Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
English colonists. Soon thereafter the Iroquois were ready to resume their western campaigns for hunting territory and captives.26
In two devastating attacks in 1680 and 1681, Iroquois war parties killed or captured between 1,700 and 2,700 Illiniwek and Illini slaves, or 17 to 27 percent of the confederacy’s population. By themselves, or even with the help of one or two Native allies, the Illinois could not punish or deter the Iroquois invaders. To do so, Illinois captains would need a large supply of firearms and a military ally capable of assembling a regional Indian alliance against the Five Nations. That ally would turn out to be France, which was about to convert its thin commercial and ecclesiastical presence in the Great Lakes into a more formidable imperial establishment.27
The transformation came too late to help some of the region’s Indian peoples, in particular the precursors of the nation later known as the Shawnees. These Algonquian-speaking people were known in the seventeenth century as the Monytons and Ouabashe, and they probably, along with the Miamis of present-day Indiana, descended from the Fort Ancient culture. Most resided in farming settlements in present-day Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia, though early seventeenth-century European maps identify “Shawnees” living on the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. Certainly the Monytons and Ouabashe had trading connections with the Indians of present-day Pennsylvania, who sold their furs to Dutch and English traders and supplied them with beads, knives, and other European wares. The subdual of the Susquehannocks, however, cut this east-west trading connection, and in 1669 Iroquois war parties began raiding Monyton and Ouabashe towns for captives. By the mid-1680s, the two nations had lost several hundred people to the raiders, as well as others to epidemic disease. Seeking refuge and new trade links with Europeans, the proto-Shawnees dispersed, many of them moving south to present-day Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. A few moved to the English colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania, whence they began recolonizing the Ohio country in the late 1720s. By then the entire social and political landscape south of the Great Lakes had changed once more—perhaps as much as it had changed during the half century before the Shawnees’ initial departure.28
* * *
The people of the Lakes country displayed considerable diversity when Europeans first encountered them shortly after 1600. Numbering about 125,000 or 150,000 people, the Lakes Indians grouped themselves into more than a dozen nations and confederacies and spoke languages belonging to three distinct linguistic families. Like most human beings, however, they did not live in isolation; the human landscape of the Great Lakes region was not a mosaic of distinct tribes but a network of relationships, sustained by trade, warfare, and intermarriage. Since people who interact with one another tend, over time, to share cultural traits with one another, it is unsurprising that the region’s Native Americans had many features in common. With the exception of the Ojibwas, all of the Lakes Indians were farmers, relying on squash, corn, and beans for a large portion of their calories. Some, like the Hurons and Illiniwek, had agricultural surpluses that contemporary European peasants would have envied. All were traders to one degree or another, and their networks extended for hundreds of miles; the Hurons’ and Ojibwas’ into northwestern Canada, the Illiniweks’ to Lake Superior and the Missouri valley, the Monytons’ to the Dutch and English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. And all had ceremonies and institutions, like redistributive feasts, that allowed them to maintain harmony within their communities, while some had developed rituals, like the calumet ceremony, that helped them forge alliances with other nations.29
MAP 1. Native Americans in the Great Lakes region to 1700 CE. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
While the Great Lakes Indians were used to adopting outsiders’ culture and had developed mechanisms for promoting social harmony, the stresses and changes that Europeans brought to America proved too profoundly unsettling to manage, at least in the short term. The French came to the Upper Country in the seventeenth century neither to make war on the Indians nor to found permanent settlements, but they brought disruption and death all the same. French goods intensified rivalries among the region’s Indian peoples, as they struggled for access to furs and French trade goods. New diseases weakened some Indian nations, such as the Hurons, Ho-Chunks, and Monytons, and drove others into destructive “mourning wars” for captives. By the 1680s the human landscape of the Lakes region had changed considerably, with the eastern districts (Huronia and the upper Ohio valley) depopulated, the powerful Illinois confederacy besieged and damaged, and northern Michigan and Wisconsin full of refugees. In the eastern Lakes country, the land itself experienced “rewilding,” as Indians’ timber-clearing burns ceased and oak and maple spread into abandoned fields and towns. (Drawing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, these new trees contributed to the fall in global temperatures that characterized the century.) In the upper Lakes, the newcomers’ crowded settlements placed pressure on their localities’ thin-stretched food supply.30
Meanwhile, as their European homeland entered a long period of imperial rivalry with Britain, French officials hoped to treat the much-altered Lakes region as a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe a new pattern of alliances that would sustain a French claim of territorial sovereignty. They found that the region’s Native peoples were ready to form such partnerships, modeled on the alliances they had earlier made with one another. What the French would learn in the eighteenth century, however, is that whatever losses the Lakes Indians suffered in the 1600s, and however much they had come to rely on French goods and whatever offers of fealty they tendered, Native peoples still held the balance of power in the Upper Country. If the French wanted to claim the region as part of their empire—that is, if they wanted to exclude other Europeans from the Great Lakes—they needed first to learn how to weave themselves into the social fabric of what remained an Indian country.
3
France’s Uneasy Imperium
DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, THE first Europeans to encounter the Great Lakes Indians shifted the emphasis of their colonial project from commerce to empire. The new goal of French officials in Canada was to hold territory, with the aid of Native American allies, and use it as a barrier against English expansion. A secondary goal, projected into the long term, was to persuade those allies to become French subjects, less through force than through voluntary religious conversion and intermarriage with French colonists. The new empire had little place in it for independent Indian nations, and French flags, forts, and soldiers demonstrated both France’s imperial goals and its willingness to pursue them with violence. At various times between 1680 and 1750, the Iroquois, Mesquakies, and Chickasaws felt the sharp end of French imperial policy. Yet many, if not most, of the Native peoples of the Lakes country would later recall the era of French dominion as something of a golden age.
When they waxed nostalgic for the era of French rule, the Lakes Indians observed that the French, unlike their British and American successors, never coveted their land nor destroyed their settlements. The nineteenth-century US historian Francis Parkman attributed this to differences between English and French views of Indians: where the English “scorned and neglected” the Indians, the French “embraced and cherished” them. Parkman’s comparison would have puzzled France’s Native American adversaries, and the understanding of European motives that it displayed was shallow, but it does oblige one to ask why the two colonial powers had such different relationships with Indians and leads one to find answers in the empires’ differing goals. What drove most English colonists to North America was colonialism, the desire to subjugate indigenous peoples and seize their land and resources. Furs and converts drew the French into the North American interior, but what kept them there was imperialism, the desire to assert sovereignty over the continent and deny other empires the use of its resources.1
Imperialism was hardly a peaceful or benevolent motive, but since it resulted from conflict with other European empires, it prevented France from concentrating on the subdual of Native Americans. On the contrary, France depended absolutely on its Indian allies to help protect the remote forts and settlements where the French flag waved and contain the expansion of England’s fast-growing colonies. French officials could not afford to