Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
went to some trouble to accommodate its allies’ demands and expectations, to provide them with regular gifts and regulated trade, to set aside their own standards of justice in favor of the Lakes Indians’ customs, and even, through intermarriage, to tie Frenchmen to Indians’ kinship networks.2
Accommodation did not always bring peace. Maintaining alliances with some Indian nations could create enmity between the French and other Native American groups. Moreover, France’s reliance on Indians, whose motives they did not always understand, did not make French officials feel especially secure. Indeed, with the passing decades they grew increasingly worried about their “subjects’” reliability and were prone to view every sign of disaffection or discontent as evidence of an anti-French conspiracy. In these fears lay the seeds both of French warfare against some of its Indian neighbors and ultimately of another radical change in policy that helped wreck the fragile edifice of French rule.
That edifice lasted for approximately seventy years, however, and the Indians of the Great Lakes region did not find it a terrible place in which to dwell.
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France’s shift to an American military empire arguably began in the 1660s, when Louis XIV royalized and garrisoned New France, and when Quebec’s governor used royal troops to invade Iroquoia and coerce the Five Nations into a peace treaty. Initially this change had little impact on New France’s policies or the Upper Country; Louis informed his new governors that he still intended Quebec to function as a trading colony and preferred it should remain compact. In the 1680s, though, the Iroquois’s devastating raids into Illinois provoked French military intervention in the Great Lakes region and shifted that region’s balance of power and alliances.3
In 1684, one of the Five Nations’ war parties plundered French voyageurs and attacked a trading post, Fort Saint Louis, in Illinois. The Iroquois probably viewed France’s shipment of weapons to the Five Nations’ western adversaries as a hostile act, and decided to respond in kind. The attack provoked a similar response from the French. New France’s governor, Joseph-Antoine de La Barre, had already begun to station troops at the Lakes trading posts, and in retaliation for the 1684 raid he organized a punitive expedition against the Hodenosaunee. Influenza crippled La Barre’s army, however, and he essentially capitulated to Iroquois emissaries’ demands without firing a shot. Three years later La Barre’s successor, the Marquis de Denonville, organized a more successful strike: twenty-one hundred gunmen, including four hundred Indians, landed in Seneca country and destroyed several towns and four hundred thousand bushels of corn. This did not prove a knockout blow, and its main effect was to strengthen a budding alliance between the Five Nations and the English colony of New York.4
The outbreak of war between England and France in 1689 placed New France on the defensive. Louis XIV declined to send reinforcements to Canada while he needed them in Europe, and England’s American colonists and Indian allies launched a powerful offensive. In the summer of 1689 over fifteen hundred Iroquois warriors raided the French village of Lachine, near Montreal, killing or capturing one hundred residents, while in 1690 a Massachusetts naval expedition under William Phips attacked the French colonial capital of Quebec. When garbled news of the Lachine raid reached the upper Lakes, some of the Native American chiefs there believed the French had lost Montreal and would soon abandon their Indian allies. A peace party emerged among the Odawas, Hurons, and Mascoutens, and the new governor of Canada, Louis de Frontenac, feared that the dissidents would form their own separate alliance with the Iroquois. To forestall this possibility, Frontenac sent emissaries to Michilimackinac to meet with the disaffected nations. The diplomats told the Hurons and Odawas that France remained still powerful and able to punish its adversaries, but the haste with which they had traveled to Michilimackinac (a journey that included fighting their way through an Iroquois ambush) and the boatloads of presents they brought indicated the extent of their masters’ anxiety. France could neither defeat the Iroquois nor maintain its regional power without the Lakes Indians’ cooperation.5
The crisis passed, and the French and their allies resumed their offensive against the Five Nations. War parties from the Anishinaabe, Illini, Miami, and Wyandot nations raided the Senecas and Onondagas, two of the more important Hodenosaunee nations, allegedly taking over four hundred scalps. French troops also undertook two more expeditions against the Iroquois, accompanied by a knowledgeable and formidable ally, the Kahnewakes. This nation originated with the Franco-Iroquois peace treaty of 1666, which allowed French Jesuits to establish a mission in Iroquoia. Several hundred Iroquois men and women, chiefly Mohawks, became Christian converts, and in the 1670s French officials persuaded many of them to move to Kahnewake, a mission settlement adjoining Montreal. The converts, who collectively took the name of their new home, retained many of their old lifeways. They continued to hunt, raise corn, and wear their hair in Iroquois fashion, and they found continuities between their new faith and indigenous traditions, substituting the Mass for sacrificial feasts and using mortification of the flesh (flagellation) to evoke the stoicism of a warrior undergoing torture.6
If the Kahnewakes’ cultural transformation had been partial and carefully managed, not so their political alignment. Christian Mohawks had come to the Saint Lawrence valley in pursuit of French spiritual power, and now they aligned themselves with French military power as well. Kahnewake warriors helped French soldiers attack the Five Nations Mohawks in 1693 and the Oneidas and Onondagas in 1696. The attackers burned towns and killed or captured several hundred English-aligned Iroquois. The Hodenosaunee could not replace these losses through capture and adoption, and by the end of the decade the Five Nations had lost nearly half of their male fighting population. They also lost a substantial part of their territory. The Mississaugas (People of the River’s Mouth), an Anishinaabe people closely related to the Ojibwas, drove the Iroquois from the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The region became the Mississaugas’ homeland, the place where they dwelled, fished, harvested crops, and held their festivals. The Five Nations now had a dynamic and powerful Native adversary at the threshold of the Longhouse.7
The war between France and the Iroquois’s principal ally, England, came to an end, and the Iroquois lacked the manpower to continue fighting on their own. They chose now to stop. Following a preliminary ceasefire in 1700, the Five Nations sent delegates to a peace conference in Montreal, the cramped, palisaded French trading town at the rapids of the Saint Lawrence. There two hundred Iroquois joined Governor Louis-Hector de Callière and over one thousand Lakes Indians and spent the summer of 1701 feasting, returning captives, and exchanging wampum belts and words of condolence for the departed. At length the delegates affixed their marks or clan totems to a formal treaty, establishing peace between the signatory nations and admitting all parties into one another’s homelands to trade. It might have represented the apex of French power and prestige in North America.8
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Shortly after the conclusion of the Treaty of Montreal, trader and adventurer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac received approval to establish a multiracial settlement, Detroit (“the Strait”), on the river connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie. The new outpost would slow Iroquois commercial expansion into the upper Lakes (though Cadillac did encourage Iroquois hunters to trade there), discourage English expansion into the region, and concentrate the Indians of lower Michigan in one more easily governable place. While Detroit would include a French garrison and Jesuit missionaries, its principal settlers would be Native Americans: Odawas and Huron/Wyandots from Michilimackinac, Potawatomis from the Saint Joseph River in southwestern Michigan. These communities’ leaders expressed reluctance to emigrate, but their people began moving in small groups to the Detroit River in 1702, and by 1710 over eighteen hundred Lakes Indians resided there.9
In 1706, an incident at Detroit demonstrated both the limits of French power and the need for Frenchmen and Indians to accommodate one another’s differences if they wished to continue living in the same settlements. A party of Odawas, believing that the Miamis planned to attack their village, preemptively struck the Miami settlement near Fort Pontchartrain and killed five people; subsequently, Odawa warriors killed two French soldiers and a Jesuit outside of the fort. Normally, the Odawas compensated the families of murder victims by giving them valuable gifts, a ritual known as “covering the dead” or “covering the grave,” but Governor Philippe de Vaudreuil told Odawa