Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
the Anishinaabeg clearly were, the Huron/Wyandots feared that their new homes in the Huron-Michigan-Superior confluence region remained vulnerable to Iroquois attack. In 1652 they moved west to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they lived on several islands near the mouth of that inlet. Several years later the refugees moved onto the mainland and into the valley of the upper Mississippi River, settling for three years on an island in Lake Pepin (sixty miles south of present-day Minneapolis) and for another year near the headwaters of Wisconsin’s Black River. Much of the region through which they passed had fertile soil and an abundance of wild animals, the latter drawn to the resource-rich ecological boundary separating the Illinois-Wisconsin prairie from the northern Lakes forests. Approximately twenty thousand Indians from a half-dozen nations dwelt together in the Wisconsin country in the mid-seventeenth century: the Ho-Chunks, known to their adversaries as the Winnebagos; the Mascoutens, or Fire People; the Mesquakies or Red Earth People, known to the French as the Fox Indians; and the Menominees, or “Folles Avoines.” The Menominees’ French name referred to wild rice, an abundant aquatic grain that many Native American women harvested in the northern Lakes country. Throughout the region, women produced and provided most of the food Indians consumed: wild rice, maple sugar, strawberries and other wild fruits, and crops like maize and pumpkins. Native American women also collectively owned the local resource sites that sustained their kinfolk: rice lakes, maple groves, berry patches, and fields. Indian men in the region worked as hunters and fishermen, and, as the local Indian nations were patrilineal, they passed their familial and clan identities to their children.18
In the Wisconsin country, Indians from different nations often lived together in the same settlements. It was not always a land of peace, however. In the early seventeenth century, the Illinois, Odawas, and Mesquakies fought with the Ho-Chunks, whom warfare, smallpox, and other disasters (like the sinking of one of their canoe fleets on the eve of a military campaign) dramatically weakened. In 1655, an Odawa and Huron refugee community near Green Bay repelled an Iroquois raiding party, whose warriors the Illiniwek and Ojibwas subsequently captured or killed. And in the 1660s, after traders Pierre Radisson and Medard des Groseilliers introduced them to the European fur trade, the Dakota Sioux expanded into the lands bordering Lake Superior. Numbering around thirty-eight thousand, the Sioux dwelt for part of the year in fixed settlements in the upper Mississippi valley but spent most of the year in mobile camps hunting deer, elk, and beaver. The prospect of trading with the French became an alluring one for the Dakotas, not only because French traders offered metal wares and firearms (which the Sioux initially called “sacred iron”), but because they offered potential marriage partners for single women in a society with strong incest taboos.19
In the process of extending their hunting and trading eastward, the Dakotas came into conflict with the Wyandots, who in 1662 had moved to Chequamegon (or Shagwaamikong) Bay, off Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin. The Chequamegon Bay settlement had been founded the preceding year by the Wyandots’ Odawa allies, who wanted access to the beaver-hunting grounds in northern Wisconsin and refuge from the Iroquois. Instead they and the Wyandots found themselves in a new war with the Dakotas, an on-again, off-again fight for captives and hunting territories that lasted a decade. In 1671, the Wyandots retreated to Michilimackinac, where they would remain for three decades, while the Sioux continued to hunt and fish in the upper Great Lakes for half a century.20
The Wyandots’ French allies had by now begun to establish their own tentative presence in the upper Great Lakes region. As early as 1634, the explorer Jean Nicolet had landed by Green Bay and met with the Ho-Chunks, whom he impressed with an embroidered mandarin robe he had brought in case he discovered a passage to China. French traders were slow to follow, as the Iroquois-Huron war had disrupted the fur trade and as the Odawas and Ojibwas were willing to bring furs to the new town of Montreal. Eventually, some traders began traveling to the upper Lakes, and Jesuit missionaries followed them into the pays d’en haut, establishing missions at Point Saint Esprit in 1665 and at Sault Sainte Marie in 1668. They began another mission at Green Bay, where several Indian nations had settled to defend themselves against the Iroquois, in 1669.21
One of these missions, Point Saint Esprit by Chequamegon Bay, the Jesuits established to preach to the Odawas and to the Huron/Wyandots, but they also received Indian visitors from further south, including trading parties from the Illinois confederacy. Some of these Illini travelers expressed interest in receiving Jesuit missionaries in their homeland, and in 1673 a priest from Saint Esprit, Jacques Marquette, accompanied other French explorers through the Fox-Wisconsin River portage and down the Mississippi River to the Illinois country. He and subsequent French explorers wrote detailed accounts of how the people of the powerful Illini confederacy lived in the seventeenth century.22
The Illinois or Illiniwek (“The People”) resided between the Illinois, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers, with outliers in present-day Indiana and Arkansas. Their contact-era homeland occupied the ecological borderland between the tallgrass prairies and the forested region south of the Great Lakes. The rich farmland and ample fish and game of their domain—the latter including bison, which lived on the Illinois prairie in herds of four hundred or more—sustained an Illinois population of more than ten thousand. Like the pre-Columbian cultures of the Ohio valley, the Illinois lived in dispersed towns but gathered periodically in their “Grand Village” (really a small city) to attend feasts, lacrosse games, and religious ceremonies. Their religious pantheon had at its apex the sun, which Illinois men saluted at the start of their dances and invoked in diplomatic proceedings. Below this supreme deity lived a multitude of manitous, spiritual beings associated with totemic animals and powerful humans. The Illinois initially identified the Jesuits and their secular companions as manitous because of their cultivated aura of other-worldliness and the powerful goods that they sold. One did not have to be European to be a manitou: Illinois berdache, men who dressed as women and assumed cross-gender identities, were also regarded by their kinsmen as manitous—“spirits or persons of consequence,” as Marquette put it.23
The Illinois people displayed great friendliness toward Frenchmen but had also devised for themselves a fearsome military reputation. The confederacy’s warriors fought routinely with the Indian nations residing to their west, north, and south, using firearms obtained from French trading partners. The principal aim of Illinois warfare, as with many other Native North Americans, was to acquire human captives. Some of these the Illiniwek tortured to death, while many others they turned into slaves, whom they referred to as “dogs.” The Illiniwek used their slaves as laborers, working in the fields under women’s supervision or hewing wood and drawing water for their masters. Some elite men exploited slave women’s reproductive labor, coercing them into sexual relationships as their second or third wives—in the Illinois language, “other wives,” a term of contempt. The threat of violence hung over all slaves, but the Illiniwek periodically returned captives to their kinfolk to restore peace. As often, they traded slaves to other nations, including the French, to solidify alliances in advance of future wars.24
Even one of the confederacy’s ostensible rites of peace, the calumet ceremony, had an underlying military purpose. The calumet was a long, stone-and-wood tobacco pipe that the western Lakes Indians had adopted from the Plains Indians, with the first examples probably entering the region via Wisconsin around 1350 CE. The Illinois and their neighbors decorated calumets with feathers and ceremonially presented them to the sun, thereby consecrating the pipes and infusing them with celestial power. They employed the calumet like a baton in a balletic dance, which they performed to honor and ceremonially adopt esteemed visitors. However, they also used the calumet dance to seal alliances and to show off their warriors’ prowess. Before the calumet dance the Illinois displayed their warriors’ weapons, and during the ceremony warriors performed war dances and recited their martial exploits. The calumet served as a military instrument as much as the war club or gun.25
If the Illinois seemed militaristic, it was probably because they believed it best, while living on a flat floodplain accessible to potential enemies, to cultivate a strong military reputation. This did not prove helpful, however, when the Five Nations of Iroquois struck into Illinois country in the 1680s. During the previous two decades the Iroquois had been preoccupied with fighting the French and the Susquehannock Indians, but in 1666 French troops had coerced the Five Nations into signing a peace treaty, and in 1676 the Iroquois