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France’s Uneasy Imperium

DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, THE first Europeans to encounter the Great Lakes Indians shifted the emphasis of their colonial project from commerce to empire. The new goal of French officials in Canada was to hold territory, with the aid of Native American allies, and use it as a barrier against English expansion. A secondary goal, projected into the long term, was to persuade those allies to become French subjects, less through force than through voluntary religious conversion and intermarriage with French colonists. The new empire had little place in it for independent Indian nations, and French flags, forts, and soldiers demonstrated both France’s imperial goals and its willingness to pursue them with violence. At various times between 1680 and 1750, the Iroquois, Mesquakies, and Chickasaws felt the sharp end of French imperial policy. Yet many, if not most, of the Native peoples of the Lakes country would later recall the era of French dominion as something of a golden age.

When they waxed nostalgic for the era of French rule, the Lakes Indians observed that the French, unlike their British and American successors, never coveted their land nor destroyed their settlements. The nineteenth-century US historian Francis Parkman attributed this to differences between English and French views of Indians: where the English “scorned and neglected” the Indians, the French “embraced and cherished” them. Parkman’s comparison would have puzzled France’s Native American adversaries, and the understanding of European motives that it displayed was shallow, but it does oblige one to ask why the two colonial powers had such different relationships with Indians and leads one to find answers in the empires’ differing goals. What drove most English colonists to North America was colonialism, the desire to subjugate indigenous peoples and seize their land and resources. Furs and converts drew the French into the North American interior, but what kept them there was imperialism, the desire to assert sovereignty over the continent and deny other empires the use of its resources.¹

Imperialism was hardly a peaceful or benevolent motive, but since it resulted from conflict with other European empires, it prevented France from concentrating on the subdual of Native Americans. On the contrary, France depended absolutely on its Indian allies to help protect the remote forts and settlements where the French flag waved and contain the expansion of England’s fast-growing colonies. French officials could not afford to alienate the Indians of the Great Lakes region. The French regime in Canada went to some trouble to accommodate its allies’ demands and expectations, to provide them with regular gifts and regulated trade, to set aside their own standards of justice in favor of the Lakes Indians’ customs, and even, through intermarriage, to tie Frenchmen to Indians’ kinship networks.²

Accommodation did not always bring peace. Maintaining alliances with some Indian nations could create enmity between the French and other Native American groups. Moreover, France’s reliance on Indians, whose motives they did not always understand, did not make French officials feel especially secure. Indeed, with the passing decades they grew increasingly worried about their “subjects’” reliability and were prone to view every sign of disaffection or discontent as evidence of an anti-French conspiracy. In these fears lay the seeds both of French warfare against some of its Indian neighbors and ultimately of another radical change in policy that helped wreck the fragile edifice of French rule.

That edifice lasted for approximately seventy years, however, and the Indians of the Great Lakes region did not find it a terrible place in which to dwell.

* * *

France’s shift to an American military empire arguably began in the 1660s, when Louis XIV royalized and garrisoned New France, and when Quebec’s governor used royal troops to invade Iroquoia and coerce the Five Nations into a peace treaty. Initially this change had little impact on New France’s policies or the Upper Country; Louis informed his new governors that he still intended Quebec to function as a trading colony and preferred it should remain compact. In the 1680s, though, the Iroquois’s devastating raids into Illinois provoked French military intervention in the Great Lakes region and shifted that region’s balance of power and alliances.³

In 1684, one of the Five Nations’ war parties plundered French voyageurs and attacked a trading post, Fort Saint Louis, in Illinois. The Iroquois probably viewed France’s shipment of weapons to the Five Nations’ western adversaries as a hostile act, and decided to respond in kind. The attack provoked a similar response from the French. New France’s governor, Joseph-Antoine de La Barre, had already begun to station troops at the Lakes trading posts, and in retaliation for the 1684 raid he organized a punitive expedition against the Hodenosaunee. Influenza crippled La Barre’s army, however, and he essentially capitulated to Iroquois emissaries’ demands without firing a shot. Three years later La Barre’s successor, the Marquis de Denonville, organized a more successful strike: twenty-one hundred gunmen, including four hundred Indians, landed in Seneca country and destroyed several towns and four hundred thousand bushels of corn. This did not prove a knockout blow, and its main effect was to strengthen a budding alliance between the Five Nations and the English colony of New York.⁴

The outbreak of war between England and France in 1689 placed New France on the defensive. Louis XIV declined to send reinforcements to Canada while he needed them in Europe, and England’s American colonists and Indian allies launched a powerful offensive. In the summer of 1689 over fifteen hundred Iroquois warriors raided the French village of Lachine, near Montreal, killing or capturing one hundred residents, while in 1690 a Massachusetts naval expedition under William Phips attacked the French colonial capital of Quebec. When garbled news of the Lachine raid reached the upper Lakes, some of the Native American chiefs there believed the French had lost Montreal and would soon abandon their Indian allies. A peace party emerged among the Odawas, Hurons, and Mascoutens, and the new governor of Canada, Louis de Frontenac, feared that the dissidents would form their own separate alliance with the Iroquois. To forestall this possibility, Frontenac sent emissaries to Michilimackinac to meet with the disaffected nations. The diplomats told the Hurons and Odawas that France remained still powerful and able to punish its adversaries, but the haste with which they had traveled to Michilimackinac (a journey that included fighting their way through an Iroquois ambush) and the boatloads of presents they brought indicated the extent of their masters’ anxiety. France could neither defeat the Iroquois nor maintain its regional power without the Lakes Indians’ cooperation.⁵

The crisis passed, and the French and their allies resumed their offensive against the Five Nations. War parties from the Anishinaabe, Illini, Miami, and Wyandot nations raided the Senecas and Onondagas, two of the more important Hodenosaunee nations, allegedly taking over four hundred scalps. French troops also undertook two more expeditions against the Iroquois, accompanied by a knowledgeable and formidable ally, the Kahnewakes. This nation originated with the Franco-Iroquois peace treaty of 1666, which allowed French Jesuits to establish a mission in Iroquoia. Several hundred Iroquois men and women, chiefly Mohawks, became Christian converts, and in the 1670s French officials persuaded many of them to move to Kahnewake, a mission settlement adjoining Montreal. The converts, who collectively took the name of their new home, retained many of their old lifeways. They continued to hunt, raise corn, and wear their hair in Iroquois fashion, and they found continuities between their new faith and indigenous traditions, substituting the Mass for sacrificial feasts and using mortification of the flesh (flagellation) to evoke the stoicism of a warrior undergoing torture.⁶

If the Kahnewakes’ cultural transformation had been partial and carefully managed, not so their political alignment. Christian Mohawks had come to the Saint Lawrence valley in pursuit of French spiritual power, and now they aligned themselves with French military power as well. Kahnewake warriors helped French soldiers attack the Five Nations Mohawks in 1693 and the Oneidas and Onondagas in 1696. The attackers burned towns and killed or captured several hundred English-aligned Iroquois. The Hodenosaunee could not replace these losses through capture and adoption, and by the end of the decade the Five Nations had lost nearly half of their male fighting population. They also lost a substantial part of their territory. The Mississaugas (People of the River’s Mouth), an Anishinaabe people closely related to the Ojibwas, drove the Iroquois from the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The region became the Mississaugas’ homeland, the place where they dwelled, fished, harvested crops, and held their festivals. The Five Nations now had a dynamic and powerful Native adversary at the threshold of the Longhouse.⁷

The war between France and the Iroquois’s principal ally, England, came to an end, and the Iroquois lacked the manpower to continue fighting on their own. They chose now to stop. Following a preliminary ceasefire in 1700, the Five Nations sent delegates to a peace conference in Montreal, the cramped, palisaded French trading town at the rapids of the Saint Lawrence. There two hundred Iroquois joined Governor Louis-Hector de Callière and over one thousand Lakes Indians and spent the summer of 1701 feasting, returning captives, and exchanging wampum belts and words of condolence for the departed. At length the delegates affixed their marks or clan totems to a formal treaty, establishing peace between the signatory nations and admitting all parties into one another’s homelands to trade. It might have represented the apex of French power and prestige in North America.⁸

* * *

Shortly after the conclusion of the Treaty of Montreal, trader and adventurer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac received approval to establish a multiracial settlement, Detroit (“the Strait”), on the river connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie. The new outpost would slow Iroquois commercial expansion into the upper Lakes (though Cadillac did encourage Iroquois hunters to trade there), discourage English expansion into the region, and concentrate the Indians of lower Michigan in one more easily governable place. While Detroit would include a French garrison and Jesuit missionaries, its principal settlers would be Native Americans: Odawas and Huron/Wyandots from Michilimackinac, Potawatomis from the Saint Joseph River in southwestern Michigan. These communities’ leaders expressed reluctance to emigrate, but their people began moving in small groups to the Detroit River in 1702, and by 1710 over eighteen hundred Lakes Indians resided there.⁹

In 1706, an incident at Detroit demonstrated both the limits of French power and the need for Frenchmen and Indians to accommodate one another’s differences if they wished to continue living in the same settlements. A party of Odawas, believing that the Miamis planned to attack their village, preemptively struck the Miami settlement near Fort Pontchartrain and killed five people; subsequently, Odawa warriors killed two French soldiers and a Jesuit outside of the fort. Normally, the Odawas compensated the families of murder victims by giving them valuable gifts, a ritual known as “covering the dead” or “covering the grave,” but Governor Philippe de Vaudreuil told Odawa leaders that “French blood is not paid for by beavers or belts.” Instead, the attackers must throw themselves on his mercy. In the fall of 1707, the Odawa captain who led the previous year’s attack, Le Pésant, surrendered to the French at Detroit. Cadillac, after briefly imprisoning Le Pésant (registering thereby his submission to French authority), quietly allowed the captain to escape from custody.¹⁰

This “drama” of submission and reprieve synthesized both French and Lakes Indian judicial cultures. Where the French, like other Europeans, believed in retributive justice, most of the Native peoples of the Great Lakes region favored redemptive justice: the forgiving of criminals and their payment of presents to their victim’s family. In a similar episode two decades earlier, French trader Daniel Greysolon Dulhut blended the two legal cultures himself: he executed a Menominee man and an Ojibwa man for killing two Frenchmen, but then he gave compensatory gifts to the Ojibwa man’s father and accepted wampum belts from Anishinaabe leaders to “cover the [French] dead.” In another case, sixteen years after the killings at Detroit, officials in Illinois freed a Frenchman accused of killing another Frenchman because an Illinois chief intervened on the killer’s behalf. Even in conflicts involving only their own countrymen, French officials could not behave exactly as they pleased; in Native country, they had to adhere to Indians’ rules, so long as they wished to keep living and doing business there.¹¹

This principle applied not only to France’s administration of justice in the Upper Country but also to everyday economic and social relationships between colonists and Indians. The Franco-Indian fur trade, in particular, depended on large concessions the French made to Lakes Indian needs, sensibilities, and expectations. These included fixed, bon marché (“good deal”) prices for furs and European merchandise, and the obligation of French traders and officials to give their Indian clients regular presents of ammunition, clothing, and tobacco. “All the nations of Canada,” observed Governor Beauharnois in 1730, “regard the governor-general as their father, who as a result in this capacity . . . should give them something to eat, to dress themselves with and to hunt.” Such gifts annually cost the Crown 20,000 livres (about $180,000 in 2016 US dollars) per year by 1716, and they imposed additional costs on traders, insofar as Lakes Indians treated preseason advances as gifts and often declined to repay the loans in full. The French had to understand, or pretend to understand, that for Native Americans the fur trade was not a rationalized exchange of goods but a display of reciprocity and solidarity between French “fathers” and Indian “children.”¹²

French traders and officials also had to understand what the term “father” meant to the Lakes Indians. If the newcomers hoped that metaphorical “fatherhood” gave them the ability to command their dutiful Indian progeny, they hoped in vain. In the Great Lakes region, Indian families usually traced descent through the father’s line, but many patrilineal nations (like the Potawatomis) adopted matrilocal dwelling customs, and over time authority in matrilocal households tended to shift to the mother’s line. Moreover, some Lakes Indians applied the kinship term “father” to a range of male relatives. The Kickapoos used “father” (mo’sa) to describe a person’s biological father, paternal uncles, and all the male relatives in his/her mother’s family. Native speakers thus might—indeed, commonly did—use “father” not to describe a dread authority figure but to evince a jolly avuncular relative, who dispensed gifts and settled arguments between his children. Fathers did not rule; they indulged.¹³

If the French did not meet these expectations, their Native American trading partners had other options. After the 1701 peace conference gave them access to the trading center of Albany, they could do business with the English. Odawa leaders made this clear to French officials when Governor Callière announced he would let French traders lower the prices they paid for furs: many objected to the announcement, and Le Pésant declared that his people would henceforth trade with the English. (The governor backed down.) The Lakes Indians could also go without European goods for several years, having retained the ability to make hide clothing, stone blades, and other traditional wares. As late as 1718, the former commandant of Detroit noted that French merchandise diffused but slowly through the Lakes Indian population: the Ho-Chunks and Mesquakies near Green Bay and Illiniwek and Miamis south of the Lakes still wore skin clothing (women in Wisconsin wore some cloth garments), and Illinois men still commonly used bows and arrows. When in 1697 the French Crown tried to restrain unruly traders by suspending trading licenses and obliging Indian hunters to come to Montreal, those hunters stayed home, dealt with smugglers, or came no further downstream than Detroit. Fur exports from Canada fell dramatically, and in 1714 New France’s governor began efforts to return French traders to the Lakes country.¹⁴

Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14), with France facing a fur shortage after decades of glut and with British access to the Canadian interior (via Hudson Bay) now guaranteed by treaty, the French government enlarged the support it gave the Lakes fur trade. Governor Vaudreuil and French traders opened new posts at Green Bay, at Kaministiquia on Lake Superior (near modern Thunder Bay, Ontario), and at Ouiatenon (modern Lafayette) on the Wabash River. The Crown authorized new trading licenses and temporarily took over the fur trade at unprofitable posts like Fort Niagara, which France had established earlier in the century to let Lakes Indian hunters bypass Albany. The French government also installed smiths at many of the Lakes trading posts to repair Indian visitors’ guns and metal wares. This concession made Indians less dependent on the French but probably more willing to do repeat business for nonmetallic merchandise, particularly clothing. Thanks to this new government support of the fur trade, and traders’ increasing use of large “master canoes” that could carry up to two tons, the volume of French trade goods shipped into the Great Lakes doubled from the 1690s to the 1720s.¹⁵

The enlargement of the French trade also furnished the Lakes Indians with new ways to buy European goods. French voyageurs traveling into the Lakes country faced an arduous journey, requiring them to cover twelve hundred miles or more (the distance from Montreal to Illinois) in fourteen-hour days of paddling, and to carry up to three hundred pounds each over portages. To increase the manpower available to them and minimize their need for heavy supplies, fur traders hired Native Americans as porters and purchased food, warm clothing, and other equipment from Lakes Indian women. The Senecas at Niagara, the Potawatomis and Wyandots at Detroit, the Odawas at Michilimackinac, and the Ho-Chunks and Odawas in Wisconsin became not only suppliers of furs and peltries but part of New France’s trading infrastructure.¹⁶

The relationship between French traders and their Indian partners was never merely an economic one, and in some cases French men and Native American women agreed to make that relationship familial and biological. Some Lakes Indian nations, like the Odawas and Huron-Wyandots, had developed a female-to-male gender imbalance after their wars with the Iroquois. Liaisons with Frenchmen provided single women from these nations with an alternative to remaining single, of which their kinsmen would have disapproved, or becoming junior wives in a polygynous marriage, which might well prove abusive. (Jesuit missionaries were, in any case, discouraging the Anishinaabeg and Hurons from practicing polygamy.) They also provided both Indian women and French traders with some of the benefits of a more formal marriage: sex, companionship, access to resources like European goods or food and clothing, language instruction, and children who would legitimately belong to at least one society (their mother’s).¹⁷

Some traders also gained entry into prominent Indian families through “country” marriages. The Frenchman Sabrevois Descaris married a very prominent Ho-Chunk woman, Hopoekaw (1711–ca. 1770), in the late 1720s, presumably to improve his business relationship with his wife’s relatives. Descaris later deserted his spouse and children, but his breaking of his marital alliance did not injure the larger political alliance he and his fellow countryman sought to build. By midcentury, Hopoekaw had become the Ho-Chunks’ principal chief, and in this capacity she counseled her countrymen to fight as French allies in the Seven Years’ War.¹⁸

French officials and Jesuit priests generally did not approve of marriages “à la façon du pays” (in the custom of the country), but they did recognize that, as in Hopoekaw’s and Descaris’s case, Indian-white intermarriage could strengthen alliances and promote cultural conversion. In the 1660s, French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert advised colonists to bring Indians into their own settlements and convert them to French customs and Catholic Christianity. The first royal charter of New France (1663) made intermarriage a means to turn Indians into Frenchmen, extending French identity and privileges to any child of mixed parentage who became a Catholic. Conversion to Catholicism proved appealing to a substantial minority of the Lakes Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: several thousand Hurons, a number of Anishinaabeg, and about two thousand Illiniwek adopted the new faith. Part of Catholicism’s appeal lay in the techniques of the Jesuit missionaries who introduced the faith to the Lakes Indians. The Jesuits moved into potential converts’ communities, learned their languages, and encouraged them to blend indigenous and European religious practices; they were not dismayed but pleased to see Illinois converts giving propitiatory offerings of tobacco to a crucifix or claiming when they died that they would “take possession of paradise in the name of the whole nation.”¹⁹

Catholicism proved especially appealing to single women in societies with a reduced male population, both because the Catholic faith honored celibacy among the female laity and because conversion made it easier for Indian women to contract sacramental marriages with French traders. Catholic women like Marie Rouensa-Oucatewa, a Kaskaskia chief’s daughter, could use the option of celibacy to negotiate with their parents regarding an unwanted marriage. They could employ the Church and its saints, like Margaret and Bridget (both patronesses of married women), as sources of personal spiritual power. Missionaries sometimes encouraged fur traders to marry Catholic Indians in the expectation that convert wives would make their unruly husbands better Catholics. This influence sometimes extended beyond the home; among the Illiniwek, female converts worked as lay teachers (as Rouensa did) and church bell ringers. French traders who married Catholic Indian converts, meanwhile, might find those marriages harder to dissolve than a “country” partnership, but they became more thoroughly part of their wives’ kinship networks and usually also gained an introduction to their spouses’ new religious “kinsmen”—their Catholic godparents.²⁰

Intermarriage became particularly common in southwestern Illinois, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, where Frenchmen and Illiniwek had established two bicultural villages, Cahokia and Kaskaskia, in the early eighteenth century. During the first few decades of the 1700s, about one-fifth of the sacramental marriages in the province were between French men and Indian, usually Illini, women. The inhabitants of these settlements created what on the surface resembled European farming villages, complete with churches, mills, herds of livestock, and wheat fields. In many respects, however, their inhabitants’ lives resembled those of Lakes Indians: the white male settlers were usually fur traders and militiamen (warriors, of a sort), while their Illini wives worked in the fields and tended the livestock. Some Lakes Indian women became well-to-do through their marital alliances. Marie Rouensa left behind a large material estate, including several houses and barns and several dozen head of livestock. Her near-contemporary, Marie Réaume, acquired a different but equally important “estate”: a social network that tied her, through her godpar-enting of Indian converts and the marriage of her daughters to French traders, to prominent families in Michilimackinac and Saint Joseph.²¹

Illinois’s bicultural and accommodative character began to change in 1717, when the French government annexed the territory to Louisiana and commandant Pierre de Boisbriant began issuing land grants to French settlers. By the 1750s there were six French towns in the region, with 750 free inhabitants and 600 slaves, most of them African. The region was by then annually producing one million pounds of flour, which its farmers sold to the French garrisons and settlements in lower Louisiana. The French settlements in Illinois still retained some Native American features: several dozen of their free inhabitants were Catholic Indians or their biracial children, about 25 percent of the villages’ slave population was Native American, and the French male habitants still avoided field work, preferring to leave this to their bondsmen. However, segregation and conflict were becoming more the order of the day in the province. Local officials had ordered many of Kaskaskia’s original Indian inhabitants to leave the town, and by the 1730s both French settlers and their Indian neighbors were squabbling over straying cattle and French encroachment on Illini lands. By the 1740s interracial marriages had become vanishingly rare in the province.²²

As Illinois’s experiences show, while the French and the Lakes Indians generally sought mutual accommodation, they did not always succeed. Rivalry and conflict periodically disrupted peaceful human relations in the region. The bloodiest disruption, the “Fox Wars,” lasted two decades and pitted the Mesquakies (Foxes) and their allies against the Anishinaabeg, Huron-Wyandots, and Illiniwek. Both of the Fox Wars grew out of internecine rivalry between these adversaries, and the French tried to stay out of both conflicts. In each case, however, France’s Indian allies compelled the Europeans to fight.

The Mesquakies had intermittently fought their Lakes Indian rivals for several decades, and a brief period of peace, during which the rival nations united to fight the Iroquois, had ended with the 1701 Montreal treaty. French and Mesquakie relations had become strained at about the same time, when some of the Foxes blocked the Wisconsin-Fox River portage in order to deprive their Dakota rivals of trade. In 1710, Sieur de Cadillac invited the Mesquakies and their Mascouten allies to Michigan, hoping thereby to clear the portage and build up Detroit’s trading population. About one thousand people accepted his invitation, but war captain Pemoussa’s band of Mesquakies alarmed the French by settling directly adjacent to Detroit. Meanwhile, the Mascouten migrants became embroiled in a war with the Odawas and, in 1712, lost over two hundred people to an Odawa attack. The surviving Mascoutens took refuge with their Mesquakie allies at Detroit. The increasingly agitated French commandant ordered both nations to leave their settlement and called on his own Native allies for reinforcements. In May 1712 a large Anishinaabe, Huron, and Illinois war party attacked and dispersed the Fox settlement, then pursued the fleeing Mesquakies and killed or enslaved more than one thousand of them.²³

Such massively disproportionate violence is difficult to explain, but most likely France’s allies wanted to make a show of force that would impress and intimidate the French. The attack had quite a different effect on Pemoussa’s Mesquakie kinsmen, who in retaliation raided Anishinaabe and other Indian towns around Lake Michigan. Eventually, Governor Vaudreuil had to launch a punitive expedition, which in 1716 attacked the principal town of the Wisconsin Mesquakies, forcing the defenders to capitulate. Casualties proved so light, however, that at least one historian suspects the French attack was a “sham,” intended less to punish the Foxes than to pacify them and reopen the faltering fur trade. Certainly the peace terms that the French imposed on the Mesquakies included the payment of furs and Indian slaves to repay the costs of the war, and the expedition’s commander boasted that his efforts yielded “an extraordinary abundance of rich and valuable peltries.”²⁴

Peace between the French and Mesquakies lasted for a decade, but the Foxes resumed fighting their Native rivals soon after 1716. French slave traders played a role in reigniting the conflict, encouraging the Mesquakies’ enemies to raid Fox settlements for captives. In retaliation, the Mesquakies destroyed two Illini towns, driving the remaining Illiniwek southward, and made war on the Ojibwas. Fox warriors tortured and executed their own captives: a French priest visiting the Mesquakie homeland observed the racked and burned bodies of Fox victims outside their towns. French officials, hoping to preserve the slowly reviving Lakes fur trade, tried to keep their nation out of the internecine war, but the conciliatory Governor Vaudreuil died in 1725 and his successor feared the Mesquakies would endanger the new French settlements in Illinois. Negotiations between that new governor, Charles de Beauharnois, and Fox chiefs broke down when the Illiniwek refused to return Mesquakie slaves. In 1728 Beauharnois initiated the final phase of the Fox Wars, sending sixteen hundred warriors and French troops to extirpate the Mesquakies. The governor’s adversaries did not lack allies of their own, however, and from one of these, the Six Nations of Iroquois, the Foxes received warning of the attack. When the expedition reached Green Bay in the summer of 1728, the attackers discovered that their quarry had retreated westward. The French consoled themselves by burning the Mesquakies’ abandoned towns and fields.²⁵

The allies changed tactics. Smaller Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee war bands harried Mesquakie settlements and travelers. By the summer of 1730, these raiders had killed or enslaved five hundred Fox Indians, and the surviving Mesquakies decided, for their own safety, to seek refuge with the Six Nations. To reach Iroquoia the Foxes had to cross the territory of their Illini enemies, and neither Illini nor French military leaders would give the Foxes free passage. The Illiniwek and their allies assembled thirteen hundred warriors and colonial militia to intercept the Mesquakies. After a brief siege of the Foxes’ camp on the Sangamon River, and a failed parley, the attackers killed about six hundred Mesquakies and enslaved most of the survivors. Only a few hundred Foxes survived to take refuge over the Mississippi River. In less than twenty years the Fox Indians lost over 80 percent of their population.²⁶

In their duration and ferocity, the Fox Wars evoked the Iroquois wars of the previous century. In both of these conflicts, the intense desire for captives turned ordinary internecine fighting into wars of annihilation. While the Iroquois primarily wanted captives to replace their own losses, however, the Mesquakies’ adversaries intended to sell most of their prisoners as slaves. New France became the primary destination for these bondsmen, and hard labor and degradation their lot. Most of the eighteen hundred Indians whom French Canadians enslaved became construction and field workers in French towns or found themselves forced into concubinage in an habitant’s bed. If the Fox Wars proved anything, it was the diversity of French motives in North America: French traders and officials might want peaceful relations with the Lakes Indians, but French settlers wanted land and laborers, and their desires made peaceful coexistence difficult if not impossible. The wars also showed that the desire for vengeance, prestige, captives, or a combination thereof could push virtually any group of people, Native American or European, into a war of annihilation. It could even, as in the case of the Iroquois wars, push them into a war hundreds of miles from their homeland. Prosecuting such a war to a successful conclusion, however, was another thing, as the French learned during their other major conflict with Native Americans in the continental interior: the Chickasaw War.²⁷

Although the Chickasaws resided in present-day Mississippi, their hunting ranges extended north to the Ohio River, and since the late seventeenth century they had been fighting a desultory war with the Illiniwek, whose towns they raided for plunder and slaves. (The Illiniwek periodically returned the favor.) By 1730, however, Chickasaw leaders had become alarmed by French Louisiana’s campaign against the neighboring Natchez Indians, and they sent emissaries to Illinois to organize a Native American defensive alliance against France. French officials instead arrested the three diplomats and sent them to New Orleans, where the governor burned them alive. Subsequently the Chickasaws gave asylum to Natchez refugees and began raiding French shipping in the Mississippi River. Governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville of Louisiana decided that he could not preserve his government’s credibility with its Indian allies—protect “the honor of the French name”—unless he extirpated the Chickasaws, and thus at great expense he organized two military expeditions against the Chickasaws’ towns.²⁸

Bienville’s two expeditions drew on both Louisiana and the Great Lakes region for manpower. The first army, dispatched in 1736, included Illini and Miami warriors, who participated in a failed assault on a fortified Chickasaw town; the Illiniwek fled the field after their French commander was wounded, and Bienville’s army took over sixty casualties. Bienville spent three years organizing another army, but his second expedition essentially collapsed in the field, depleted by desertion and illness. The governor’s mutinous officers forced him to sign a truce with the Chickasaws before his soldiers ever reached Chickasaw country. The truce itself was short-lived; in the early 1740s, Chickasaw warriors raided French shipping on the lower Ohio River, and their nation’s war with France lasted nearly two more decades. The Franco-Indian expeditions of 1736 and 1739 had proven so expensive, however, that Bienville decided to rely henceforth on his southern Indian allies, particularly the Choctaws, to harry and raid the Chickasaws.²⁹

* * *

The “Great Peace” of 1701, which marked the end of the Iroquois wars in the Lakes country, did not inaugurate a peaceful epoch in that region’s history. For three decades Lakes Indian warriors and French officers and paymasters preoccupied themselves with two protracted, expensive interethnic wars. Both of these conflicts, and to some extent the final phase of the Iroquois war, were consequences of the French alliance with the Lakes Indians. New France wanted to hold onto its thinly dispersed empire in the pays d’en haut and their Mississippi River communication line with Louisiana. They needed their Indian “children’s” good offices, but they particularly needed their military services, without which they could neither intimidate France’s North American adversaries nor protect their own frail outposts.

The Lakes Indians were not mercenaries, however. They entered into their alliance expecting the French not only to supply them with goods and blacksmiths but also to marry into their families, adhere to their customs, and respect their autonomy. “You who are great chiefs,” an Illini chief told French officials during a 1725 visit to France, “should leave us masters of the country where we have placed our fire.” Most of all, they expected the French to fight for them. The Anishinaabeg and Illiniwek used this mutual obligation to push the French into a war with the Fox Indians; when it appeared New France might make peace, these Indian nations used slave raiding to reignite the conflict. West of the Lakes country, one might note, the Cree and Assiniboine sold Sioux slaves to French traders in order to sow discord between the French and the Sioux, checking New France’s commercial expansion. The Franco-Indian alliance was not one that the French controlled, nor was it based solely on peaceful commerce.³⁰

While some of the Lakes Indians tried to prevent the French from allying with their own Native adversaries, so too did French officials worry about their Indian allies uniting against them. New France needed strong Indian defenders, but not too strong. Fear of an Iroquois alliance with the Odawas and Wyandots had produced a risky and expensive anti-Iroquois diplomatic mission in 1690 and probably helped motivate Governor Frontenac’s offensives against Iroquoia later that decade. Fear of a Chickasaw alliance with the Illinois and other southern Lakes nations helped ignite and sustain the Chickasaw war of the 1730s and ’40s. The French might periodically fret about inter-Indian conflict, but they preferred to let such fighting occur, and even to participate in it themselves, to keep their allies separated and weak. The Franco-Indian alliance wasn’t merely a violent one: it also generated mutual suspicion. This would only grow as French officials contemplated both the fragility of their North American dominion and their growing inability to separate their Indian “children” from the greatest threat to their empire: the rapidly expanding colonies of Great Britain.