Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols

Peoples of the Inland Sea - David Andrew Nichols


Скачать книгу
leaders would give the Foxes free passage. The Illiniwek and their allies assembled thirteen hundred warriors and colonial militia to intercept the Mesquakies. After a brief siege of the Foxes’ camp on the Sangamon River, and a failed parley, the attackers killed about six hundred Mesquakies and enslaved most of the survivors. Only a few hundred Foxes survived to take refuge over the Mississippi River. In less than twenty years the Fox Indians lost over 80 percent of their population.26

      In their duration and ferocity, the Fox Wars evoked the Iroquois wars of the previous century. In both of these conflicts, the intense desire for captives turned ordinary internecine fighting into wars of annihilation. While the Iroquois primarily wanted captives to replace their own losses, however, the Mesquakies’ adversaries intended to sell most of their prisoners as slaves. New France became the primary destination for these bondsmen, and hard labor and degradation their lot. Most of the eighteen hundred Indians whom French Canadians enslaved became construction and field workers in French towns or found themselves forced into concubinage in an habitant’s bed. If the Fox Wars proved anything, it was the diversity of French motives in North America: French traders and officials might want peaceful relations with the Lakes Indians, but French settlers wanted land and laborers, and their desires made peaceful coexistence difficult if not impossible. The wars also showed that the desire for vengeance, prestige, captives, or a combination thereof could push virtually any group of people, Native American or European, into a war of annihilation. It could even, as in the case of the Iroquois wars, push them into a war hundreds of miles from their homeland. Prosecuting such a war to a successful conclusion, however, was another thing, as the French learned during their other major conflict with Native Americans in the continental interior: the Chickasaw War.27

      Although the Chickasaws resided in present-day Mississippi, their hunting ranges extended north to the Ohio River, and since the late seventeenth century they had been fighting a desultory war with the Illiniwek, whose towns they raided for plunder and slaves. (The Illiniwek periodically returned the favor.) By 1730, however, Chickasaw leaders had become alarmed by French Louisiana’s campaign against the neighboring Natchez Indians, and they sent emissaries to Illinois to organize a Native American defensive alliance against France. French officials instead arrested the three diplomats and sent them to New Orleans, where the governor burned them alive. Subsequently the Chickasaws gave asylum to Natchez refugees and began raiding French shipping in the Mississippi River. Governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville of Louisiana decided that he could not preserve his government’s credibility with its Indian allies—protect “the honor of the French name”—unless he extirpated the Chickasaws, and thus at great expense he organized two military expeditions against the Chickasaws’ towns.28

      Bienville’s two expeditions drew on both Louisiana and the Great Lakes region for manpower. The first army, dispatched in 1736, included Illini and Miami warriors, who participated in a failed assault on a fortified Chickasaw town; the Illiniwek fled the field after their French commander was wounded, and Bienville’s army took over sixty casualties. Bienville spent three years organizing another army, but his second expedition essentially collapsed in the field, depleted by desertion and illness. The governor’s mutinous officers forced him to sign a truce with the Chickasaws before his soldiers ever reached Chickasaw country. The truce itself was short-lived; in the early 1740s, Chickasaw warriors raided French shipping on the lower Ohio River, and their nation’s war with France lasted nearly two more decades. The Franco-Indian expeditions of 1736 and 1739 had proven so expensive, however, that Bienville decided to rely henceforth on his southern Indian allies, particularly the Choctaws, to harry and raid the Chickasaws.29

      * * *

      The “Great Peace” of 1701, which marked the end of the Iroquois wars in the Lakes country, did not inaugurate a peaceful epoch in that region’s history. For three decades Lakes Indian warriors and French officers and paymasters preoccupied themselves with two protracted, expensive interethnic wars. Both of these conflicts, and to some extent the final phase of the Iroquois war, were consequences of the French alliance with the Lakes Indians. New France wanted to hold onto its thinly dispersed empire in the pays d’en haut and their Mississippi River communication line with Louisiana. They needed their Indian “children’s” good offices, but they particularly needed their military services, without which they could neither intimidate France’s North American adversaries nor protect their own frail outposts.

      The Lakes Indians were not mercenaries, however. They entered into their alliance expecting the French not only to supply them with goods and blacksmiths but also to marry into their families, adhere to their customs, and respect their autonomy. “You who are great chiefs,” an Illini chief told French officials during a 1725 visit to France, “should leave us masters of the country where we have placed our fire.” Most of all, they expected the French to fight for them. The Anishinaabeg and Illiniwek used this mutual obligation to push the French into a war with the Fox Indians; when it appeared New France might make peace, these Indian nations used slave raiding to reignite the conflict. West of the Lakes country, one might note, the Cree and Assiniboine sold Sioux slaves to French traders in order to sow discord between the French and the Sioux, checking New France’s commercial expansion. The Franco-Indian alliance was not one that the French controlled, nor was it based solely on peaceful commerce.30

      While some of the Lakes Indians tried to prevent the French from allying with their own Native adversaries, so too did French officials worry about their Indian allies uniting against them. New France needed strong Indian defenders, but not too strong. Fear of an Iroquois alliance with the Odawas and Wyandots had produced a risky and expensive anti-Iroquois diplomatic mission in 1690 and probably helped motivate Governor Frontenac’s offensives against Iroquoia later that decade. Fear of a Chickasaw alliance with the Illinois and other southern Lakes nations helped ignite and sustain the Chickasaw war of the 1730s and ’40s. The French might periodically fret about inter-Indian conflict, but they preferred to let such fighting occur, and even to participate in it themselves, to keep their allies separated and weak. The Franco-Indian alliance wasn’t merely a violent one: it also generated mutual suspicion. This would only grow as French officials contemplated both the fragility of their North American dominion and their growing inability to separate their Indian “children” from the greatest threat to their empire: the rapidly expanding colonies of Great Britain.

      4

      The Hazards of War

      IMPERIALISM USUALLY FEEDS OFF EMPIRE BUILDERS’ FEARS: FEAR that their own empire is weak; fear that an end to expansion will bring economic collapse; fear that if one’s own empire doesn’t seize a prized territory, some rival surely will. This last fear weighed heavily on the early modern imperial mind, and it drove the French to build their tenuous and economically unproductive North American empire. Tens of thousands of Indians supported that empire, partly with furs and food and slaves, partly by their profession of kinship with the French and their monarch, and partly with their military labor, their willingness to fight France’s adversaries. Fear of British competition for those Native allies drove officers to build forts hundreds of miles from the nearest French settlement, and to mount showy and expensive military campaigns from New York to Mississippi. Fear eventually drove the French to initiate the war that brought down their extensive and expensive North American empire.1

      French officials particularly feared the potential consequences of Native Americans’ autonomy. The Indians in their empire were not subjects but allies, independent nations who manipulated the French to their own ends, and who might at some future date “defect” to the British. In point of fact, only a small minority of Lakes Indians sought to break with the French by the mid-eighteenth century. While many traded with the British colonists, they also continued to buy goods from and pledge their loyalty to their French fathers, and during the Seven Years’ War (1754–1760), most demonstrated that they preferred the French as allies. Lakes Indian warriors raided Britain’s settlements, besieged its forts, and helped the French oppose its armies. Their aid, ultimately, did not suffice to save the French empire, for Britain had resources that neither Louis XV nor his Indian supporters could match: a huge navy, ample money and credit, and an American colonial population fifteen times larger than French America’s. When the


Скачать книгу