Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
with one another, and their commercial networks extended hundreds of miles to the north, east, and west. All gave young men the responsibility for becoming warriors, and all fought internecine wars with their neighbors for glory and captives. The Lakes Indians even shared some of the same mythologies, with several attributing their origins to divine or celestial realms, many describing the material world as a great island supported on the back of a giant turtle, and most believing that they shared the world with powerful manitous that influenced human affairs. These similarities were not merely coincidental: they demonstrated that the contact-era Lakes Indians had been interacting with one another and sharing goods and ideas for centuries.1
The web of interaction that Native Americans created would later magnify the destructive impact of European colonization. Trade routes carried new diseases, which decimated the Huron-Wendat and Iroquois confederacies at the eastern end of the Great Lakes. Old warpaths now provided passage to Iroquois raiders and Illiniwek slavers armed with European guns. French intruders found that, with a little help from their Indian allies, they could employ Native American paths and waterways to penetrate to the center of the continent. Having initially come to North America to trade and evangelize, the French would by the end of the seventeenth century use these routes to build and supply churches, forts, and settlements. All of these became instruments of an empire with which most Lakes Indians felt compelled to align themselves.
* * *
The first Europeans to encounter the Great Lakes Indians came from France, a western European kingdom with roughly the same population as fifteenth-century Mexico. France was an old land, colonized by modern humans long before the first Paleo-Indians arrived in North America, but its culture and institutions developed much more recently. The kingdom’s principal language and its bookish, bureaucratized Catholic faith derived ultimately from the Romans, who had bloodily conquered Gaul (as France was then known) in the first century BCE and ruled it for five hundred years. The agricultural staples that fed the French people, grain and livestock, had been domesticated several millennia earlier, but the productivity of early-modern France’s farms, and thus the subsistence of its twenty million people, depended on medieval innovations like crop rotation and the horse collar. The machinery (mine pumps and powered bellows) that allowed French smiths to manufacture cheap metal wares, the goods most desired by France’s Indian trading partners, came into use even more recently, in the fifteenth century. Even France’s ruling class experienced significant change, with the old warrior-aristocracy of the Middle Ages losing power to wealthy merchants and guild masters, who used their money to buy land, educate their children, and acquire honorable offices in the royal government. France was still a rural, parochial, and often violent society, but its people increasingly devoted themselves to industry, commerce, and exploration.2
The first Frenchmen to spend significant time in North America and trade with its Native peoples were humble fishermen from marginal coastal provinces, like Brittany and the Basque country. Early in the sixteenth century, these men began outfitting voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to the Grand Banks, a region of shoals off the coast of Newfoundland. There, currents deflected by the steep banks churned up nutrients that sustained huge quantities of plankton, which in turn fed millions of codfish. Cod was a protein-rich fish that fishermen could preserve for months, and for which there was a considerable demand among Europe’s protein-starved working population. Cod became North America’s first profitable transatlantic export, and by the 1550s hundreds of fishing vessels from France and other nations were plying the Grand Banks.3
To dry and salt their catch, cod fishermen landed on the coasts of Newfoundland, Labrador, and Quebec and spent weeks or months at temporary encampments. There some encountered Miqmaq and Montagnais Indians, who from an early date began to barter with these uninvited guests, exchanging food and animal furs for knives and glass beads. The Indians’ furs, particularly the wooly pelts of American beaver, proved valuable to French hatters, and Canadian furs became the second significant North American export to Europe. Even while a series of religious wars (1562–98) disrupted the French economy, French mariners continued to catch cod and purchase beaver pelts, and around 1600 some established a semipermanent trading rendezvous on the Saint Lawrence River.4
Since American furs were a luxury item with a low production volume and high value, French merchants believed it possible to establish an effective monopoly over the fur trade, and in the early 1600s several companies of courtiers and merchants asked the king to grant them such a monopoly. In 1607 one of these partnerships asked mariner Samuel Champlain to help them find an appropriate site in Canada for a trading base and settlement. Champlain persuaded his sponsors to choose the narrows of the Saint Lawrence River, a site relatively secure from attack and closer than Tadoussac to the homelands of the region’s principal Indians. The result was the outpost of Quebec (1608), which grew into both a successful trading center and the nucleus of French settlement in North America.5
Quebec occupied the land of the Montagnais Indians, but its principal trading partners, who accounted for over two-thirds of the furs sold to the Company of New France, belonged to a Great Lakes nation, the Hurons. The Hurons were members of the Northern Iroquoian cultural and language group, whose progenitors, according to archaeologist Dean Snow, probably migrated to the Great Lakes region after 900 CE, at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period (900–1300) that preceded the Little Ice Age. By the seventeenth century CE, there were about twenty thousand Hurons residing in a cluster of towns east of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Huron towns consisted of several dozen wooden longhouses, each housing upwards of thirty people; their largest communities had two thousand inhabitants. Like other Iroquoians, the Hurons were matrilineal, tracing familial descent through the mother’s side of the family, and they were also matrilocal, which meant that married men resided in their wives’ households. The latter development helped avoid rivalries and civil discord by separating brothers from one another, making it harder for them to form factions of male kinsmen. It was a useful enough survival mechanism that even some of the patrilineal Great Lakes Indians, peoples like the Potawatomis and Mesquakies who traced descent through the father’s line, were also matrilocal or bilocal.6
The Hurons’ matrilineality and matrilocal dwelling customs probably reflect the importance of women, who did all of the Hurons’ farming, to the nation’s survival. While the Hurons also practiced hunting and fishing, agriculture provided about 80 percent of their calories. Even though they lived close to the 120-frost-free-day line that marked the northern limit of maize cultivation, the Hurons grew such a large surplus of corn that they could trade it with the Ojibwas and other Indians of the northern Great Lakes. In the early seventeenth century, Huron traders learned that the thick pelts of northern beavers and other mammals were valuable to Europeans, and they initiated a multiparty exchange of Huron corn for Ojibwa furs for European goods. The merchandise they obtained from French traders gradually improved the Hurons’ standard of living without altering their basic lifeways. Durable iron axes and blades made it easier to fell trees, build longhouses, and improve the Hurons’ bone- and wood-carving practices; light metal cooking pots made it easier to prepare food; and firearms gave Huron warriors an advantage in their periodic wars with the Iroquois.7
While individual families owned the Hurons’ crops and trade routes, the nation avoided gross inequalities of wealth and promoted social stability with regular rituals of redistribution. Huron men and women expected their leaders to hold feasts and dances for them, some to serve as displays of hospitality and some to help heal the sick. All Hurons participated in a massive redistributive ceremony known as the Feast of the Dead, held every twelve years in the town of Ossossane, during which families dug up, skinned, and reinterred their deceased relatives. They accompanied these last rites with the display and distribution of thousands of presents. (The Hurons reinterred their dead after their relatives’ “second souls,” which they believed to remain with the body after the initial physical death, had passed on.) Hurons also redistributed goods as part of their legal culture: the families of those accused of murder had to pay sixty gifts to the victim’s family, unless they wanted to invite violent retribution, while thieves’ victims could confiscate their attackers’ possessions.8
The Hurons’ social cohesion began to break down in the 1630s, however, because of two additional imports from Europe: Old World diseases and Catholic Christianity.