Читать книгу Empire by Collaboration - Robert Michael Morrissey - Страница 10

Chapter 1

Opportunists in the Borderlands

In 1673, the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet arrived at a village of the Peoria near the Des Moines River, the first Europeans to record a visit to the Illinois Country in the Mississippi Valley. Beaching their canoes at the edge of town, they shouted and made their presence known to the Indians, thereby opening the encounter between the French and these Algonquians at the margins of the Great Lakes world.¹

The Indians gathered in the center of their village to give the Frenchmen an extraordinary and distinctive welcome. As Marquette later recounted, chief men made speeches, and villagers performed a dance featuring a calumet pipe, only the second calumet that Marquette had ever seen. After the performance and speeches, the Illinois prepared a feast including the “fattest morsels” of what to Marquette was a new delicacy, bison meat. Dressed in bison skins themselves, they then presented him with several belts, garters, and other artifacts made from the skin of bison, caribou, and elk, and they may have given him the famous hide robes that now survive in the Musée du Quai Branly. Some of these were elaborately adorned with decorative motifs, notably a bison and a large hawk or thunderbird. After singing to him, they presented him finally with a “little slave.”²

Perhaps because it contained so many new and unfamiliar objects and symbols, Marquette considered the calumet ceremony baffling—“altogether mysterious.” Read carefully from an Illinois perspective, however, the calumet and the Illinois’s welcome ceremony are windows into the recent history of this place and the powerful people who lived here at the time of contact. Although Marquette did not realize it, the Illinois were newcomers, invaders who had moved to the Illinois Valley over the previous few generations and were now making one of the most significant bids for power in seventeenthcentury North America. Their history had diverged from that of the larger Algonquian world with which Marquette was familiar. In their welcome ceremony, the Illinois were showing Marquette—and us—who they were: an adaptable and ambitious people seizing advantages in a special borderlands region.³

The dance featured many symbols of this distinctive and opportunistic history. For instance, there were the bison materials and bison meat. Bison was the product of the ecosystem—the tallgrass prairie—that the Illinois had recently occupied, and it was the basis of the new lifeway that made them much more prosperous than their Algonquian neighbors. Symbols on the Illinois’s robes probably reflected conquest and assimilation of Siouanspeaking people whose territory they had conquered. The calumet ceremony itself was also a western tradition, suggesting the newcomers’ creation of a “transitional culture” as they adopted the previous inhabitants of the Illinois Valley into their collective.⁴ And the slave reflected the violence of their invasion and the domination that they had achieved, as well as the basis of a newly emerging economic system that the Illinois were developing in the borderlands: the slave trade. Taken together, all these aspects of the dance added up to an expression and celebration of Native power and opportunism.

Marquette did not really understand the significance of these symbols in the calumet ceremony, but we can. To do so, however, we need to look back to a Native colonial history of Illinois before European contact.⁵ Beginning in the 1200s, climate change reshaped the Midwest, powerfully affecting the environment and human subsistence south of the Great Lakes.⁶ Seizing opportunities during this period of change, the proto-Illinois moved west from the region south of Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley into the Illinois prairies and began a unique trajectory in a unique environment. While many Algonquian agriculturalists struggled during this “dark period,” the proto-Illinois experienced expansion and not declension, establishing themselves on the tallgrass. When conflict broke out in the Great Lakes region in the mid-1600s with the start of the so-called Beaver Wars, the Illinois could have stayed out of it. Instead, they became aggressors, making a dangerous bid to capitalize on the violence.⁷ This is a story of Native power and expansion, of risky behavior and bold intentions.

It could hardly be otherwise, given the setting. The Illinois was a borderland, a place of important divisions, natural and cultural. Ecologically it was the transition between the two major biomes of the middle of the continent, the grasslands of the West and woodlands of the East. Socially and culturally, it lay at the division between two major cultural groupings of Native North America, Siouan-speakers of the Plains and Algonquians of the Great Lakes. And it was also the continental divide that separated the Mississippi Valley from the Great Lakes. In all of these ways, the place was a unique landscape of division, a setting for dynamic human history at the edge. Moving into this space, the proto-Illinois were taking a bold step, seeking power.⁸

Figure 2. Capitaine de La Nation des Illinois. Louis Nicolas depicted the Illinois chief with military accessories and smoking the calumet, a western diplomatic tradition, while wearing what is probably a painted bison robe. This evokes the Illinois’s ethnogenesis as a “transitional culture.”

Courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Okla.

The Illinois’s colonization was a remarkably successful effort to take advantage of this place of division in a specific moment of change. In the transition, the Illinois found new means of subsistence, as well as sociopolitical opportunities that gave them advantages. Here, on the edge of different worlds, the Illinois seized new prospects and built a new lifeway. When the French arrived, the Illinois would only continue their innovation. The history of empire in Illinois must begin with Native efforts to exploit power in the borderlands. The story begins with Cahokia.

Before European arrival, the region that would become Illinois Country was home to the biggest Native city-state on the continent, Cahokia. Numbering twenty thousand inhabitants at its height, Cahokia shaped the trade and culture of peoples in a huge portion of the continent. Although the story of Cahokia is well told by historians, it is often treated in isolation, disconnected from later historical events. For our purposes, we need to view it as part of a long-term set of processes that continued long after Cahokia was no more.⁹ The Illinois were not descendants of the Cahokians, but the Illinois’s rise in the Illinois Valley can be seen as a consequence of some of the same forces that brought Cahokia to an end.

Cahokia rose in a region at the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois, and Ohio rivers, the “American Bottom.”¹⁰ Based heavily on corn agriculture, the civilization spread its power throughout the Midwest, as revealed by archaeological evidence of trade and tribute coming into the metropolis from the eleventh through the thirteenth century from throughout an expansive territory.¹¹ Beginning as an ordinary village in the Late Woodland period, Cahokia experienced a “big bang”—a sudden and dramatic rise to power.¹² By the 1200s, the twenty thousand people in Cahokia represented the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico. It is not clear whether Cahokia was a truly centralized political regime, but the Cahokia Mississippians exercised wide regional influence through a hegemonic culture and trade.¹³

The middle of the continent was a likely place for the most powerful pre-contact Native society for the same reason that Chicago and St. Louis rose in the nineteenth century: the Midwest contained a tremendously rich variety of ecological resources.¹⁴ Given the major river systems that defined the region, the landscape contained numerous alluvial environments with resources for human exploitation. These environments featured wetlands and forests, often with extensive floodplains. Above the river valleys were a mix of hardwood forests, dominated mostly by oak-ash-maple and oak-hickory forests. These forests transitioned into park-like edge habitats, probably maintained by purposeful burning and natural fire, which in turn gave way to plains and the Midwest’s distinctive tallgrass prairies. A discrete biome unto itself, the tallgrass prairie was where evaporation and rainfall were roughly equal but where trees could not establish themselves because of periodic fire, dense grass roots, and other factors.¹⁵ While 39 percent of the modern state of Illinois was forested before the advent of the steel plow, fully 55 percent of the state’s landscape was covered with prairie. Much of the rest was dominated by wetlands.¹⁶

Despite all the diversity of the region, the Cahokians took advantage of a relatively small portion of the ecological opportunity in the middle of the continent. Because environmental conditions were so favorable for farming, their subsistence focused on a small area, near the confluence of the rivers, and was heavily concentrated in the bottomlands.¹⁷ This proved perilous. Climate change started to affect the region in the 1100s. For 140 out of 145 years beginning in 1100, Cahokia experienced drought, probably reducing farming yields.¹⁸ Sediment in the Missouri River owing to drought-forced erosion on the Plains may have produced a shallower channel in the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and increased spring flooding in the bottomlands, compromising agriculture.¹⁹ Meanwhile, even as drought challenged their subsistence, it seems clear that Cahokians overexploited resources, especially wood, in their local environment, which may have led to difficulties in the city.²⁰ In the 1250s, a new Pacific climate event began to change conditions again, bringing cooler summers and harsher winters, and drier conditions overall.²¹ With the onset of the Pacific episode, farming became even more difficult at Cahokia. As a result of this and probably other social and political changes, the entire region began to empty out, leaving the middle Mississippi Valley, the lower Illinois Valley, the lower Ohio Valley, and the entire American Bottom increasingly devoid of people. The emerging “vacant quarter” was a dramatic end to the great civilization at Cahokia.²²

With the end of the Cahokia, smaller groups reoccupied the region of Illinois. Most likely these migrants came from the West as climate change extended the so-called prairie peninsula and made conditions on the Plains drier and colder. Seeking refuge for a mixed-subsistence lifeway in the river valleys of the Illinois, these people were the Oneota, the ancestors of later Siouan-speakers like the Winnebago, Otoes, Ioways, and others.²³ Compared to Cahokia, they lived on a smaller scale and took advantage of a much larger variety of the ecology of the region.²⁴ In contrast to the complexity of Cahokians, they were “simple” and regularly relocated villages to take advantage of different aspects of the local ecology.

Although we cannot be precise about details, archaeological evidence suggests that the Oneota newcomers were factionalized and organized into small social units.²⁵ They also lived a rather Hobbesian existence, since violence was endemic in the Illinois after Cahokia’s decline. Archaeological sites from the 1300s and 1400s in the Illinois Valley reveal fortified villages and other evidence of warfare between Oneota and Middle Mississippian groups. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of violent lifeways in this period is an Oneota village, dated to the year 1300, in the central Illinois Valley. The site contains a cemetery with 264 burials. Sixty-six percent of the people interred at the cemetery had been decapitated or scalped at death.²⁶ Life was hard in the wake of Cahokia.

In addition to warfare, other factors kept the population of the Oneota villagers low. Continuing the trend of the Pacific event that started in the 1200s, another climate episode began in the 1400s: the Little Ice Age. While this created well-known disturbances around the world and especially in Eurasia, it also brought about a significant shift on the North American continent.²⁷ By some estimates, the Little Ice Age may have reduced the average summer temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius in mid-America.²⁸ The temperature shifts may have produced as many as thirty-four fewer frost-free days in the modern state of Illinois. The continuing low human population in the vacant quarter that this and previous climate events helped occasion may be responsible for producing a rather sudden and dramatic species shift in the region. With few people in the Illinois Valley, and thus so few potential hunters, the population of wild animals may well have spiked.²⁹ By the 1500s, the great wild ungulates of North America, bison, had invaded the grasslands east of the Mississippi River in large herds, probably extending the prairies with their grazing as they advanced.³⁰ They came in great numbers, congregating by salt licks and springs, such as near Starved Rock in the Illinois Valley.³¹

There is an important reason why bison revolutionized lifeways for the Oneota occupants of the midwestern prairies. As is well-known, tallgrass prairies in the middle of the country sat atop the thickest topsoil layer anywhere in the world.³² Yet the dense root systems under the grass made it impossible to farm these soils until the invention of steel plows in the nineteenth century. Native Americans did not have plows or metal farming tools of any kind, and so they normally did not exploit the prairies as farmland. Instead, they used hoes to farm the fertile soils of the bottomlands. Meanwhile, although game species like deer and elk could be found in the tallgrass prairies, they were most commonly located at the “edges” where grasslands and forests overlapped. Remarkable evidence of prehistoric trash pits suggests that prairie environments were largely underutilized. In one Huber phase Oneota trash pit from the 1400s, for instance, only 2.4 percent of the animals used by the residents came from the prairie, while the vast majority came from the valley floors, forests, and wetlands.³³ This was probably typical. For much of the prehistoric period, it seems clear that the prairie itself probably went relatively unused by human inhabitants of the region.³⁴

This is important because prairie made up close to 55 percent of the land in the modern state of Illinois, even more in the modern state of Iowa. Since they could not easily exploit this land for farming, and since their preferred game did not usually congregate in prairies but on its edges, this meant that the Native inhabitants of these regions left prairies as a largely untapped ecosystem. Here were calories, produced by grasses, which the Oneota villages had little means to exploit. Humans, of course, could not eat the grasses, nor could they easily replace them with edible plants.

The large-scale invasion of the bison into midwestern grasslands from points west thus created a great new subsistence opportunity for people whose climate was changing, and particularly for farmers whose calorie yield was compromised by both rainfall shortages and possible flooding. Newly arriving bison of course could use the prairie grasses, eating them up to become what one historian calls “reservoirs of biomass.”³⁵ In ecological terms, bison were able to convert the “vast energy stored in the … grasses for human use.”³⁶ Deer and elk were certainly important before, but bison arrived in the region in huge herds and were relatively simple to hunt, provided one had a cooperative group to help direct the animals to a kill zone. Indeed, bison hunting produced calories on a totally different scale than deer hunting: each animal weighed 2,000 pounds, containing at least 675 pounds of useful meat. Hunts in the tallgrass prairies regularly yielded hundreds of animals at a time.³⁷ For Oneota people accustomed to starchy agricultural diets, the new resource created a dramatic increase in nutritional quality, fairly quickly.³⁸ The invasion of the bison brought tremendous change to Native life in Illinois between 1500 and 1800.

By turning the prairies from wasteland to productive, the arrival of bison vastly increased the amount of calorie-producing land in the future Illinois Country. The new animal resource was so attractive that it inspired migration among many of the inhabitants of the region. The eastern spread of bison pulled more Oneota people to the West, back out onto the prairie peninsula and closer to the plains environment, as they increasingly specialized in bison hunting.³⁹ This “bison revolution” confirmed the Oneota’s status as a “bridging culture,” connected to the two biomes and lifeways of the woodlands and the plains.⁴⁰

To be sure, not everyone went west. The so-called Huber phase Oneota sites remained in the northern part of the Illinois River Valley. These were prosperous places, now augmented and altered by bison exploitation. Trash pits at the Fisher site in the upper Illinois Valley from this period reflect a great deal of diversity in the diet of these Oneota people, who now added bison to an extensive list of flora and fauna that they exploited on a seasonal and cyclical basis.⁴¹ The survival and persistence of these Oneota culture groups in the wake of Cahokia set the stage for the protohistoric and historic transformations in Illinois.⁴²

Meanwhile in the East, Algonquians living south of Lake Erie and in the Ohio Valley were also suffering from climate change that made agriculture difficult. As in the Illinois Valley, this produced violence and warfare, even what one archaeologist calls a period of “ethnic cleansing” as proto-Algonquian groups struggled to survive.⁴³ Some Algonquians, concentrated in settlements just to the south of Lake Erie, interacted and shared pottery traditions with a group identified by archaeologists as the Fort Ancient people, who lived in modern-day southwestern Ohio.⁴⁴ Pottery traditions and archaeological assemblages suggest that these proto-Anglonquian groups began to trade with Oneota peoples at the Huber phase sites in the upper Illinois Valley in the 1500s. Before long, they were in close contact with these Oneota groups, carrying prestige goods back and forth across the modern state of Indiana in a flourishing trade network.⁴⁵ Interestingly, calumet pipes, the diplomatic tool of western Siouan-speakers, were some of the materials that Algonquians received from this new trade.⁴⁶

But it was not just prestige goods and diplomatic symbols that passed back and forth between these Algonquians and their Oneota neighbors. Sometime in the 1500s, the Fort Ancient culture adopted another facet of the lifeway of their neighbors to the northwest: they started hunting bison. Limited numbers of bison had arrived in the Ohio Valley in the 1500s. There is no way to know whether the Fort Ancient hunters learned bison hunting from their Oneota trading partners, but it seems possible. Like their neighbors to the northeast, these Ohio Valley hunters experienced a bison revolution.⁴⁷

It was probably bison that inspired the next important turning point in this story. In the late 1500s, a new pottery tradition known to archaeologists as Danner-Keating shows up in the Huber Phase sites in the upper Illinois Valley. Importantly, this Danner-Keating tradition strongly resembles pottery found in the Fort Ancient sites. Moreover, a very similar pottery tradition, which may be a root tradition for Danner, is found in sites to the south of Lake Erie.⁴⁸ Examining this pottery, scholars now speculate that the people identified with the distinctive Danner-Keating material culture and its possible Fort Meigs antecedent moved over time across the established trade networks between the Lake Erie settlements, Fort Ancient sites, and Huber phase Oneota settlements, and into the northern Illinois Valley. By the early 1600s, Danner-Keating appears in the same locations long occupied by the Huber phase, whom archaeologists believe were the historic Winnebago. Before long these Danner-Keating migrants replaced their hosts.⁴⁹ It is almost certain that the bearers of this new Danner-Keating archaeological tradition were the historic Illinois and their Miami kinsmen.⁵⁰

Was the invasion violent? It’s not clear.⁵¹ As we have seen, many Oneota peoples—Siouan-speakers and the ancestors of the Missouria, Ioway, and other groups—had recently moved west from the Illinois Valley to exploit the bison more intensively. The proto-Winnebago moved north out of the Illinois in the early 1600s. The southern Illinois Valley remained a vacant quarter in the wake of the Oneota-Mississippian violence between 1200 and 1400, and the new bison hunters saw the opportunity to seize it. The broad history is one of “replacement” or possibly “intermixture,” as the Illinois came to this region.⁵² But one thing is clear: the Illinois were colonizers.

In his study of the Cheyenne in the Great Plains, historian Elliott West tells how the Cheyenne moved out of the upper Mississippi Valley onto the Plains to exploit the bison in the 1800s, reenvisioning the region and giving it “a new meaning.” Committing fully to an equestrian lifestyle, they became the “called out people.” Of course, the Illinois were never equestrians, but their migration west in the early 1600s may have had a similar dynamic. They were committing to a new lifestyle, a new ecological resource, while invading a rich region, much of which had long been left vacant by climate change and violence. Like the Cheyenne’s migration, this was a bold, opportunistic process as they reenvisioned the tall grass and its possibilities.⁵³

Over the course of the next generations, the Illinois-speakers colonized the whole region formerly occupied by the Oneota in modern-day Illinois. Moving into their new homeland, the Illinois adopted bison hunting as the basis of a radically new lifeway. Perhaps because the Illinois still spoke an Algonquian language at contact, French eyewitnesses often did not emphasize in their accounts how different the Illinois were from other Great Lakes Algonquians by that time. In fact, upon moving into the prairies, the Illinois embarked on a total transformation, becoming the only bison-based Algonquians, with many new cultural and economic practices.⁵⁴

The Illinois newcomers perfected the seasonal lifeway previously established by the Oneota peoples. Like the Oneota, they were farmers, but evidence suggests they became more committed to hunting and abandoned less useful, less nutritious agricultural resources.⁵⁵ At the same time, they became consummate bison people. While archaeological evidence suggests that they took advantage of various animals in their yearly cycle, it is clear that bison made up a great percentage of their subsistence. One study suggests that bison constituted 57 percent of the meat at a contact-era Illinois village. Deer and elk were another 30 percent, and fish and birds together constituted no more than 4 percent of the meat.⁵⁶ Like the Oneota before them, the Illinois committed to the bison.

Bison hunting shaped the Illinois’s new lifeway. Descriptions of bison hunting in the post-contact period make it clear that this was a communal, cooperative, and well-organized enterprise. Unlike hunting for deer and other species, which was solitary and required stealthy stalking in the forest edges, bison were herd animals for which different strategies were required. Nonequestrians, the Illinois hunted bison in large groups, in carefully coordinated expeditions and by employing new tools for the prairie environment, especially fire.

Contact-era evidence of this new bison lifeway comes from several important eyewitness sources.⁵⁷ For instance, Pierre-Charles de Liette, a commandant at Fort St. Louis des Illinois, an early French outpost in the Illinois Valley in the 1690s, went hunting with the Illinois and reported their technique. As he explained, the Illinois worked together in groups to slay a large number of the animals at a single time.

The next day we saw in a prairie a great herd of buffalos. A halt was called and two old men harangued the young men for half an hour, urging them to show their skill in shooting down all the buffalos that we saw, and to manage so as to make all those that they could not kill move toward us. After removing us to the nearest spot, they started out in two bands, running always at a trot. When they were about a quarter of a league from the animals, they all ran at full speed, and when within gunshot they fired several volleys and shot off an extraordinary number of arrows. A great number of buffalos remained on the ground, and they pursued the rest in such manner that they were driven toward us. Our old men butchered these.⁵⁸

Explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle gave another description, noting that fire was essential to the Illinois’s bison-hunting technique: “When they see a herd, they assemble in great numbers and set fire to the grass all round, with the exception of a few passages which they leave open, and at which they station themselves with their bows and arrows. In attempting to escape from the fire, the cattle are thus compelled to pass by these savages, who sometimes kill as many as two hundred in a single day.”⁵⁹ As eyewitness descriptions make clear, this was a cooperative, shared enterprise. Liette also described how the Illinois ensured the success of their hunts by enforcing teamwork and punishing behavior that would threaten the group’s success.⁶⁰

Other evidence from the contact period fleshes out our picture of communal bison hunts, which were at the center of the Illinois lifeway. The Illinois-language dictionary made by Jesuit Jacques Gravier in the 1690s gives the most interesting window into the Illinois’s subsistence.⁶¹ Of particular note are a number of Illinois words and phrases relating to bison hunting, which taken together help us understand the Illinois’s adaptation as pedestrian bison hunters in the tallgrass prairies. Like Liette’s description, Gravier’s dictionary suggests that Illinois hunters worked in large groups, sometimes embarking on long-range hunting expeditions of several days’ duration, echoing explorers in the 1680s who noted that the Illinois “went inland” on long journeys to hunt bison.⁶² Finally, the dictionary shows their important strategy of burning the prairie to encourage game and to corral the bison toward a kill site. Myriad words detail the use of fire in Illinois’s hunting.

Table 1. Bison-Hunting Vocabulary in Contact-Era Illinois Language

Aiagamire8i	Fire is drawn from the other side of the prairie	4
Caki8re8i	Fire is everywhere in the prairies	93
Caticat8nama8a	Hunt close [to the village] and return with nothing	103
Chibicai88a	Hunt for a long time	112
C8r8er8ki irenans8ki	We still discover more bison	139
Inenans8a	Bison	172
Kicacat8i	Prairie: you don’t see anything but prairie	181
Kinta8aki8i; kinta8iki8i	Burned prairie	205
Ki8atere8	Fire all around	208
Kipakinegab8aki irenans8ki	Bison taken standing up	211
Nikit8enan, ainghi kit8enanga nina	Hunter who kills many beasts one by one	229
Matarichita8i	Hunt with different villages	257
Nimatchiki8e	Hunt with everybody	259
Ninatas8a	Hunt animals that I make flee by setting fire	327
Nat8nama8i8ni	Hunt for a day	329
8anapakite8i	Burned prairie	368
8araten8i	Prairie surrounded by woods	373
8e8entire8i	Fire comes from two sides and joins	381
Nipacas8aki	Hunt with fire	411
Pess8e8aki	Fire in the prairies to hunt a deer	461
Nipitat8nama8i	Hunt for one day or two	478
Nipitcheracha	Hunt for several days	478
P8kicaki8aki irenans8ki	Bison are surrounded in the daytime and flee	484
P8n8maninghigi aie8aki pintiki8aki	Bison surrounded where they are expected	488
Niressig8	Fire in the trees to make the animal come out	507
Tchecam8cakita	Hunt with others	548
Tchic8kite8i	Prairie all burned	554
Tchiram8si8aki	Fire in the prairie	559

Source: Jacques Gravier, Kaskaskia-to-French Dictionary, ca. 1690, manuscript held at Watkinson Library Special Collections, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

Unlike woodlands hunters, the Illinois had given themselves over to a resource that required organization and scale. This probably made the prairie bison hunters into a more unified and cohesive society than was typical of Algonquians and pre-bison Oneota. The new lifeway may have given rise to a more hierarchical social structure, and it certainly required larger villages, especially in the summer and winter when the Illinois came together for the bison hunt. Whereas other Algonquians broke up into small villages to chase animals like deer and bears, the Illinois could stay together in their large groups throughout the year.⁶³

The bison economy also fostered another change, which was a new gendered division of labor. Contact-era evidence suggests that women processed the hides, smoked the meat, and made bison products like wool and robes.⁶⁴ Moreover, since each male-headed household in Illinois “owned” the specific meat that its male hunters killed, and since each family processed their meat separately, this created an incentive for each man to have lots of women in his household.⁶⁵ The bison economy may have helped encourage the polygamous households that were common among the Illinois at the time of contact, just like among bison hunters on the plains.⁶⁶

Given the huge size of bison herds in the region, bison hunting made the Illinois prosperous. Herds spread across the prairies of Illinois in the 1600s and remained large through the colonial period.⁶⁷ Marquette counted herds of 400 in 1673, and others counted herds in the thousands.⁶⁸ Typical hunts produced 200 animals or more, according to the seventeenth-century sources, and the Illinois were taking at least 2,000 bison annually by the early 1700s.⁶⁹ Bison provided the largest source of meat to the Illinois and likely a good portion of their overall calories.⁷⁰ It seems likely that this made them healthier than other Algonquians of their era and better-off than pre-bison Oneota as well. At contact Marquette was impressed by the prosperity of the Illinois people. As he wrote, “They raise Indian corn, which they have in great abundance, have squashes as large as those of France, and have a great many roots and fruits. There is fine hunting there of Wild Cattle, Bears, Stags, Turkeys, Ducks, Bustards, Pigeons, and Cranes. The people quit their Village sometime in the year, to go all together to the places where the animals are killed, and better to resist the enemy who come to attack them.”⁷¹

The bison also became central to the Illinois’s material culture. Liette noted that the Illinois used skins for clothing, shelter, and other purposes. They made tools out of the animals’ bones. Marquette noted that bison was the main medium for the Illinois’s artistic traditions, and on several occasions during his travels he remarked on belts, garters, and accessories that were given as gifts or worn by prominent people among the Illinois. These included the scarves, made from bison hair, that distinguished the “captains” of the Illinois, “made, with considerable skill, from the hair of bears and wild cattle.”⁷² Indeed, the new animal gave the Illinois a distinctly different material culture from that of many of their Algonquian neighbors. While Indians in the region of Illinois had poor beaver resources, Marquette noted that “Their wealth consists in the skins of wild cattle.”⁷³

Figure 3. “Chasse Génèrale au Boeuf, mais à pied,” published in Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz’s Histoire de Louisiane (Paris, 1758). Le Page du Pratz’s depiction of non-equestrian bison hunting resembles many of the descriptions from eyewitnesses to the Illinois in the contact period.

Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Bison hide painting became an important artistic expression in the Illinois culture. As Marquette noted, “[Bison hair] … falls off in Summer, and the skin becomes as soft as Velvet. At that season, the savages use the hides for making fine Robes, which they paint in various Colors.”⁷⁴ It is intriguing to speculate about how the bison became central to the Illinois culture as they migrated, perhaps even helping create a new kind of identity. But this was not simply a new culture but something more complex. It was a blended culture, a synthesis of Oneota and Algonquian. To the point, consider the bird motif on the hide robe that Marquette supposedly brought back from Illinois in 1673. Evidence suggests that this was a very important motif in Oneota culture, perhaps even associated with Oneota ethnogenesis centuries before the Illinois’s arrival. According to one scholar, birds—and particularly hawks—were at the center of Oneota ritual tradition and identity.⁷⁵ The hawk motif on Marquette’s hide robe closely resembles a similar decoration on pottery unearthed in an Oneota site in Polk County, Iowa.⁷⁶ It is also similar to the thunderbird pictogram used to represent the Winnebago—descendants of the Oneota—at the 1701

Great Peace treaty at Montreal, which ended the Beaver Wars. Of course it is impossible to be conclusive about what these similarities really suggest, if anything. But it does seem possible to read this rare pre-contact Illinois material culture as a reflection of how the Illinois newcomers assimilated and integrated the culture of the Natives in the region and incorporated it with their own identity in the seventeenth century, together with the bison material itself.⁷⁷ The Illinois had colonized the region and adopted the transitional lifeway pioneered by the Oneota.⁷⁸ They had become a cooperative, cohesive, hybrid set of colonizers.

The thunderbird on the Illinois hide reflects possible social interactions and affiliations between Oneota people and the Illinois newcomers and hints at how the Illinois may have integrated or assimilated outsiders as part of their colonizing history. It is impossible to know for sure how the Illinois newcomers made community and negotiated social life as they arrived in the Illinois Country. But what does seem clear is that as they colonized, the Illinois built a strong and complex network of villages, united by language and probably kinship.

Figure 4. Bison arrow-shaft wrench. Made from bison femur, unearthed at Guebert site, eighteenth-century Illinois village in Illinois Valley. The Illinois based much of their material culture on bison products.

Courtesy of the Collection of the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Ill. Doug Carr, museum photographer.

Figure 5. Illinois hide robe with thunderbird. A long tradition has it that this robe was presented to Marquette when he visited the Peoria Indians on the Des Moines River in 1673. Hide robes like this are an artistic tradition the Illinois picked up from their grasslands neighbors and are not typical Algonquian art forms. They reflect the Illinois’s “transitional culture.”

Courtesy of SCALA Archives, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.

Figure 6. Winnebago pictogram on 1701 Great Peace treaty, Montreal. Note the symbol for the Winnebago, Siouan neighbors of the Illinois, is the “thunderbird.” C^11a, vol. 19, fols. 41–44v, ANOM.

Courtesy of the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France.

Although we must rely on post-contact descriptions for much of our understanding of Illinois social life, there are some things we can be reasonably confident about regarding the Illinois in the early 1600s. For one thing, as it was for all eastern North American Indians, kinship was the most important means of separating friends from foreign peoples.⁷⁹ Contrary to how European observers saw them, the Illinois did not really organize themselves primarily into a “tribe” or “nation” or even a “confederacy.” Rather, they did most things in life—resided, went to war, negotiated, identified—as families. Families were the center of life. While we don’t know a lot of specifics about the social organization of the Illinois-speakers in the pre-contact period, what is certain is that the Illinois created extensive lineages, possibly similar to the doodemag among Algonquians like the Anishinaabeg.⁸⁰ Among the Illinoisspeakers were at least fourteen distinct subgroups—or familles as La Salle called them—at the time of contact: Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaroa, Coiracoentanon, Chinko, Cahokia, Chepoussa, Amenakoa, Oouka, Acansa, Moingwena, Tapuaro, Maroa, Ispeminkias, and Metchigameas.⁸¹ As a later French observer would say of the Illinois, these were inclusive units not necessarily based solely in biological kinship and included “degrees of kinship that [Europeans] … would not even call cousins.”⁸² In any event, these patrilineal “familles” were the primary units of identity among the Illinois. As Illinoisspeakers moved into their new territory, they likely used intermarriage, as well as adoption and other kinds of fictive kinship, to build bridges, to welcome other newcomers into their familles, and to create borders. For the Illinois-speaking newcomers in the 1600s, the world was organized into “a8enti8aki”—relatives—and “ninaca8atisi”—strangers.⁸³ Kinship created obligations, identities, and responsibilities that helped the newcomers negotiate their immigration to the borderlands.

Extended and intermarried families were almost certainly the basis for the decentralized and autonomous villages, which were the most important social units in pre-contact Illinois.⁸⁴ One early observer said that there were fully sixty villages of Illinois-speakers in the 1640s.⁸⁵ On the first contact-era map of the Illinois, Marquette drew seven distinct villages of Illinois-speakers that he saw with his own eyes in just a month’s time, which probably represented just a fraction of the total that actually existed. As Marquette’s map shows, the Pe8area (Peoria) were divided into three villages, while the Moing8ena (Moingwena), Kachkaskia (Kaskaskia), Maroa, and Metchigamea all lived in distinct villages. La Salle noted that the numerous villages on early maps constituted “only some of the tribes composing the nation of Illinois.”⁸⁶

La Salle also emphasized that the pre-contact Illinois lived in distinct villages, far away from one another, both to the east and to the west of the Mississippi.⁸⁷ The demands of bison hunting probably joined with kinship to create the bonds and relationships that united local groups into larger familles. Indeed, it is likely that bison hunting, since it required large groups, was helping to “unite” some of these villages in the pre-contact era.⁸⁸

In addition to whatever kinship ties may have joined Illinois villages in the prehistoric period, trade certainly helped create a loosely unified identity among the Illinois-speakers and structured relationships with neighbors. Over the course of their colonization of the Illinois Country, trade clearly came to the fore of Illinois Indian life. In Native societies in the Midwest, trade was an important way of expanding power, building cohesion, and dealing with outsiders.⁸⁹ Trade connections could even produce fictive kinship bonds, as trading partners became a kind of kin.⁹⁰ Illinois-speakers also established trade connections beyond their local region, creating an interregional trade network that allowed them to import materials from foreign regions. Exotic goods in protohistoric Illinois archaeological sites included prestige goods like Olivella shell beads, marine shell gorgets, and other objects from the lower Mississippi Valley, as well as exotic materials from the Plains.⁹¹ By the early 1600s, north-south trade networks were augmented by east-west trade networks, spanning the Algonquian and Siouan borderlands.⁹²

Figure 7. Marquette map of 1673. This map depicts the Kaskaskia village in the Illinois River Valley, as well as several other Illinois villages west of the Mississippi. From Sara Jones Tucker, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Museum, 1942).

Courtesy of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The Illinois began trading for European metal as early as the 1620s and possibly earlier.⁹³ Archaeologists argue from this evidence that the Illinois were aggressively pursuing trade with the Wendats, far to the north in the Great Lakes, probably beginning in the early 1600s.⁹⁴ Other evidence suggests that they then carried these metals farther south and west, toward modernday Missouri, where they traded them for profit and to make alliances among the Siouan neighbors, descendants of the Oneota. In other words, by the mid-seventeenth century the Illinois had emerged as merchants, middlemen, and go-betweens.⁹⁵ As newcomers to a region that was borderland between Siouan and Algonquians, as well as at the crossroads of cultures, the Illinois used trade to build consensus, friendships, and cohesion.

One sign of the opportunistic stance in the Illinois newcomers’ human relationships is the calumet. Like bison hunting and other aspects of the Illinois’s lifeway, the calumet was a recent adoption. As Algonquians among the Siouan Oneota-speakers, the Illinois probably used it frequently when they arrived in the new territory, relying on it to “speak to strangers.”⁹⁶ The first and most detailed early examples of calumet ceremonialism among the Illinois reflect the fact that they used the calumet not only for peace but also to intimidate and to declare and celebrate their hegemony. The dance featured scenes of conflict, the dancer “repairing his arms, attiring himself, running, discovering the foe, raising the cry, slaying the enemy, removing his scalp, and returning home with a song of victory.” Marquette noted how the whole setting for the dance was decorated with war paraphernalia, “the weapons used by the warriors of those Nations … namely: clubs, war-hatchets, bows, quivers, and arrows.”⁹⁷ The dancers reenacted a battlefield victory, with the one dancer, near defeat, turning around in defiance and “caus[ing] his adversary to flee.” The climax of the dance was a speech about conquest. As Marquette said, the dance ended with “a lofty Discourse, delivered by him who holds the Calumet … he recounts the battles at which he has been present, the victories that he has won, the names of the Nations, the places, and the Captives whom he has made.”⁹⁸

One way to read the calumet among the Illinois, then, is that it was an accommodation to the language of their new territory. But within this ostensible accommodation was actually a declaration of Illinois power. Through kinship and alliance, rather than Cahokia’s territorialism and hierarchy, the Illinois had expanded. The Illinois at contact were probably close to fifteen thousand people.⁹⁹ They had repopulated the prairies with close to the same number of people who had once inhabited the city at Cahokia. The Illinois Country was no longer a vacant quarter but was home to an aggressive, opportunistic group of newcomers. At midcentury, their world began to feel the effects of a different colonialism in the East.

In the 1650s, powerful and unified Iroquois warriors, supplied by their Dutch allies at Albany, began to attack people of the Great Lakes in an effort to subject Algonquians, gain captives, and control fur resources in the region.¹⁰⁰ For several groups—the Wendats most especially—the result was near devastation.¹⁰¹ Refugees fled through the Great Lakes, pushing west. Meanwhile, the French at Quebec adopted a policy of supporting the Algonquian allies of the Great Lakes against the Iroquois violence, hoping to prevent them from making peace with the Iroquois and their Dutch and English allies. With French support, the Algonquians counterattacked against the Iroquois. The previously “limited-indecisive” warfare characteristic of pre-contact Native American societies turned much more violent, now producing thousands of casualties, prisoners, and deaths.¹⁰²

The Illinois felt some early effects of this violence, on a relatively small scale. In 1653, a “small village” of the Illinois was attacked by the Iroquois.¹⁰³ They suffered another attack a few years later.¹⁰⁴ But Illinois warriors bounced back from these episodes. In fact, in the 1650s at least, they counterattacked against the Iroquois and may have got the better of them.¹⁰⁵ More important, far from simply defensive, the Illinois became aggressive. It was as if the Iroquois violence and resulting disorder in the region combined with the Illinois’s colonizing trajectory to trigger their own ambitious bid for supremacy. In the 1650s, Illinois warriors attacked the Winnebago and routed them.¹⁰⁶ Later they attacked an Iroquois party and took forty Iroquois “who were on their way to hunt beaver in the Illinois Country.”¹⁰⁷ The Illinois were not militarily defeated. In the 1660s, they attacked the Sauk and Fox.¹⁰⁸ They attacked enemies to the south and west.¹⁰⁹ Soon they were at war with “seven or eight” different nations.¹¹⁰ Illinois-speakers were not defensive or desperate; they were belligerent.

Moreover, if we look closely at the Illinois engagements, one important pattern emerges. Not only were the Illinois routing their enemies, they were also usually taking huge numbers of captives. Against the Winnebago, they took an entire village captive. As one French account put it, “So vigorous was their attack that they killed, wounded, or made prisoners all the Puans, except a few who escaped.”¹¹¹ Describing the Winnebago after the same event, another account told how “All the people of this Nation were killed or taken captive by the Iliniouek.”¹¹² Far from defeated, the Illinois were on a concerted campaign to capture slaves.

Like so many other things in Algonquian life, the central logic of slavery among peoples of the Great Lakes was based on kinship. Since kinship networks were fundamentally how people gained their status, identity, and power in the world, a person’s lineage and family were absolutely central to his or her life. Maintaining and extending a kinship network was fundamental to a person’s success in trade, warfare, political diplomacy, and marriage. Kinship was the bedrock of life.¹¹³

This context helps explain the phenomenon of slave raids among Algonquians like the Illinois. As war and disease impacted Native societies during the Beaver Wars, people died by the thousands. This created great disorder among Great Lakes Indians in the seventeenth century, as many kin went missing. The fundamental logic of Indian warfare was that the deceased needed to be replaced. Captives could fill the spaces left vacant by deceased relatives in the kinship order. Adopted into the family, they could literally replace the dead.¹¹⁴

It is no accident that many of our best informants on Indian slavery were eyewitnesses to the Illinois, where captivity became such an important part of life during the contact period. As one Jesuit visitor to the Illinois Country in the seventeenth century wrote, expressing the logic of Indian captivity and slavery, “When there is any dead man to be resuscitated, that is to say, if any one of their warriors has been killed, and they think it a duty to replace him in his cabin,—they give to this cabin one of their prisoners, who takes the place of the deceased; and this is what they call ‘resuscitating the dead.’”¹¹⁵ Another priest in the Illinois Country, Jacques Gravier, lived with the Illinois in the 1690s. His dictionary of the Illinois language contains a virtual primer for understanding the subtleties of Indian slavery in this period. One telling term for slavery in the five-hundred-page dictionary expressed the essence of the phenomenon: nirapakerima: “I adopt him in place of the dead.”¹¹⁶

This was the basic principle of Native warfare throughout the Algonquian world in this period. In the wake of disease and violence, the dead needed to be replaced. But this was a complicated business, and certain requirements governed the taking of slaves. Most important, a captive could not be kin or the kin of allies.¹¹⁷ As the French would learn as they began buying and receiving slaves from Indian allies, owning a slave immediately antagonized the culture and lineage to which that person belonged.¹¹⁸ In the Algonquian-speaking world in the midst of the Beaver Wars, many groups had consolidated, uniting kin lines in an effort to reestablish their networks. For instance, the Anishenaabeg created a new collective identity out of previously disparate local identities.¹¹⁹ In this context, Algonquian-speaking captives were often useless, for attempting to enslave or adopt them into a lineage would only upset neighbors in the mixed-up world of the pays d’en haut. Only true “strangers” would do, those who were not only not kin but also did not share kin with an ally. For this purpose, in the Algonquian Great Lakes, Siouan-speaking groups from the West made the best slaves. They had no kin—they were complete strangers. And so they could become a8enti8aki—relatives.¹²⁰

Given the preference for “strangers” in the business of captive adoption, the Illinois-speakers had a hugely important strategic advantage in slaving. They lived in, and increasingly controlled, the borderlands. They could raid among the Siouan-speakers of the West, very few of whom had kinsmen among the Algonquian-speakers of the Great Lakes. The Illinois took advantage of this as they raided in the 1660s.¹²¹ When they attacked the Winnebago, taking the whole village captive, they were enslaving a group of Siouanspeaking people who would not make them enemies among the other Algonquian-speakers in the North. The same goes for their reported raids to the south and west in the 1660s.¹²² When the Jesuit Claude Allouez reported that the Illinois were engaged in wars with the Iroquois on one side and Siouans on the other, he thought it was a lamentable situation for them. It was actually the heart of the Illinois advantage.¹²³

It is important to note that when they went on slave raids in the precontact era, the Illinois probably mostly captured women. Not only was this typical of most Algonquian slave systems, and certainly typical of the Illinois’s practices in the contact era, as we will see, but the Illinois’s new bison economy gave women a new significance in the 1600s—as laborers. Evidence from the contact era suggests that female slaves were welcomed into polygamous families among the Illinois as second and third wives and put under the subordination of a mistress.¹²⁴ As La Salle would write in the 1680s, by the early contact period, female slaves in Illinois were not just replacement kin but people “who they compel to labor for them.”¹²⁵ It seems almost certain that the bison economy’s labor demands and the traditional kinshipreplacement imperatives of slavery dovetailed in Illinois in the contact era. The Illinois’s location in the borderlands allowed them to replace kin and to expand the capacity of their bison-based mode of production.

By the 1660s, through slavery and adoption, the Illinois had probably begun to replace the people they had lost in early Iroquois attacks and probable epidemics, as their population figures suggest.¹²⁶ This created a fork in the road. It seems clear that the Illinois might have stayed out of further conflicts, safe from the fighting that embroiled the Algonquian world. They could have remained, heedlessly hunting bison west of the Mississippi, avoiding Iroquois aggression. Instead the ambitious Illinois continued their opportunistic trajectory. Taking advantage of a respite from Iroquois attacks beginning in the late 1660s, the Illinois resumed their trading to the north vigorously. Several French accounts from this period report the Illinois making their first visits to newly established French outposts in Green Bay, the Fox River, and Lake Superior (St. Esprit).¹²⁷ As Allouez wrote in 1669, by this time the Illinois were entrepreneurs, traveling north “from time to time in great numbers, as Merchants, to carry away hatchets and kettles, guns, and other articles that they need.”¹²⁸ Allouez commented that one Illinois merchant—Chachagwessiou—had distinguished himself as a skilled trader and a tough negotiator. Commenting on the Illinois, Allouez wrote: “They act like traders and give hardly any more than do the French.”¹²⁹

But every good merchant needs a commodity for sale. For the Illinois, their prairie homeland lacked lakes and woods that made for good beaver habitat, as many French pointed out. And so it just made sense: living in the borderlands, the Illinois were in a strategic spot. They projected power both in the Algonquian world to the northeast and in the Siouan-speaking world to the south and west. They were slavers, having restored their own depleted population with a whole village of Winnebagos and probably others. They had a long tradition of acting as merchants and middlemen. Taking a bold and aggressive step, they combined the roles. The Illinois continued to capture and trade for ever more slaves in the south and west, Siouans and Caddoans like the Pawnee, Osage, and Missouri. Then, following the trade routes that they had established earlier in the protohistoric period for trade with the Huron, the Illinois now brought these slaves north. Using a market-oriented logic, they began to “traffic” in slaves, as one French observer later put it.¹³⁰ Ambitious merchants who lacked good beaver for the fur trade, the Illinois took advantage of the other commodity available to themselves: people. By 1673, when Marquette visited the Illinois, the strategy was consummate: “They are warlike, and make themselves dreaded by the Distant tribes to the south and west, whither they go to procure Slaves; these they barter, selling them at a high price to other Nations, in exchange for other Wares.”¹³¹

Like their migration to the Illinois Valley in the late 1500s, the Illinois’s embrace of slavery and slave trading was not defensive but aggressive. And as Marquette realized while traveling to the Illinois Country, the aggressive Illinois were now “feared” by groups all over the pays d’en haut. In the 1670s, the Ketchigamis saved two Illinois prisoners from death for fear of reprisals by the Illinois.¹³² The Menominees told Marquette not to travel any farther south than the Fox River, on account of the Illinois—the “ferocious people”—who lived beyond.¹³³ The Illinois themselves told the French that they held influence over all the “remote nations” and “very distant savages” to the South of them.¹³⁴ It was likely their power as slavers that made them so feared. First exploiting bison and then slaves, the Illinois had invaded and conquered the borderlands, seizing opportunity.

It is precisely this kind of opportunism that the Illinois used to welcome the French when they showed up in the Illinois Country during the 1670s. The Jesuits Marquette and his partner, Claude Allouez, were among the first Frenchmen to travel to the Illinois’s new homelands. Arriving at Illinois villages on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, the Frenchmen met a powerful Indian group, whose “traditions” were all about innovation, flexibility, and conquest. As they reveal in their earliest writings for the Jesuit Relations from Illinois, the Jesuits thought that the Illinois were very eager Christians. What is more accurate to say is that the Illinois were extraordinarily opportunistic and willing to experiment with the Jesuits’ ideas just as they had done in their recent cultural, ecological, and social adaptations while moving to the prairies. They had a “tradition” of innovation, and it was the cornerstone of their history.

From Allouez’s very first meeting with the Illinois at St. Esprit, he singled them out as exceptionally enthusiastic about Christianity. As he wrote in 1670, the Illinois “offer[ed] a fine field for Gospel laborers, as it is impossible to find [a group of Indians] better fitted for receiving Christian influences.”¹³⁵ Unlike many other Indian groups, the Illinois were not hostile to missionaries and were open to prayer. “If they do not all pray as yet, they at least esteem prayer. They are far from having an aversion to it, or from dreading it as a dangerous thing, as all the other Savages of this New France did when we began preaching the Gospel to them.”¹³⁶ Their speeches had “no savor of the Savage,”¹³⁷ and they listened attentively to the priests’ lengthy sermons.¹³⁸ Not only did the Illinois at St. Esprit eagerly await Allouez’s lessons, they also promised to become evangelists in their own right.¹³⁹

The Illinois began to experiment with Christianity willingly in almost every one of the early encounters between themselves and the Jesuits. In 1673, Marquette proudly watched Indians worshiping the cross with animal skins.¹⁴⁰ Allouez noted that the Illinois mixed Christianity into a spiritual practice featuring dreams and thrilled at how the Illinois reported seeing Jesus in their dreams.¹⁴¹ During their visit to the mission of St. Francis Xavier in 1674, Allouez observed some Illinois burning tobacco at the altar.¹⁴² Especially interesting was the Indians’ treatment of the church building itself. As Allouez noted, Illinois chiefs began to pray to the church, “address[ing] their speeches to this house of God, and speak[ing] to it as to an animate being.” Then they began to do something even more unusual: “When they pass by here they throw tobacco all around the church, which is a kind of devotion to their divinity.” Finally, the Illinois Indians “also [came] sometimes and offer[ed] presents [to the church], to beg God to have pity upon their deceased relatives.”¹⁴³ Combined with their feasts honoring Jesus and the fasts that they conducted in order to find God in their dreams, these gestures suggested an idiosyncratic, but positive, embrace of Christianity. The priests proudly boasted about the “honors they pay to our Holy Church, after their fashion.”¹⁴⁴ The Illinois approached the priests and the other-than-human spirits they represented in typical fashion, opportunistically.

It is almost certain that Christianity became another additive to a diverse and complex Illinois spiritual worldview.¹⁴⁵ The Illinois practiced Christianity alongside more traditional manitou worship, itself likely newly tailored to the Illinois environment. The Illinois were flexible and adaptive, and this is what made them such good pupils. “They honor the lord among themselves in their own way,” as Marquette noted.¹⁴⁶ Of course, it is hard to imagine them doing it any other way. After all, they were powerful and not desperate. Indeed, Marquette himself seemed to acknowledge the Illinois’s own agency in the creation of a hybrid version of Christianity. Recognizing the Illinois’s active participation in appropriating Christianity to their own needs, Marquette noted how an Illinois man on his deathbed went “to go take possession of paradise in the name of the whole nation.”¹⁴⁷ If a “spiritual conquest” was happening here, the Illinois were the ones conquering Christianity, on their own terms.

To the Jesuits, the Illinois’s openness and curiosity were encouraging, though the priests surely did not fully understand the Illinois’s engagement with Christianity. For instance, Allouez and Marquette considered the Illinois to be almost monotheistic, which was not true.¹⁴⁸ Allouez perceived that the Illinois recognized one spirit—the “maker of all things”—above all others.¹⁴⁹ This was optimistic—and false. The Jesuits interpreted the Illinois custom of feasting as similar to communion.¹⁵⁰ And in general, the early Jesuits thought that the Illinois were nearly Christian, writing that missionizing here was a matter of exploiting close parallels between Christianity and indigenous spirituality. As Marquette wrote, “we keep a little of their usage, and take from it all that is bad.”¹⁵¹ However, rather than true similarities between Christian and Illinois worldviews, what the Jesuits were actually perceiving was the Illinois’s willingness to experiment. Their engagement with Christianity really reflected their openness, their flexibility, and their interest in gaining an advantage. Almost certainly they were hoping to capitalize on the newcomers’ power—spiritual or, if that proved useless, at least material. The Illinois were opportunistic.

Arriving in Illinois, the Jesuits often believed that they were the most important thing happening in the Illinois’s world. But in fact the Illinois had reformed almost everything about their lives over the previous several generations, making the French newcomers just one of a whole series of changes. The Illinois had moved to the borderlands, colonizing and taking advantage of new possibilities to build power based on bison hunting and slavery. Adapting themselves to the new ecological opportunities, they also adapted culturally, assimilating many aspects of the Siouan peoples whom they replaced and incorporated in these borderlands. When Marquette arrived among them, he ignored the real symbols of Illinois power and history that they presented him—the calumet ceremony, the bison skins and meat, Siouan iconography, and the slave. Focusing on the Illinois’s positive reception of Christianity, he did not understand that this was part of an ongoing set of adaptations that had defined their recent ambitious history.

In any event, the Jesuits sent their optimistic reports about Illinois back to Quebec and on to Paris. They tried to drum up support for this promising new mission project in the distant Illinois Country. Reading these reports, however, imperial officials back in Quebec were mostly indifferent to the idea of colonial activity in the remote borderlands. Even with news of the Illinois’s initial embrace of Christianity and the glowing descriptions of the rich Illinois Valley landscape, nobody in the administration of New France much cared about this place in 1673. To the contrary, officials mostly opposed expanding the empire to include these distant and different lands and peoples.

But in 1680 the Iroquois Wars took a sudden turn. And when they did, the Illinois were at the center of it. Suddenly, in spite of their initial indifference, officials could not ignore the Illinois—the people and the region demanded French attention. Soon, following Marquette, more explorers, with diverse imperial goals, ventured to Illinois to join the powerful Native people who had recently conquered the region. Opportunism would continue to shape the Illinois’s response to empire.