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Chapter 2

The Imaginary Kingdom

In 1680, an army of the Iroquois invaded the Illinois with a force of five to six hundred warriors, renewing the Beaver Wars. Chasing the Illinois from their villages in the Illinois Valley, they desecrated graves, burned buildings, and ruined fields. Catching up with their victims, they committed, according to one French account, “mutilation, by slaying, and by a thousand tortures besides.”¹ After this destruction, the Iroquois aggressors left the Illinois Valley full of markers of their violence, including “the half denuded skulls of Illinois dead” and pictographic memorials commemorating the Iroquois victory.²

To the French in Quebec and throughout the pays d’en haut, who were only barely familiar with the region, this looked like devastation. Recounting the Iroquois attacks on the Illinois, La Salle wrote that there were seven hundred casualties and four hundred slaves taken.³ New France intendant Jacques Duchesneau put the number even higher.⁴ To the French, this episode was a major blow, if not a crushing one, for the Illinois people whom the French considered weak and “indifferently warlike.”⁵ According to French sources, the Illinois were “well nigh exterminated.”⁶ They had to “abandon their country” and “seek refuge in distant parts.”⁷

In viewing the Illinois as devastated victims, the French exaggerated and misunderstood this episode of Indian warfare and underestimated Illinois power. Nevertheless, the Iroquois attack of 1680–81 marked a turning point in French diplomacy with regard to western peoples like the Illinois. Convinced that the Iroquois were poised to dominate the Great Lakes, the French faced an important choice. One alternative was to allow the Iroquois to continue their aggression against the Illinois and other Algonquians, which would put at risk the fur trade and balance of power that New France relied on. The other alternative was to support the western allies, unify them, and help them defeat the Iroquois. In fact, this was no real choice at all. Over the course of the next several years, French officials committed to becoming the mediators of the alliance, the “glue” of the Algonquian world.⁸ They resolved to support the most important targets of Iroquois attacks, the Illinois.

This change produced enormous effects for the Illinois. Nowhere near as devastated by the attack in 1680 as the French thought, the Illinois continued on an opportunistic trajectory they had begun well before contact. With French support, they expanded their power to the Southwest, increasing their activity as slavers in the Siouan borderlands. Coalescing in larger groups, they united at the so-called Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, modern-day Starved Rock, which soon became the largest population center north of Mexico. Here they created a center of exploitation, basing their tremendous power on bison, slaves, and now the French alliance. Far from devastated by the attack in 1680, the Illinois moved into an even more ambitious phase of their history.

But if these changes in French diplomacy had important effects for the Illinois, they also had important effects for the French themselves. For in resolving to help build the Algonquian alliance and support the Illinois, Quebec officials were committing themselves to a whole new policy regarding the distant West. Prior to the 1680s, the only people who went to the remote country of the Illinois Valley were schemers with quixotic and even defiant plans. These included Jesuits, explorers like Robert La Salle, and, most important, fur traders. Officials in Quebec openly opposed western expansion of the empire. Now, in the mid-1680s, the imperatives of Indian diplomacy forced officials to change their views. Importantly, officials had to look to the schemers on the ground in Illinois as the agents of their new Indian policy. For their part, visionaries like La Salle had to look to the government as essential partners in their projects.

This was the beginning of a unique, halting, and uncertain colonial experiment on New France’s periphery. To support the Indian allies, New France officials relied on an “infrastructure” of disloyal explorers, priests, and fur traders whose activities they previously discouraged.⁹ Fur traders pursued their self-interest, but they gained imperial support and military assistance. Priests and fur traders disagreed about priorities, but they came together and cooperated to solidify their fledgling presence among the Illinois. The necessities of Indian affairs forced the French—with all their competing priorities and different interests—to find a common ground. It was the beginning of empire by collaboration.

Meanwhile, of course, the real winners were the Illinois. This period marked the height of their power. Far from devastated, they launched an aggressive phase, uniting at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia. Here, exploiting bison and the slave trade, they made one of the most important bids for power in all of seventeenth-century America. Together, Indians, French schemers, and Quebec officials collaborated to realize disparate goals.

The period from the 1670s through the 1680s witnessed the first explorations of the Illinois Country by Frenchmen. Even before Marquette’s famous exploration in 1673, Jesuit priest Claude Allouez made initial contact with Illinois Indians on Lake Superior in the 1660s. In 1671, Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson explored the westernmost edge of the Great Lakes and interacted with Illinois Indians.¹⁰ In 1673, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet made their famous voyage into the Mississippi Valley watershed, exploring the Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Illinois rivers. Robert La Salle and Louis Hennepin entered the Mississippi Valley several times beginning in 1680, and in 1682 La Salle voyaged from Illinois almost to the mouth of the Mississippi River. In several of these early explorations, French travelers passed through the Illinois River Valley and first laid eyes on the territory that later would be known as the Illinois Country. Crossing the watershed that separated the Great Lakes from the Mississippi Valley, they entered into “strange lands.”¹¹

What they found impressed them. Explorers reported how “you could not find any land better [suited] for the production of wheat, and for vines, and for other fruits as well.”¹² The land featured bison and game that were “innumerable”¹³ and soil in the bottomlands that “looks as if it had been already manured.”¹⁴ They found the Illinois Indians affable, “of good birth,” and eager for trade and religious instruction.¹⁵ The rumors concerning the presence of hostile Indians here in the Mississippi Valley proved false, and explorers quickly found ways to win friends among Indians in the region.¹⁶ One explorer was especially direct in his praise of Illinois: “It may be said to contain the finest lands ever seen.”¹⁷ Jesuits found Illinois to be a “fine field for Gospel laborers.”¹⁸ Taken together, these discoveries inspired explorers with visions of empire.¹⁹

But officials were more than skeptical. In 1663, the royal government had taken over New France after years of company management. The French government reorganized the colony and embarked on an era of centralized planning.²⁰ New royal officials, led by Minister of the Marine Jean-Baptiste Colbert, brought new priorities. As they saw it, fur trade was important, but trade should not dominate or overshadow other potentially profitable activities in the colony. Nor could it be allowed to tempt would-be farmers into the woods.²¹ The stability of the colony relied on settling Frenchmen in the St. Lawrence Valley and employing them in productive industry there. Without outposts in the West, Colbert believed, “the settlers would be obliged to engage in fishing, prospecting, and manufacturing, which would yield them far greater benefits.”²²

Practical realities added to the official bias against western expansion. Iroquois attacks had destroyed western outposts of New France in the 1640s, and Iroquois power had reached its zenith in 1651. The missions and fur trade outposts in the West had been pulled back, and trade dried up through much of the 1650s and 1660s.²³ Reestablishing these posts would be expensive and risky. In 1666, Colbert announced the major principle of his imperial vision when he called for a tightly focused colonization in New France: “It would be worth much more to restrain [the colonies] to a space of land in which the colony would be able to sustain itself, rather than to embrace too great a quantity of land which one day we might have to abandon with some diminution of the reputation of His Majesty and the crown.”²⁴

Ignoring this opposition, Jolliet was the first Frenchman to seriously propose an outpost of an expanded French empire in the Illinois Country in 1673.²⁵ Of all the lands he saw in the new Mississippi Valley, Jolliet praised the Illinois Country, just beyond the Great Lakes watershed, and south of Lake Michigan, as “the most beautiful and the easiest for inhabiting.”²⁶ The weather was mild. Unlike in the valley of the St. Lawrence, “A habitant here would not have to work some ten years to knock down the trees and burn them; the same day he arrives, he could put the plow in the field.”²⁷ It was a land of plenty: there were prairies that stretched out for twenty miles and Indians who were “honest … and obliging.”²⁸ To realize his plan, Jolliet proposed a harbor at the southern end of Lake Michigan, by which his colony would maintain easy communication with Michilimackinac. Further, if the continental divide meant that the rivers here flowed south, and away from New France, Jolliet envisioned conquering this inconvenient geographical circumstance. A canal joining the Chicago and the Illinois rivers, he asserted, would connect this Mississippi River Valley to the Great Lakes, integrating the newly discovered territory into New France in the north.

Jolliet proposed building his canal in the area where he and Marquette had recently found the Kaskaskia, a prosperous village of Illinois-speakers. Jolliet did not mention them as part of his plan, but clearly he singled out their homeland as the prime place for French colonization. Containing a growing population of Indians eager for trade, this was the village to which Marquette had promised to return the following year to establish a permanent mission. It could become the heart of a new French colonial region.

But when Jolliet made his proposal for a colony in Illinois, the official answer was, simply, no: “His Majesty does not want to give to Sieur Jolliet the permission which he has asked to establish himself with 20 men in the Country of Illinois. It is necessary to multiply the habitants of Canada before thinking of other lands, and [the governor of New France] should hold this as your maxim in regard to new discoveries which are made.”²⁹

Meanwhile, however, Marquette did not even wait for permission. Returning to the precise area that Jolliet described at the top of the Illinois Valley, in 1674 he established the mission of the Immaculate Conception in the village of the Kaskaskia. Having shared a number of interactions with the Illinois at various mission outposts in the Great Lakes in the 1660s, Marquette and his partner, Claude Allouez, now would have a home base right in the center of Illinois Country. This is where Marquette intended to create a flourishing mission among these Indians whom he already knew to be enthusiastic about and receptive to Christianity. However, having disapproved Jolliet’s plan for a colony in Illinois, New France officials opposed the Jesuits’ earliest efforts in Illinois as well.

A specific logic underlay official opposition to Jesuit activity in the West. In addition to centralized settlement, Colbert’s reforms in the 1660s also included an idealistic goal of assimilating Indians into the French colonial population. As Colbert saw it, the role of religious missionaries was to work to settle Indians in the St. Lawrence and integrate them, adding them to the productive and military strength of the colony. Formalizing a policy known as Frenchification, Colbert wrote to intendant Jean Talon: “To increase the colony … the most useful way to achieve it would be to try to civilize the Algonquins, the Hurons, and the other Savages … and to persuade them to come to settle in a commune with the French, to live with them, and educate their children in our mores and our customs.”³⁰ A key component of this assimilation program clearly rested on proximity: Indians had to be settled in what were known as “reserves” or “réductions” near the French population centers where they could gradually acquire the habits of Frenchmen.

Over several generations of missionary work in New France, the Jesuits had developed a strategy almost completely opposite to these principles.³¹ In the 1630s, they had begun going with the Indians into their villages and translating Christianity to a Native context. This was in keeping with Loyola’s charge to teach and live “in a way that is accommodated to those people, [and their] understanding.”³² In their famous Relations, Jesuits narrated their heroic efforts in “following [the Indians] into the deep forest” and “reducing the principles of their own language.”³³ The point was not to teach Indians to live as Frenchmen but rather for the priests to adapt themselves to Indian ways of living. As one Jesuit in this early period wrote, “A great step is gained when one has learned to know those with whom he has to deal; has penetrated their thoughts; has adapted himself to their language, their customs, and their manner of living; and, when necessary, has been a Barbarian with them, in order to win them over to Jesus Christ.”³⁴ Far from Frenchifying Indians, Jesuits actually aimed to keep Indians apart from Frenchmen, whom they thought only corrupted the Natives. As one Jesuit summed it up in later years, “The best mode of Christianizing them was to avoid Frenchifying them.”³⁵

Although many of the Jesuits’ early “flying missions” in the Great Lakes were destroyed in the 1640s by Iroquois attacks, peace between the Iroquois and New France beginning in 1667 had allowed for new activity.³⁶ Over the next ten years, the Jesuits extended their missions to ever more remote sites, weeks away from Quebec. In 1666, Allouez traveled to Chequamegon Bay, where he established the mission of St. Esprit. In 1668, Marquette left Trois-Rivières to found a mission at Sault-Ste. Marie. After Claude Dablon joined Allouez and Marquette in the West in 1669, the priests pushed even farther into the interior. While Marquette took over St. Esprit, Allouez went to establish the mission of St. Francis Xavier in Green Bay in December 1669. Two years later, Allouez pressed on to a Mascouten village on the Fox River.³⁷ These were the places where the Jesuits first encountered the Illinois Indians.

Throughout this period, Colbert disapproved. He wrote to condemn the Jesuits’ new distant missions and their method of “keeping the converted Indians’ ordinary lifestyle [rather than] bringing them among the French.” From his perspective, he wrote, “it is only too obvious how such a course is harmful both to Religion and to the State.”³⁸ The king himself urged the Jesuits to change their ways, to “attract [the Indians] into a civil society and to quit their form of living, with which they will never be able to become good Christians.”³⁹ In 1672, the new governor Frontenac criticized the Jesuits’ distant missions as “pure mockeries.” As he told the minister, “I don’t think that [the Jesuits] should be permitted to extend them any further than they already have until we see in one of these places a church of Indians better formed.”⁴⁰

But the Jesuits remained convinced that distant missions were the best way to convert Indians. Indeed, when Marquette founded the Immaculate Conception mission in 1674 it was not merely another distant mission, it was the most distant mission the Jesuits had ever established.⁴¹ Deep in the West, totally outside the priorities of the French empire and remote from the influence of French colonists, here the Jesuits could foster among the Natives an ideal “primitive Christianity,” “just like the First Christians.”⁴² Far from making the Indians live as Frenchmen, Marquette, setting out for the Illinois Country in the 1670s, predicted that he would soon be living on their terms: “After the fashion of the Savages, the Illinois wish for us in order that we may share their miseries with them, and suffer every imaginable hardship of barbarism. They are lost sheep, that must be sought for among the thickets and woods, since for the most part they cry so loudly that one hastens to rescue them from the jaws of the Wolf.”⁴³

All this helps us understand why the Jesuits were so thrilled to report how Illinois Indians practiced a kind of idiosyncratic Christianity in their earliest encounters, “honor[ing] our Lord among themselves in this own way.”⁴⁴ As Jesuits saw it, the Illinois had spiritual traditions that echoed Christianity, which was why Marquette could boast that “we keep a little of the usage, and take from it all that is bad.”⁴⁵ Here was the realization of the Jesuit ideal. Isolated from the French colonial project, they made a new indigenous Christianity, “in their own fashion.”

In some ways, the Jesuits must have been glad when the administration rejected Jolliet’s plan. They viewed Illinois as an opportunity to conduct a religious mission separate from other French colonial activity, and Jolliet’s project—canal and all—would only have attracted Frenchmen to corrupt the infant church. But of course the French government did not reject Jolliet in order to preserve the Jesuits’ isolated mission. French officials opposed the Jesuits, too. Taken together, the earliest Frenchmen in Illinois had incompatible visions and no support from the government. If this made prospects for empire in the region look dim, Robert La Salle only added to the discord when he arrived in the region.

Just as Jolliet received news of the king’s rejection of his plan in 1677, La Salle was visiting the Illinois for the first time and devising a new vision of empire. Having heard about the discovery of the Mississippi River in the 1670s, La Salle began to imagine a future colonial project centered at the Gulf of Mexico and oriented to the South, where a port could remain open all year round. From here, free of the cold-weather challenges faced by Quebec, La Salle anticipated a more profitable fur trade and better agricultural possibilities.

New France officials, interested in protecting their fur trade at Montreal, were naturally skeptical of this new project. But La Salle gained an ally in Governor Frontenac, who was himself opposed to the Montreal fur traders. With his help, La Salle began creating a new trade route beginning in 1672 that extended south of the Great Lakes. After establishing a fort on Lake Ontario, La Salle won permission to create an outpost in Illinois, the first settlement in his future imperial scheme.⁴⁶ He established a fort in Illinois in 1680 near the Kaskaskia village, where he settled several men under his command in what would become the base camp for his ambitious enterprises.

It was in 1682 that La Salle finally reached the Gulf of Mexico after descending the Mississippi River. Here he made clear his intention that the little colony in Illinois would now belong to a whole new imperial system, outside of New France. Planting a cross and a flag at the bottom of the Mississippi, La Salle conducted a brief but elaborate ceremony in front of a small audience of Indians, signaling the official start of this new colonial project. Shouting “vive le Roi” and “chanting the Te Deum, the Exaudiat, the Domine salvum fa Regum,” La Salle took possession of the entire Mississippi Valley, which he promptly renamed “this country of Louisiana.” He then placed in the ground a lead plate, inscribed with a short description of his historic journey from the Illinois down the Mississippi, nearly the entire extent of his possession. As part of the legal proceedings, he made a note of the fact that various Indians present had consented to this possession and allied themselves to this future government in Louisiana. Within this list of Indians were the Illinois, among “the most considerable nations dwelling therein.”⁴⁷

La Salle’s ceremony was the mirror image, in many ways, of a similar ceremony conducted by the explorer Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson in 1671. Standing on the edge of Lake Superior, Saint-Lusson had claimed the entire western Great Lakes for France, also in front of an audience of local Indians. Like La Salle, he had made a note of the various Indian groups whose territory he meant his claim to include. And like La Salle, he singled out the Illinois among these. So while Saint-Lusson had claimed the Illinois as part of an empire oriented to the north and centered in Quebec, La Salle now reversed this orientation and reimagined their territory in a landscape oriented south. When La Salle claimed Louisiana, he included the marginal Illinois Country as an important part of his claim, providing a vision that located the territory within a new empire separate from New France. When he created his new outpost in the Illinois Country in 1681, he called it Fort Saint Louis de Louisiane, reflecting its inclusion in this alternative plan.

Officials in New France strongly opposed La Salle’s vision for a Mississippi Valley empire, as well as his specific activities in Illinois. As they knew, La Salle intended to siphon away fur trade from the northern route and from Montreal. Even before the actual creation of the Illinois outpost, New France authorities worried about competition from the new project and forced La Salle to promise never to interfere with the northern trade.⁴⁸ During the initial stages, La Salle’s project was frequently under suspicion of such illegal trading activity.⁴⁹ In 1680, Intendant Duchesneau complained to the king that La Salle was not just an explorer but an illegal fur trader and empire builder: “La Salle, under the pretext of [making] a discovery sent two traders and himself traded in the Outaoases [Ottawa] nations which are not part of his [Illinois] concession. And he gave licenses to several individuals and habitants who he does not at all use for discoveries, to go and trade [in the north].

… All this is very bad for the colony [of New France].”⁵⁰ The fledgling colony in Illinois was a threat to New France interests, especially as long as Frontenac was governor. The rivalry between the Illinois proprietors—La Salle and his partner, Henri de Tonty—and New France officials over the fur trade would only grow over the course of the 1680s.⁵¹

But if La Salle caused frustration for New France officials, on the ground he had his own frustrations, owing most of all to insubordination among his men. The problems started with La Salle’s earliest settlement in Illinois, when nearly every one of his men deserted either en route or shortly after arriving in the region.⁵² Altogether, La Salle lost at least thirty men and spent most of his time during these early expeditions chasing after deserters.⁵³ After building a small fort on the Illinois River in November 1679, La Salle returned to Fort Frontenac for more supplies. Arriving back in Illinois in July 1680, he found that his remaining men had abandoned him and destroyed his fort.⁵⁴

As the priest Louis Hennepin wrote, even the very name of this first fort in Illinois, called Fort Crevecoeur, or broken heart, was a testament to the frustration the leaders felt toward their disloyal men: “We named it the Fort of Crevecoeur, because the desertion of our Men, and the other Difficulties we labour’d under, had almost broke our Hearts.”⁵⁵ Having fled Fort Crevecoeur in the spring of 1680, a member of the deserting party turned and scrawled a message in a wood block hanging on the remains of the looted fort: “Nous sommes Tous Sauvages” (“We are all savages”).⁵⁶

Much to La Salle’s frustration, these defiant deserters pursued their own interests. A good example is a man called Michel Accault, a fur trader who accompanied La Salle to the interior. As one priest later wrote, he was “famous in this Illinois country for all his debaucheries.”⁵⁷ In 1680, Accault almost certainly participated in several attempts to mutiny against La Salle’s leadership. Assigned to help Father Louis Hennepin explore the Mississippi in 1680, Accault abandoned the priest and stole the goods that had been entrusted to him as gifts to the Indians.⁵⁸ This left Hennepin alone with a single guide to travel through an unknown country.⁵⁹ Hennepin later found Accault returning from a fruitful hunting season, “descending the River of Bulls with [a] Fleet of Canow’s well stor’d with Provisions.”⁶⁰ He was “reproached for a Base Fellow, who had refus’d to accompany us for fear of being famished by the way.”⁶¹ But he survived, and he profited.

Indeed, men like Accault were opportunistic and self-interested. On one occasion, Hennepin recalled a conversation he had with Accault, one of the very rare moments in which the words of a fur trader are captured in the record. Standing at a fork in the road, disagreeing about which way to turn, Hennepin and Accault began debating about responsibility and authority in the middle of the Illinois woods in 1680. When Hennepin insisted on Accault’s obligations to the government in New France, as well as to La Salle, Accault and some others rejected this notion: “My men would never consent, telling me that they had no Business there, and they were oblig’d to make all the haste they could towards the North, to exchange their Commodities for furs. I told them, that the Public Good was to be preferr’d to the Private Interest; but I could not persuade them to any such thing.”⁶² Accault felt no allegiance to larger imperial goals or to La Salle’s project, and he did not quibble with Hennepin’s view that he was pursuing only his private interest. In fact, he embraced this description, emphasizing the lack of political allegiance he felt to the government or to local authorities like Hennepin. As Hennepin recalled, “[Accault] told me that every one ought to be free.” Accault then led the canoe up the river, to where he wanted to go.⁶³

Men like Accault were successful, profiting greatly in the Illinois. For their part, Illinois Indians welcomed these men. But in spite of successes like Accault’s, or indeed perhaps because of them, the whole colony frustrated Quebec officials. In 1683, the new governor-general of the colony of New France, Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, wrote a memorial to the king, informing him about La Salle’s activity in Illinois. “You will please tell me what you want me to do,” he wrote, for “Sieur de La Salle by his arrogance has turned his head.” La Barre especially complained about La Salle’s efforts to effect “his plan, which is to attract habitants” to what amounted to an outlaw plantation, full of men like Accault. The governor worried that he would soon “debauch all the lazy and idle men of this country [New France]” by recruiting them to his illicit settlement. As La Barre told it, La Salle aimed to make his own independent colony or, in the words of the frustrated governor, “to try to make an imaginary kingdom.”⁶⁴

Of course, given La Salle’s struggles to control his men, La Barre’s description was apt. Although he had grand imperial visions, La Salle could not realize them. Nor could the Jesuits, whose hopes of keeping the Illinois separate from the French were now dashed by the arrival of La Salle. Meanwhile, the government in New France opposed colonial activity in the region altogether. It was hard to see what kind of empire would possibly come of these competing agendas, chaotic beginnings, and quixotic visions. None of them was likely to be realized. In the early 1680s, Illinois was an imaginary kingdom, indeed. But this was when Indian affairs suddenly and radically changed the situation.

When the Iroquois attacked the Illinois in 1680, it appeared to the French like the Illinois were too weak to defend themselves. As the Iroquois descended the Illinois Valley, Illinois men pathetically ran away and did not even defend the women and children of their villages. Poignantly, most of the several hundred victims of the attacks were women.⁶⁵ Moreover, French audiences familiar with descriptions of the Illinois in the Jesuit Relations and other colonial correspondence might have remembered a previous episode in which the Illinois men similarly abandoned women and children to Iroquois violence.⁶⁶ Shocked by this apparent cowardice, the French concluded that the Illinois were just devastated. La Salle, who gave the most graphic account of the attack and its aftermath, said they were “incapable of resistance.”⁶⁷

As the Iroquois attacks on the Illinois were followed by more attacks on other Algonquians, the French realized that they had few options. Over the course of the Beaver Wars, the French had supported several Algonquian groups in an effort to prevent the Iroquois from dominating the Great Lakes. The future of the fur trade and the very existence of New France seemed to hinge on making sure Algonquians remained motivated to resist the Iroquois and, most important, never to ally with them.⁶⁸ When English traders began moving into the Illinois Country in the 1680s, attempting to coax the Illinois into an alliance against French-allied tribes in the Great Lakes, pressure on the French increased.⁶⁹ The attack on the Illinois in 1680 was a dramatic beginning to a change in policy. As the French now saw it, failure to support the Illinois would be perceived by the latter as “abandonment,” raising the possibility that the tribe would align against Quebec.⁷⁰ Meanwhile, French explorations in the Illinois region in the 1670s and 1680s had made it clear that the Illinois were a key population in the West. They were, one priest wrote, “the Iroquois of this Country here who will make war with all the other nations.”⁷¹ Summing up the new attitude toward the Illinois alliance, the king himself wrote in 1686, “There is nothing more important than sustaining the Illinois and the other allied nations against … those that the Iroquois send in war. It would be better to engage them than to let [the Iroquois] destroy these nations when all of them can be sustained by commerce.”⁷² Despite reservations, and despite how remote the territory was from Quebec, the French policy became to “hold the hand of the Illinois.”⁷³

The decisions to support the Illinois and to extend commercial routes into their territory represented major changes for a government still reluctant to send traders into the interior, let alone into such a distant zone. The French government now began to send gifts and ammunition regularly into the interior. For the most part the new policy was a program to supply the Illinois with trade goods, arms, and military assistance. In 1686, the government of New France supplied 400 rifles to the Illinois living around Fort St. Louis des Illinois. Another load of supplies that year included 150 firelocks and 300 muskets. In exchange for supplies, according to the proprietors of Fort St. Louis, the Illinois chiefs “promised to do their duty to fight the Iroquois.”⁷⁴

In addition to providing ammunition, the French also supported the Illinois through military organization. In 1683, La Barre raised troops and planned a joint French-Algonquian attack on the Iroquois. When it failed at the last minute, the Illinois felt betrayed. In the wake of this debacle, the king recalled governor La Barre.⁷⁵ His replacement, Jacques-René de Brisay Denonville, quickly summoned all the Algonquians to support the Illinois in a major counterattack against the Iroquois in 1687, which was successful.

But gifts and military supplies, while important, were not enough to secure the Illinois to the alliance, especially in a period when French support seemed to waver. As Duchesneau put it, the French must mediate the rivalries among the Algonquians and “keep these people united” under the leadership of Onontio, the French governor.⁷⁶ And yet if the French hoped to have the Illinois and all their Algonquian neighbors follow the commands of Onontio, they had to learn “to take cognizance of all their differences, however trifling these may be.”⁷⁷ This was not a simple matter. The Illinois, like most Algonquians, dealt with outsiders only after they had been turned from strangers into relatives. Algonquian diplomacy relied on personal relationships and face-to-face negotiations. Thus the alliance could not be achieved remotely from Quebec by a figurehead like Onontio. Instead it had to be achieved by actual people who had established personal relations with the Illinois.

Fortunately for the officials, there were people who had done just that. Since the 1660s, the Illinois had welcomed French newcomers into their world, especially at Kaskaskia. Examples abound. An Illinois chief named Oumahouha adopted the Recollect priest Zenobé Membré in 1680, welcoming him and telling him that “he loved him like a son.”⁷⁸ A French trader named Villeneuve was assimilated into an Illinois lineage, his identity so thoroughly transformed that he wore the distinctive tattoos of an Illinois warrior all over his torso.⁷⁹ French fur traders married into Illinois families. Priests were treated to calumet ceremonies. These were the kinds of relationships that turned French strangers into Illinois kinsmen.

These relationships could be instrumental for mediating the alliance. Consider the example of La Salle himself, who used personal connections and status in Kaskaskia to mediate an alliance between the Illinois and Miami in the early 1680s.⁸⁰ As a fur trader observed, longstanding enmity had poisoned the relationship between the Miami and the Illinois, who “hate each other reciprocally.”⁸¹ In the early 1680s, this mutual antagonism threatened the whole French strategy, as the Miami and Iroquois colluded to attack the Illinois.⁸² Since this would have started a major war for which the French were clearly not prepared, the diplomacy became complicated.⁸³ The French needed to make the Miami stand down.

It was La Salle who achieved this, and he did so through on-the-ground relationships that were clearly impossible for French administrators to establish back in Quebec. Together, the Illinois, Miami, and La Salle worked out an arrangement whereby La Salle became a trusted kinsman, helping to seal the alliance. To do this, La Salle adopted the identity of Ouabicolcata, a deceased Miami chief. He became Ouabicolcata, reincarnated. Delivering a speech to the Miami, he promised them that his identity had transformed: “Think him not dead; I have his mind and soul in my own body; I am going to revive his name and be another Ouabicolcata; I shall take the same care of his family that he took in his lifetime…. My name is Ouabicolcata; he is not dead; he lives still, and his family shall want for nothing, since his soul is entered into the body of a Frenchman, who can provide his kinsmen abundantly with all things needful.”⁸⁴ With this speech, La Salle appealed to the Natives in language that, as he said himself, was “perfectly adapted to their sensibilities.” He promised to become, like Ouabicolcata had been, a provider, bringing goods and “all things needful.” In so doing, La Salle was welcomed among the opportunistic Miami. Through him, a kinsman, they allied themselves to the Illinois.⁸⁵

This kind of mediation was impossible for the French to achieve just by sending weapons and goods. It was agents like La Salle and the Jesuits who could provide the important “infrastructure” of the alliance.⁸⁶ The nascent colony at Fort St. Louis and the mission of the Immaculate Conception were the necessary infrastructure of French policy and alliance among all these crucial Indian groups of the West. Ironically, La Salle’s installation in Illinois, envisioned as a separate colonial project and formerly opposed by New France officials and merchants, was now indispensable to New France as officials sought to prosecute the war. Collaborating, officials and colonial schemers worked together for mutual goals. Now the Illinois outpost was becoming an unplanned, even unintentional, part of the empire. But an even more unintentional reality was this: the French were supporting an Indian world on the rise.

As they came to support the Illinois, the French misunderstood the Illinois’s power. For instance, as Indians gathered around the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, La Salle boasted that they were there to be with the French and that they were “dependent” on him.⁸⁷ In fact, Illinois motives in this period went well beyond what the French understood. Rather than meekly seeking protection, the Illinois were continuing a decades-old rise to power and following a course that was aggressive, not defensive. Even moments that the French perceived as signs of weakness—such as the attack they suffered in 1680—can actually be read as a sign of the Illinois’s power and ambition in this period. The Illinois were building strength, and French support only added to an ongoing bid for power.

Although La Salle thought that the Illinois’s arrival at the Grand Village was a response to his presence, the Illinois were actually coming together well before the French arrived in Illinois. Frenchmen often badly misinterpreted what was happening as Illinois migrants moved to the Grand Village in a massive consolidation that had begun years earlier. Father Claude Allouez is a good example. As he wrote in 1666, “[The Illinois] used to be a populous nation, divided into ten large Villages; but now they are reduced to two.”⁸⁸

Figure 8. Marquette map of 1673, detail. Although most Illinois villages were located to the west of the Mississippi River in the 1670s, they moved east in the 1680s to unite at the top of the Illinois River Valley.

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

Allouez said “reduced,” but the villages he visited at the top of the Illinois Valley were much larger than previous Illinois settlements. Moreover, additional Illinois-speakers were arriving here from the West all the time. As Allouez himself confirmed in the 1670s, Kaskaskia had grown huge. “I found this Village largely increased,” he wrote of Kaskaskia, as the village increased from seventy-five to about three hundred cabins in 1675.⁸⁹ After the attack by the Iroquois in 1680, the Illinois-speakers immediately gathered even more people together at Kaskaskia, right in the center of the violence. They simply continued a consolidation that was already underway. In some respects, they were not weakened but strengthened.

It is important to note that when the Iroquois attacks began, many of the Illinois were located to west of the Mississippi River, where they had built power on bison and slaving. Surely when violence began in the Illinois Valley, they could have stayed to the west, out of the way and aloof from the Iroquois Wars. Instead they began to move east, back to the Algonquian world, to the top of the Illinois River Valley, and into the heart of the violence. As Allouez said, they were collecting at Great Kaskaskia in a huge melting pot: “Formerly, it was Composed of but one nation, that of the Kachkachkia; at the present time, there are 8 tribes in it, the first having summoned the others, who inhabited the neighborhood of the river Mississippi.”⁹⁰ Allouez acknowledged that the Illinois were moving eastward in this violent time. By 1681, as La Salle reported, the Grand Village was even more mixed up, containing “some of the tribes composing the nation of the Illinois [including] the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaroa, Coiracoentanon, Chinko, Cahokia, Chepoussa, Amonokoa, Cahokia, Quapaw, and many others.” Together they “form[ed] the village of the Illinois made up of about 400 huts.”⁹¹ Three years later, the village included the same lineup, including now the Tapouero and Maroa as well.⁹² In the concept of historian Michael Witgen, the Illinois were “shapeshifting,” adopting the unified identity of “Illinois” even as they preserved their “microlevel” identities as members of what La Salle called their “familles” or, perhaps, doodemag.⁹³ Significantly, it was kinship, the common ancestry dating back before the contact era began, that helped make this shapeshifting possible. La Salle made the point that “all of these nations are comprised beneath the name Illinois because they are related and because there are a few families of each within the village of Kaskaskia.”⁹⁴

In addition to shapeshifting, this consolidation was facilitated by an inclusivist political strategy.⁹⁵ In the Grand Village, outsiders were welcomed. Chickasaw and Shawnees, who spoke a totally foreign language, were welcomed to the area of the Grand Village in the 1680s, as were Miami after 1681.⁹⁶ A short distance away, other groups settled as well, adding to the population center with possibly five to ten thousand more people.⁹⁷ And of course the Illinois welcomed Frenchmen like La Salle. The Illinois incorporated these “strangers” into their community and built strength. By 1683, they were in the largest population center on the continent north of Mexico—twenty thousand people within walking distance of one another.

The massive size of the Grand Village gave the Illinois safety, allowing them to redouble their efforts in slaving. Throughout the 1680s, La Salle and Hennepin frequently noted how the Illinois brought slaves up the Illinois River after their raids in the West.⁹⁸ Many of these captives were probably assimilated into the patrilineal households of the Illinois as second and third wives. Put to work as farmers and especially as meat and hide processors in the bison economy, they became slaves “who they force to labor for them,” according to La Salle. Many others were traded to other Algonquian groups in the Great Lakes who were in need of replacement kin. These were, again in the words of La Salle, the “slaves which they are accustomed to traffic.”⁹⁹ In the context of continued Iroquois violence, the captives became a key to Illinois strength.

Figure 9. Detail of Franquelin’s map of 1684, with the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia. Many of the groups in this massive settlement at the top of the Illinois Valley were Illinois-speakers who had moved from the West, making the Grand Village and surrounding settlements North America’s largest population center in the 1680s.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

As they consolidated, the Illinois continued their violent trajectory from the pre-contact era. Each year, the annual cycle would feature agriculture, a winter hunt, and sometimes a summer or a fall expedition. Frequently in the 1680s, they would go to the east, supported by the French, and make war on the Iroquois, as they did in 1687.¹⁰⁰ But their more typical annual routine was to go west for slaves. In 1689, the Illinois brought back 130 captives from a raid on the Osage.¹⁰¹ In the 1690s, they organized an expedition with 1,200 warriors against the Osage and Arkansas.¹⁰² Indeed, by the 1690s, French observers noted that “almost all the village marches, and even many women accompany them.”¹⁰³ The results were impressive. In one march, they “carried away captive [all] the people of a village.”¹⁰⁴ And this wasn’t an isolated incident. The general reputation of the Illinois in this period was that “they carry off entire villages.”¹⁰⁵ In 1690, slaves brought through the Illinois Country included Siouans and Caddoans from the distant West, like the Kadohadacho, as well as Pawnee, Osage, and Missouria.¹⁰⁶

As the Illinois expanded their reach into the Southwest, Siouan-speakers treated the Illinois as regional hegemons. The Illinois were so powerful that Indians like the Osage appeared each year at the Grand Village, as Liette noted, “to recognize some of their people [the Illinois] as chiefs.”¹⁰⁷ New France intendant and Indian expert Antoine Denis Raudot echoed Liette: “This honor that they receive makes them believe that all the ground should tremble under them.”¹⁰⁸ These were the wages of a hundred years of expansion in the borderlands.

French support helped the Illinois build power, both militarily and economically. With French alliance, the Illinois continued their business as merchants, trading both slaves and bison hides to the French and Algonquian allies.¹⁰⁹ In turn, they took French goods to allied groups in the Southwest. The demand for goods there was high, and the Illinois took advantage: “These [western] people not being warlike like themselves and having need of their trade to get axes, knives, awls, and other objects, the Illinois buy these things from us to resell to them.”¹¹⁰ They also likely benefited from the mediation of the French, who helped them make alliances with Algonquians like the Ottawa and Miami, former enemies whom they now were able to provide with slaves.

The Illinois’s culture became quite militaristic in the Grand Village. As mentioned, their yearly cycle included a season of warfare. Liette noted, “It is ordinarily in February that they prepare to go to war.” At this time of year, chiefs hosted feasts, collecting dozens of warriors together to convince them that “the time is approaching to go in search of men.”¹¹¹ The war tradition in Illinois was animated by patrilineal kinship lines, traced through fathers and brothers.¹¹² Male relatives organized raiding parties to replace their lost brothers, uncles, and fathers. Demonstrating the imperative for patrilineal kinship replacement, one Illinois chief rallied male relatives together for an expedition: “I have not laughed since the time that my brother, father, or uncle died. He was your relative as well as mine, since we are all comrades. If my strength and my courage equalled yours, I believe that I would go to avenge a relative as brave and as good as he was, but being as feeble as I am, I cannot do better than address myself to you. It is from your arms, brothers, that I expect vengeance for our brother.”¹¹³

Although Liette noted the rituals involved as the Illinois prepared “to go in search of men,” the more usual situation was that they went in search of women, as noted. This was probably owing in part to the logistics of warfare, since women and children captives were easier to subdue and control. Moreover, the bison economy, as we have seen, created a demand for female laborers in Illinois. Perhaps most important, the preference for women captives may have had to do with the patrilineal kinship systems common to Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes that made women better candidates for assimilation than men.¹¹⁴ In any event, commenting on the Illinois warriors in battle during the 1660s, French commissary and early historian Claude-Charles Bacqueville de La Potherie noted how they had “the generosity to spare the lives of many women and children, part of whom remained among them.”¹¹⁵ Marquette noted the same practice among the Illinois in the 1670s: “The Illinois kill the men and scalp them and take [prisoner] only the women and children, whom they grant life.”¹¹⁶ At the Grand Village in the 1690s, the tradition continued: “They always spare the lives of women and children unless they have lost many of their own people,” Liette noted.¹¹⁷

The massive introduction of female slaves shaped life at the Grand Village. As La Salle said, there were “many more women than men” in Kaskaskia.¹¹⁸ Relatedly, all eyewitnesses noted the polygamy practiced by the Illinois. La Salle wrote that most Illinois men had multiple wives in this period, as many as ten or twelve.¹¹⁹ What the French often did not realize was that many of these wives were likely slaves.¹²⁰ A specific logic underlay these slave-based polygamous marriages. In the Illinois’s patrilineal society, children took the identity of their fathers, regardless of whether their mothers were native Illinois or outsiders married in, or even slaves. Thus marriages with multiple slaves strengthened the Illinois’s numbers, since all children would be raised as Illinois.¹²¹ This mode of reproduction combined with the bison-based mode of production to encourage female slavery among the Illinois in this period.

Indeed, the large number of female slaves among the Illinois in the contact-era forces us to rethink the supposedly devastating attack on the Illinois by Iroquois in 1680. In many French accounts, this was a decisive blow, as the Illinois lost 700–1,200 of their people.¹²² As Iroquois warriors invaded, Illinois men ran away, leaving women and children behind undefended. To the French, it was a sign that the Illinois were insufficiently warlike, passive victims, and utterly desperate for French support. But what the French did not realize was that the Kaskaskia village in 1680 was likely full of slaves, almost all of them women. The fact that the men gave up this number of women might not be a sign of Illinois weakness or timidity. It is probably better understood as a sign of how many slaves the Illinois had or how many they had access to. In fact, a likely reason the attack was so successful is because “more than half” of the Kaskaskia men were themselves away on a slaving mission.¹²³ The slave economy dominated the Illinois’s life at Great Kaskaskia.

Meanwhile, they underwrote all of this slave-based power by taking advantage of the other unique resource of their borderlands environment: bison. Many descriptions of the Illinois by French observers noted the huge scale of bison exploitation that the Illinois undertook in this period. Hennepin recalled hunting with the Illinois from the Grand Village and observed their capture of four hundred animals. La Salle did likewise. But the most important eyewitness was Pierre-Charles de Liette, the commandant at Fort St. Louis des Illinois in the 1690s.¹²⁴ On one single summer hunt that Liettes accompanied, the Illinois pursued a “great herd” and killed a “great number of buffalos” after shooting off “an extraordinary number of arrows.” The bottom line? One single hunt that Liette witnessed in the Illinois Valley yielded 1,200 animals.¹²⁵ Since a typical bison yielded 675 pounds of food, the Illinois utterly maximized their bison advantage at the Grand Village to support their massive population.

The Illinois used their strength to take revenge on the Iroquois. Frequent reports arrived back in Quebec detailing the gruesome rewards of the crucial alliance with the Illinois. In 1688: “96 Iroquois were killed [by the Illinois], the scalps of which victims were brought to fort Saint-Louis.”¹²⁶ In 1689: “Our Illinois have brought us 25 [Iroquois] slaves. We have caused them to be burned. I did not count those that were killed on the spot.”¹²⁷ Year after year, the tally grew; in 1694 the governor of New France estimated that the Illinois had taken a total of 400–500 Iroquois casualties.¹²⁸ The Illinois revenged themselves for their previous losses against the Iroquois.¹²⁹

The French certainly contributed to the Illinois’s power. They helped mediate disputes with the Ottawa and especially the Miami. But Illinois power was largely independent of the French, and the real logic of Great Kaskaskia was opportunism, not desperation or dependency. Although they could have stayed out of it, they united at the Grand Village during a moment of violence, becoming the masters of the slave trade and the borderlands. Indeed, while the French flattered themselves by thinking that the Illinois were dependent, in fact the Illinois probably came to this place because doing so enabled them to combine their various advantages—bison and slaves—with the new opportunities of the French material support and Algonquian alliance.

As New France supported La Salle’s colony and the Jesuit outposts, this created an unusual colonial situation. For the officials, the imperatives of Indian diplomacy meant tolerating and even supporting a nascent colony that had placed itself apart, outside of the normal rules of French government. Because the administration in New France was dependent on the agency of La Salle and the Jesuits for the alliance, administrators could not easily dictate how the colony ought to operate. Things happened here that would not have been allowed in other parts of the empire.

One example is the fur trade. In 1681, Colbert reformed the fur trade, instituting a license system that limited the number of traders allowed into the West. But Illinois remained outside of the new rules, and La Salle and Tonty had authority to issue their own trade permits.¹³⁰ La Forest, who became Tonty’s partner in the mid-1680s, explained the logic: the Illinois colony was on its own, financially. If the king wanted the Illinois alliance, he would have to permit Illinois colonists to trade for their own profit.¹³¹ As a result, the king did grant exclusive trade rights to the proprietors in 1686 “in order to give them the means of meeting the expense of maintaining the fort.”¹³² Indeed, by 1686, the officials in New France had to recognize that the Illinois Country was the exclusive trade property of La Salle’s partners. Denonville complained that Tonty and La Forest excluded licensed New France traders from the Illinois trade.¹³³ But nothing was done to stop this, even after Tonty and La Forest confiscated the goods of licensed Canadian traders in the Illinois.¹³⁴ No other part of the Great Lakes interior operated like this, with its own rules. Even as Colbert had tried to systematize the fur trade, Illinois was outside the system.

Another example is land. La Barre was frustrated that La Salle issued grants to habitants. For instance, in his 1683 grant to a voyageur called Jacques Bourdon, La Salle gave seigneurial rights, as though the colony was its own entity free of restrictions from New France.¹³⁵ This practice continued through the 1680s, and administrators often wondered whether this was even licit. As La Barre complained, the colony was attracting habitants and “debauch[ing] all the lazy men of [New France].”¹³⁶ To the New France authorities, the whole settlement flew in the face of efforts to keep farmers in the St. Lawrence Valley. Governor Denonville wrote in 1687, “M. de la Salle has made grants at Fort St. Louis to several Frenchmen who have been living there for several years without caring to return. This has occasioned a host of disorders and abominations.” Elaborating this view, Denonville complained: “These people to whom M. de la Salle has made grants are all youths who have done nothing toward cultivating the land…. These people set themselves up as independent and masters on their grants.”¹³⁷ In other areas of the West, illegal settlers were recalled and arrested. In Illinois, New France did not shut them down but rather allowed these “independent” colonists to be their own “masters.”

Another problem with the Illinois colony from an imperial standpoint was the question of authority itself. New France officials realized that La Salle considered his new colony to be autonomous. “I have been advised,” wrote Governor Denonville, “that Monsieur de la Salle claimed that the commandant of his fort in the Illinois was not under my orders.”¹³⁸ The government of New France became increasingly upset about the state of the Illinois colony in the late 1680s. In 1688, for example, the governor persuaded the king to revoke the charters in Illinois. The fact that this legal action had no effect on the actual goings on at Fort St. Louis reflects the very weak control that New France possessed over the outpost. Still, it is notable: “In regard to the concessions made by Sieur de La Salle in the area of Fort Saint-Louis, since these cause disorders similar to those which have been noted, His Majesty permits that they be revoked.”¹³⁹ Probably owing to the continued necessity of the Illinois alliance in the war against the Iroquois, the concessions were all renewed in 1690 when the king transferred the official charter of the colony from La Salle, who had died in 1684, to Tonty and La Forest. Not only did the king reconfirm the old concessions, but he granted to Tonty and La Forest the right to make new ones and charged them to “maintain and grow” the outpost.¹⁴⁰

If all this suggests that Illinois was in a special position in the empire, perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of its distinctiveness occurred in 1693. It was in that year that Michel Accault, the former engagé and fur trader, signed a contract and paid six thousand livres’ worth of beaver in exchange for a surprising new status—landlord of Illinois. Along with just one other man, Accault now officially controlled the small outpost in the Illinois Country.¹⁴¹ This was the same Michel Accault whom Hennepin once called “a Base Fellow,” “famous in this Illinois country for all his debaucheries.” In the 1680s, he had deserted, disputed, and rebelled. Now he was the landlord, half owner of an official concession.

It is easy to see why Accault was in control in Illinois. Accault was extremely able and powerful in the colony. For one thing, according to La Salle himself, he was expert in dealing with the local Illinois-speaking Indians. He was “tolerably versed in their languages and manners.” Moreover, he “knew all their customs and was esteemed by several of these nations [in Illinois Country].” In the often difficult task of winning the trust and affection of Indian groups, Accault “succeeded completely.” And his character was impressive. Summing up Accault’s qualities, La Salle wrote that the trader was “prudent, brave and cool.”¹⁴²

That a man like this took control of Illinois Country in 1693 tells us something important about Illinois’s earliest history and its relationship to the French empire. Many early visions for colonial activity in Illinois had failed. New France had failed to keep its empire restricted to the St. Lawrence. Jesuits had failed to keep Illinois an isolated, primitive church. La Salle, now dead, had not created his alternative empire—it remained just an “imaginary kingdom.” And yet Accault had succeeded. He became an important figure amid a powerful Indian population center, a place now reluctantly included in the French colonial empire. Accault’s authority represented compromise and collaboration—among Indians, Frenchmen, and imperialists. To realize their goals, officials would have to collaborate with a man like Accault.

In the 1680s, Indian affairs created a unique situation in Illinois. After the Iroquois attacks, the French became the “glue” that held together a fragmented social world of Algonquians in the pays d’en haut.¹⁴³ In Illinois, however, the exigencies of Indian policy also had another effect, which was to hold together diverse French people with competing visions of the French empire. While in most of the pays d’en haut it was French glue bonding Indian fragments, here in Illinois there was Indian glue uniting people with diverse schemes for empire. The imperatives of the Beaver Wars forced collaboration among Jesuits, fur traders, schemers, Indians, and officials.

But this collaboration seemed to be only as durable as the need for alliance against the Iroquois. Like so many relationships and experiments on the early American frontier, these accommodations were surely temporary and expedient. But meanwhile, on the ground, affairs at the Grand Village were entering a new phase. In the Grand Village, Jesuits, fur traders, and Indians were coming to understand each other, to forge relationships that went beyond the short-term imperatives of the fur trade or the Iroquois Wars. In 1694, an event was about to take place that would change the history of Illinois forever. Moving far beyond the hasty accommodations of the early years, this would be the beginning of a much more serious collaboration and the foundation of an idiosyncratic colonial community.