Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
to turn Indians into Frenchmen, extending French identity and privileges to any child of mixed parentage who became a Catholic. Conversion to Catholicism proved appealing to a substantial minority of the Lakes Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: several thousand Hurons, a number of Anishinaabeg, and about two thousand Illiniwek adopted the new faith. Part of Catholicism’s appeal lay in the techniques of the Jesuit missionaries who introduced the faith to the Lakes Indians. The Jesuits moved into potential converts’ communities, learned their languages, and encouraged them to blend indigenous and European religious practices; they were not dismayed but pleased to see Illinois converts giving propitiatory offerings of tobacco to a crucifix or claiming when they died that they would “take possession of paradise in the name of the whole nation.”19
Catholicism proved especially appealing to single women in societies with a reduced male population, both because the Catholic faith honored celibacy among the female laity and because conversion made it easier for Indian women to contract sacramental marriages with French traders. Catholic women like Marie Rouensa-Oucatewa, a Kaskaskia chief’s daughter, could use the option of celibacy to negotiate with their parents regarding an unwanted marriage. They could employ the Church and its saints, like Margaret and Bridget (both patronesses of married women), as sources of personal spiritual power. Missionaries sometimes encouraged fur traders to marry Catholic Indians in the expectation that convert wives would make their unruly husbands better Catholics. This influence sometimes extended beyond the home; among the Illiniwek, female converts worked as lay teachers (as Rouensa did) and church bell ringers. French traders who married Catholic Indian converts, meanwhile, might find those marriages harder to dissolve than a “country” partnership, but they became more thoroughly part of their wives’ kinship networks and usually also gained an introduction to their spouses’ new religious “kinsmen”—their Catholic godparents.20
Intermarriage became particularly common in southwestern Illinois, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, where Frenchmen and Illiniwek had established two bicultural villages, Cahokia and Kaskaskia, in the early eighteenth century. During the first few decades of the 1700s, about one-fifth of the sacramental marriages in the province were between French men and Indian, usually Illini, women. The inhabitants of these settlements created what on the surface resembled European farming villages, complete with churches, mills, herds of livestock, and wheat fields. In many respects, however, their inhabitants’ lives resembled those of Lakes Indians: the white male settlers were usually fur traders and militiamen (warriors, of a sort), while their Illini wives worked in the fields and tended the livestock. Some Lakes Indian women became well-to-do through their marital alliances. Marie Rouensa left behind a large material estate, including several houses and barns and several dozen head of livestock. Her near-contemporary, Marie Réaume, acquired a different but equally important “estate”: a social network that tied her, through her godpar-enting of Indian converts and the marriage of her daughters to French traders, to prominent families in Michilimackinac and Saint Joseph.21
Illinois’s bicultural and accommodative character began to change in 1717, when the French government annexed the territory to Louisiana and commandant Pierre de Boisbriant began issuing land grants to French settlers. By the 1750s there were six French towns in the region, with 750 free inhabitants and 600 slaves, most of them African. The region was by then annually producing one million pounds of flour, which its farmers sold to the French garrisons and settlements in lower Louisiana. The French settlements in Illinois still retained some Native American features: several dozen of their free inhabitants were Catholic Indians or their biracial children, about 25 percent of the villages’ slave population was Native American, and the French male habitants still avoided field work, preferring to leave this to their bondsmen. However, segregation and conflict were becoming more the order of the day in the province. Local officials had ordered many of Kaskaskia’s original Indian inhabitants to leave the town, and by the 1730s both French settlers and their Indian neighbors were squabbling over straying cattle and French encroachment on Illini lands. By the 1740s interracial marriages had become vanishingly rare in the province.22
As Illinois’s experiences show, while the French and the Lakes Indians generally sought mutual accommodation, they did not always succeed. Rivalry and conflict periodically disrupted peaceful human relations in the region. The bloodiest disruption, the “Fox Wars,” lasted two decades and pitted the Mesquakies (Foxes) and their allies against the Anishinaabeg, Huron-Wyandots, and Illiniwek. Both of the Fox Wars grew out of internecine rivalry between these adversaries, and the French tried to stay out of both conflicts. In each case, however, France’s Indian allies compelled the Europeans to fight.
The Mesquakies had intermittently fought their Lakes Indian rivals for several decades, and a brief period of peace, during which the rival nations united to fight the Iroquois, had ended with the 1701 Montreal treaty. French and Mesquakie relations had become strained at about the same time, when some of the Foxes blocked the Wisconsin-Fox River portage in order to deprive their Dakota rivals of trade. In 1710, Sieur de Cadillac invited the Mesquakies and their Mascouten allies to Michigan, hoping thereby to clear the portage and build up Detroit’s trading population. About one thousand people accepted his invitation, but war captain Pemoussa’s band of Mesquakies alarmed the French by settling directly adjacent to Detroit. Meanwhile, the Mascouten migrants became embroiled in a war with the Odawas and, in 1712, lost over two hundred people to an Odawa attack. The surviving Mascoutens took refuge with their Mesquakie allies at Detroit. The increasingly agitated French commandant ordered both nations to leave their settlement and called on his own Native allies for reinforcements. In May 1712 a large Anishinaabe, Huron, and Illinois war party attacked and dispersed the Fox settlement, then pursued the fleeing Mesquakies and killed or enslaved more than one thousand of them.23
Such massively disproportionate violence is difficult to explain, but most likely France’s allies wanted to make a show of force that would impress and intimidate the French. The attack had quite a different effect on Pemoussa’s Mesquakie kinsmen, who in retaliation raided Anishinaabe and other Indian towns around Lake Michigan. Eventually, Governor Vaudreuil had to launch a punitive expedition, which in 1716 attacked the principal town of the Wisconsin Mesquakies, forcing the defenders to capitulate. Casualties proved so light, however, that at least one historian suspects the French attack was a “sham,” intended less to punish the Foxes than to pacify them and reopen the faltering fur trade. Certainly the peace terms that the French imposed on the Mesquakies included the payment of furs and Indian slaves to repay the costs of the war, and the expedition’s commander boasted that his efforts yielded “an extraordinary abundance of rich and valuable peltries.”24
Peace between the French and Mesquakies lasted for a decade, but the Foxes resumed fighting their Native rivals soon after 1716. French slave traders played a role in reigniting the conflict, encouraging the Mesquakies’ enemies to raid Fox settlements for captives. In retaliation, the Mesquakies destroyed two Illini towns, driving the remaining Illiniwek southward, and made war on the Ojibwas. Fox warriors tortured and executed their own captives: a French priest visiting the Mesquakie homeland observed the racked and burned bodies of Fox victims outside their towns. French officials, hoping to preserve the slowly reviving Lakes fur trade, tried to keep their nation out of the internecine war, but the conciliatory Governor Vaudreuil died in 1725 and his successor feared the Mesquakies would endanger the new French settlements in Illinois. Negotiations between that new governor, Charles de Beauharnois, and Fox chiefs broke down when the Illiniwek refused to return Mesquakie slaves. In 1728 Beauharnois initiated the final phase of the Fox Wars, sending sixteen hundred warriors and French troops to extirpate the Mesquakies. The governor’s adversaries did not lack allies of their own, however, and from one of these, the Six Nations of Iroquois, the Foxes received warning of the attack. When the expedition reached Green Bay in the summer of 1728, the attackers discovered that their quarry had retreated westward. The French consoled themselves by burning the Mesquakies’ abandoned towns and fields.25
The allies changed tactics. Smaller Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee war bands harried Mesquakie settlements and travelers. By the summer of 1730, these raiders had killed or enslaved five hundred Fox Indians, and the surviving Mesquakies decided, for their own safety, to seek refuge with the Six Nations. To reach Iroquoia the Foxes