Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
his mercy. In the fall of 1707, the Odawa captain who led the previous year’s attack, Le Pésant, surrendered to the French at Detroit. Cadillac, after briefly imprisoning Le Pésant (registering thereby his submission to French authority), quietly allowed the captain to escape from custody.10
This “drama” of submission and reprieve synthesized both French and Lakes Indian judicial cultures. Where the French, like other Europeans, believed in retributive justice, most of the Native peoples of the Great Lakes region favored redemptive justice: the forgiving of criminals and their payment of presents to their victim’s family. In a similar episode two decades earlier, French trader Daniel Greysolon Dulhut blended the two legal cultures himself: he executed a Menominee man and an Ojibwa man for killing two Frenchmen, but then he gave compensatory gifts to the Ojibwa man’s father and accepted wampum belts from Anishinaabe leaders to “cover the [French] dead.” In another case, sixteen years after the killings at Detroit, officials in Illinois freed a Frenchman accused of killing another Frenchman because an Illinois chief intervened on the killer’s behalf. Even in conflicts involving only their own countrymen, French officials could not behave exactly as they pleased; in Native country, they had to adhere to Indians’ rules, so long as they wished to keep living and doing business there.11
This principle applied not only to France’s administration of justice in the Upper Country but also to everyday economic and social relationships between colonists and Indians. The Franco-Indian fur trade, in particular, depended on large concessions the French made to Lakes Indian needs, sensibilities, and expectations. These included fixed, bon marché (“good deal”) prices for furs and European merchandise, and the obligation of French traders and officials to give their Indian clients regular presents of ammunition, clothing, and tobacco. “All the nations of Canada,” observed Governor Beauharnois in 1730, “regard the governor-general as their father, who as a result in this capacity . . . should give them something to eat, to dress themselves with and to hunt.” Such gifts annually cost the Crown 20,000 livres (about $180,000 in 2016 US dollars) per year by 1716, and they imposed additional costs on traders, insofar as Lakes Indians treated preseason advances as gifts and often declined to repay the loans in full. The French had to understand, or pretend to understand, that for Native Americans the fur trade was not a rationalized exchange of goods but a display of reciprocity and solidarity between French “fathers” and Indian “children.”12
French traders and officials also had to understand what the term “father” meant to the Lakes Indians. If the newcomers hoped that metaphorical “fatherhood” gave them the ability to command their dutiful Indian progeny, they hoped in vain. In the Great Lakes region, Indian families usually traced descent through the father’s line, but many patrilineal nations (like the Potawatomis) adopted matrilocal dwelling customs, and over time authority in matrilocal households tended to shift to the mother’s line. Moreover, some Lakes Indians applied the kinship term “father” to a range of male relatives. The Kickapoos used “father” (mo’sa) to describe a person’s biological father, paternal uncles, and all the male relatives in his/her mother’s family. Native speakers thus might—indeed, commonly did—use “father” not to describe a dread authority figure but to evince a jolly avuncular relative, who dispensed gifts and settled arguments between his children. Fathers did not rule; they indulged.13
If the French did not meet these expectations, their Native American trading partners had other options. After the 1701 peace conference gave them access to the trading center of Albany, they could do business with the English. Odawa leaders made this clear to French officials when Governor Callière announced he would let French traders lower the prices they paid for furs: many objected to the announcement, and Le Pésant declared that his people would henceforth trade with the English. (The governor backed down.) The Lakes Indians could also go without European goods for several years, having retained the ability to make hide clothing, stone blades, and other traditional wares. As late as 1718, the former commandant of Detroit noted that French merchandise diffused but slowly through the Lakes Indian population: the Ho-Chunks and Mesquakies near Green Bay and Illiniwek and Miamis south of the Lakes still wore skin clothing (women in Wisconsin wore some cloth garments), and Illinois men still commonly used bows and arrows. When in 1697 the French Crown tried to restrain unruly traders by suspending trading licenses and obliging Indian hunters to come to Montreal, those hunters stayed home, dealt with smugglers, or came no further downstream than Detroit. Fur exports from Canada fell dramatically, and in 1714 New France’s governor began efforts to return French traders to the Lakes country.14
Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14), with France facing a fur shortage after decades of glut and with British access to the Canadian interior (via Hudson Bay) now guaranteed by treaty, the French government enlarged the support it gave the Lakes fur trade. Governor Vaudreuil and French traders opened new posts at Green Bay, at Kaministiquia on Lake Superior (near modern Thunder Bay, Ontario), and at Ouiatenon (modern Lafayette) on the Wabash River. The Crown authorized new trading licenses and temporarily took over the fur trade at unprofitable posts like Fort Niagara, which France had established earlier in the century to let Lakes Indian hunters bypass Albany. The French government also installed smiths at many of the Lakes trading posts to repair Indian visitors’ guns and metal wares. This concession made Indians less dependent on the French but probably more willing to do repeat business for nonmetallic merchandise, particularly clothing. Thanks to this new government support of the fur trade, and traders’ increasing use of large “master canoes” that could carry up to two tons, the volume of French trade goods shipped into the Great Lakes doubled from the 1690s to the 1720s.15
The enlargement of the French trade also furnished the Lakes Indians with new ways to buy European goods. French voyageurs traveling into the Lakes country faced an arduous journey, requiring them to cover twelve hundred miles or more (the distance from Montreal to Illinois) in fourteen-hour days of paddling, and to carry up to three hundred pounds each over portages. To increase the manpower available to them and minimize their need for heavy supplies, fur traders hired Native Americans as porters and purchased food, warm clothing, and other equipment from Lakes Indian women. The Senecas at Niagara, the Potawatomis and Wyandots at Detroit, the Odawas at Michilimackinac, and the Ho-Chunks and Odawas in Wisconsin became not only suppliers of furs and peltries but part of New France’s trading infrastructure.16
The relationship between French traders and their Indian partners was never merely an economic one, and in some cases French men and Native American women agreed to make that relationship familial and biological. Some Lakes Indian nations, like the Odawas and Huron-Wyandots, had developed a female-to-male gender imbalance after their wars with the Iroquois. Liaisons with Frenchmen provided single women from these nations with an alternative to remaining single, of which their kinsmen would have disapproved, or becoming junior wives in a polygynous marriage, which might well prove abusive. (Jesuit missionaries were, in any case, discouraging the Anishinaabeg and Hurons from practicing polygamy.) They also provided both Indian women and French traders with some of the benefits of a more formal marriage: sex, companionship, access to resources like European goods or food and clothing, language instruction, and children who would legitimately belong to at least one society (their mother’s).17
Some traders also gained entry into prominent Indian families through “country” marriages. The Frenchman Sabrevois Descaris married a very prominent Ho-Chunk woman, Hopoekaw (1711–ca. 1770), in the late 1720s, presumably to improve his business relationship with his wife’s relatives. Descaris later deserted his spouse and children, but his breaking of his marital alliance did not injure the larger political alliance he and his fellow countryman sought to build. By midcentury, Hopoekaw had become the Ho-Chunks’ principal chief, and in this capacity she counseled her countrymen to fight as French allies in the Seven Years’ War.18
French officials and Jesuit priests generally did not approve of marriages “à la façon du pays” (in the custom of the country), but they did recognize that, as in Hopoekaw’s and Descaris’s case, Indian-white intermarriage could strengthen alliances and promote cultural conversion. In the 1660s, French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert advised colonists to bring Indians into their own settlements and convert them to French customs and Catholic Christianity. The