Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey
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