance of wild animals, the latter drawn to the resource-rich ecological boundary separating the Illinois-Wisconsin prairie from the northern Lakes forests. Approximately twenty thousand Indians from a half-dozen nations dwelt together in the Wisconsin country in the mid-seventeenth century: the Ho-Chunks, known to their adversaries as the Winnebagos; the Mascoutens, or Fire People; the Mesquakies or Red Earth People, known to the French as the Fox Indians; and the Menominees, or “Folles Avoines.” The Menominees’ French name referred to wild rice, an abundant aquatic grain that many Native American women harvested in the northern Lakes country. Throughout the region, women produced and provided most of the food Indians consumed: wild rice, maple sugar, strawberries and other wild fruits, and crops like maize and pumpkins. Native American women also collectively owned the local resource sites that sustained their kinfolk: rice lakes, maple groves, berry patches, and fields. Indian men in the region worked as hunters and fishermen, and, as the local Indian nations were patrilineal, they passed their familial and clan identities to their children.¹⁸

In the Wisconsin country, Indians from different nations often lived together in the same settlements. It was not always a land of peace, however. In the early seventeenth century, the Illinois, Odawas, and Mesquakies fought with the Ho-Chunks, whom warfare, smallpox, and other disasters (like the sinking of one of their canoe fleets on the eve of a military campaign) dramatically weakened. In 1655, an Odawa and Huron refugee community near Green Bay repelled an Iroquois raiding party, whose warriors the Illiniwek and Ojibwas subsequently captured or killed. And in the 1660s, after traders Pierre Radisson and Medard des Groseilliers introduced them to the European fur trade, the Dakota Sioux expanded into the lands bordering Lake Superior. Numbering around thirty-eight thousand, the Sioux dwelt for part of the year in fixed settlements in the upper Mississippi valley but spent most of the year in mobile camps hunting deer, elk, and beaver. The prospect of trading with the French became an alluring one for the Dakotas, not only because French traders offered metal wares and firearms (which the Sioux initially called “sacred iron”), but because they offered potential marriage partners for single women in a society with strong incest taboos.¹⁹

In the process of extending their hunting and trading eastward, the Dakotas came into conflict with the Wyandots, who in 1662 had moved to Chequamegon (or Shagwaamikong) Bay, off Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin. The Chequamegon Bay settlement had been founded the preceding year by the Wyandots’ Odawa allies, who wanted access to the beaver-hunting grounds in northern Wisconsin and refuge from the Iroquois. Instead they and the Wyandots found themselves in a new war with the Dakotas, an on-again, off-again fight for captives and hunting territories that lasted a decade. In 1671, the Wyandots retreated to Michilimackinac, where they would remain for three decades, while the Sioux continued to hunt and fish in the upper Great Lakes for half a century.²⁰

The Wyandots’ French allies had by now begun to establish their own tentative presence in the upper Great Lakes region. As early as 1634, the explorer Jean Nicolet had landed by Green Bay and met with the Ho-Chunks, whom he impressed with an embroidered mandarin robe he had brought in case he discovered a passage to China. French traders were slow to follow, as the Iroquois-Huron war had disrupted the fur trade and as the Odawas and Ojibwas were willing to bring furs to the new town of Montreal. Eventually, some traders began traveling to the upper Lakes, and Jesuit missionaries followed them into the pays d’en haut, establishing missions at Point Saint Esprit in 1665 and at Sault Sainte Marie in 1668. They began another mission at Green Bay, where several Indian nations had settled to defend themselves against the Iroquois, in 1669.²¹

One of these missions, Point Saint Esprit by Chequamegon Bay, the Jesuits established to preach to the Odawas and to the Huron/Wyandots, but they also received Indian visitors from further south, including trading parties from the Illinois confederacy. Some of these Illini travelers expressed interest in receiving Jesuit missionaries in their homeland, and in 1673 a priest from Saint Esprit, Jacques Marquette, accompanied other French explorers through the Fox-Wisconsin River portage and down the Mississippi River to the Illinois country. He and subsequent French explorers wrote detailed accounts of how the people of the powerful Illini confederacy lived in the seventeenth century.²²

The Illinois or Illiniwek (“The People”) resided between the Illinois, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers, with outliers in present-day Indiana and Arkansas. Their contact-era homeland occupied the ecological borderland between the tallgrass prairies and the forested region south of the Great Lakes. The rich farmland and ample fish and game of their domain—the latter including bison, which lived on the Illinois prairie in herds of four hundred or more—sustained an Illinois population of more than ten thousand. Like the pre-Columbian cultures of the Ohio valley, the Illinois lived in dispersed towns but gathered periodically in their “Grand Village” (really a small city) to attend feasts, lacrosse games, and religious ceremonies. Their religious pantheon had at its apex the sun, which Illinois men saluted at the start of their dances and invoked in diplomatic proceedings. Below this supreme deity lived a multitude of manitous, spiritual beings associated with totemic animals and powerful humans. The Illinois initially identified the Jesuits and their secular companions as manitous because of their cultivated aura of other-worldliness and the powerful goods that they sold. One did not have to be European to be a manitou: Illinois berdache, men who dressed as women and assumed cross-gender identities, were also regarded by their kinsmen as manitous—“spirits or persons of consequence,” as Marquette put it.²³

The Illinois people displayed great friendliness toward Frenchmen but had also devised for themselves a fearsome military reputation. The confederacy’s warriors fought routinely with the Indian nations residing to their west, north, and south, using firearms obtained from French trading partners. The principal aim of Illinois warfare, as with many other Native North Americans, was to acquire human captives. Some of these the Illiniwek tortured to death, while many others they turned into slaves, whom they referred to as “dogs.” The Illiniwek used their slaves as laborers, working in the fields under women’s supervision or hewing wood and drawing water for their masters. Some elite men exploited slave women’s reproductive labor, coercing them into sexual relationships as their second or third wives—in the Illinois language, “other wives,” a term of contempt. The threat of violence hung over all slaves, but the Illiniwek periodically returned captives to their kinfolk to restore peace. As often, they traded slaves to other nations, including the French, to solidify alliances in advance of future wars.²⁴

Even one of the confederacy’s ostensible rites of peace, the calumet ceremony, had an underlying military purpose. The calumet was a long, stone-and-wood tobacco pipe that the western Lakes Indians had adopted from the Plains Indians, with the first examples probably entering the region via Wisconsin around 1350 CE. The Illinois and their neighbors decorated calumets with feathers and ceremonially presented them to the sun, thereby consecrating the pipes and infusing them with celestial power. They employed the calumet like a baton in a balletic dance, which they performed to honor and ceremonially adopt esteemed visitors. However, they also used the calumet dance to seal alliances and to show off their warriors’ prowess. Before the calumet dance the Illinois displayed their warriors’ weapons, and during the ceremony warriors performed war dances and recited their martial exploits. The calumet served as a military instrument as much as the war club or gun.²⁵

If the Illinois seemed militaristic, it was probably because they believed it best, while living on a flat floodplain accessible to potential enemies, to cultivate a strong military reputation. This did not prove helpful, however, when the Five Nations of Iroquois struck into Illinois country in the 1680s. During the previous two decades the Iroquois had been preoccupied with fighting the French and the Susquehannock Indians, but in 1666 French troops had coerced the Five Nations into signing a peace treaty, and in 1676 the Iroquois absorbed the Susquehannocks, who had survived a bitter war with English colonists. Soon thereafter the Iroquois were ready to resume their western campaigns for hunting territory and captives.²⁶

In two devastating attacks in 1680 and 1681, Iroquois war parties killed or captured between 1,700 and 2,700 Illiniwek and Illini slaves, or 17 to 27 percent of the confederacy’s population. By themselves, or even with the help of one or two Native allies, the Illinois could not punish or deter the Iroquois invaders. To do so, Illinois captains would need a large supply of firearms and a military ally capable of assembling a regional Indian alliance against the Five Nations. That ally would turn out to be France, which was about to convert its thin commercial and ecclesiastical presence in the Great Lakes into a more formidable imperial establishment.²⁷

The transformation came too late to help some of the region’s Indian peoples, in particular the precursors of the nation later known as the Shawnees. These Algonquian-speaking people were known in the seventeenth century as the Monytons and Ouabashe, and they probably, along with the Miamis of present-day Indiana, descended from the Fort Ancient culture. Most resided in farming settlements in present-day Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia, though early seventeenth-century European maps identify “Shawnees” living on the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. Certainly the Monytons and Ouabashe had trading connections with the Indians of present-day Pennsylvania, who sold their furs to Dutch and English traders and supplied them with beads, knives, and other European wares. The subdual of the Susquehannocks, however, cut this east-west trading connection, and in 1669 Iroquois war parties began raiding Monyton and Ouabashe towns for captives. By the mid-1680s, the two nations had lost several hundred people to the raiders, as well as others to epidemic disease. Seeking refuge and new trade links with Europeans, the proto-Shawnees dispersed, many of them moving south to present-day Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. A few moved to the English colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania, whence they began recolonizing the Ohio country in the late 1720s. By then the entire social and political landscape south of the Great Lakes had changed once more—perhaps as much as it had changed during the half century before the Shawnees’ initial departure.²⁸

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The people of the Lakes country displayed considerable diversity when Europeans first encountered them shortly after 1600. Numbering about 125,000 or 150,000 people, the Lakes Indians grouped themselves into more than a dozen nations and confederacies and spoke languages belonging to three distinct linguistic families. Like most human beings, however, they did not live in isolation; the human landscape of the Great Lakes region was not a mosaic of distinct tribes but a network of relationships, sustained by trade, warfare, and intermarriage. Since people who interact with one another tend, over time, to share cultural traits with one another, it is unsurprising that the region’s Native Americans had many features in common. With the exception of the Ojibwas, all of the Lakes Indians were farmers, relying on squash, corn, and beans for a large portion of their calories. Some, like the Hurons and Illiniwek, had agricultural surpluses that contemporary European peasants would have envied. All were traders to one degree or another, and their networks extended for hundreds of miles; the Hurons’ and Ojibwas’ into northwestern Canada, the Illiniweks’ to Lake Superior and the Missouri valley, the Monytons’ to the Dutch and English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. And all had ceremonies and institutions, like redistributive feasts, that allowed them to maintain harmony within their communities, while some had developed rituals, like the calumet ceremony, that helped them forge alliances with other nations.²⁹

MAP 1. Native Americans in the Great Lakes region to 1700 CE. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP

While the Great Lakes Indians were used to adopting outsiders’ culture and had developed mechanisms for promoting social harmony, the stresses and changes that Europeans brought to America proved too profoundly unsettling to manage, at least in the short term. The French came to the Upper Country in the seventeenth century neither to make war on the Indians nor to found permanent settlements, but they brought disruption and death all the same. French goods intensified rivalries among the region’s Indian peoples, as they struggled for access to furs and French trade goods. New diseases weakened some Indian nations, such as the Hurons, Ho-Chunks, and Monytons, and drove others into destructive “mourning wars” for captives. By the 1680s the human landscape of the Lakes region had changed considerably, with the eastern districts (Huronia and the upper Ohio valley) depopulated, the powerful Illinois confederacy besieged and damaged, and northern Michigan and Wisconsin full of refugees. In the eastern Lakes country, the land itself experienced “rewilding,” as Indians’ timber-clearing burns ceased and oak and maple spread into abandoned fields and towns. (Drawing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, these new trees contributed to the fall in global temperatures that characterized the century.) In the upper Lakes, the newcomers’ crowded settlements placed pressure on their localities’ thin-stretched food supply.³⁰

Meanwhile, as their European homeland entered a long period of imperial rivalry with Britain, French officials hoped to treat the much-altered Lakes region as a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe a new pattern of alliances that would sustain a French claim of territorial sovereignty. They found that the region’s Native peoples were ready to form such partnerships, modeled on the alliances they had earlier made with one another. What the French would learn in the eighteenth century, however, is that whatever losses the Lakes Indians suffered in the 1600s, and however much they had come to rely on French goods and whatever offers of fealty they tendered, Native peoples still held the balance of power in the Upper Country. If the French wanted to claim the region as part of their empire—that is, if they wanted to exclude other Europeans from the Great Lakes—they needed first to learn how to weave themselves into the social fabric of what remained an Indian country.