Colonial America
Page 63
Because the French government depended so heavily on the Indians in these communities to help defend the colony against the British, French leaders avoided antagonizing the Indians by interfering with tribal sovereignty. Thus the reserve Indians spoke French but retained substantial control over their own political affairs and preserved a great deal of cultural autonomy, in stark contrast to the Christianized Indians in Florida and New Mexico. The Kahnawake and Kanesatake Mohawks declined to submit to French law, adopted Jesuit teachings selectively, and largely managed to maintain their traditional gender roles. Women continued to farm the land in the same manner as their mothers and grandmothers had, planting corn, squash, and beans all together in hillocks, while men proved their manhood by joining war parties for the French government, bringing back extra income and plunder for their clans. Tribal governing structures continued to operate. As long as French ports remained open and trade goods continued to arrive from Europe, alliances between the French and their Indian neighbors remained strong. Meanwhile the French were building additional military alliances with new groups of Native Americans in the West.
4 The French Upper Country, or Pays d'en Haut
With the supply of furs dwindling in the St. Lawrence Valley, French traders had begun as early as the 1660s to venture further west to search for new Indian trading partners who could supply them with furs. Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert initially tried to discourage the westward expansion of the fur trade, fearing it would be expensive to defend. The colony needed to concentrate on building up the settler population in Canada and strengthening government authority before expanding into an area it could not possibly control. Westward expansion might be worthwhile to prevent competition from other European competitors in the fur trade, but there was little immediate danger of such competition during the 1660s. Still, Colbert eventually concluded that the exploration of the West should be allowed. He and other advisors continued to hope the explorers would discover a water route to the Pacific, or at least to some warm-water port that could communicate with Canada year-round. Indeed after 1670, when an English company established a fur-trading colony in Hudson Bay, the need to explore the West became more urgent. Whichever power became the first to find a water route to the Pacific could control the continent.
French parties were therefore sent off to explore the Great Lakes to the west of Lake Huron as well as the rivers to the north, west, and south. By 1670 the Great Lakes had been traversed and claimed for France. Exploration of the rivers proceeded rapidly as well. In 1669, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, traveled south on the Ohio River, though he returned without finding anything of great interest. Then in 1673, Father Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary now working at the northwestern tip of Lake Huron, and Louis Joliet, a trader and explorer from Québec, traveled from the Bay of Green Bay up the Fox River and proceeded south on the Wisconsin River until they reached the Mississippi. Marquette and Joliet continued downstream on the Mississippi far enough to realize that it led directly to the Gulf of Mexico before they finally turned around near the mouth of the Arkansas River in July, fearing they might encounter the Spanish.
Once these expeditions had shown the way, Canada's governor-general, the Comte de Frontenac, took the lead himself in organizing the westward expansion of the trade. Fort Frontenac was built on the eastern tip of Lake Ontario in 1673. La Salle received the right to establish trading posts on the Mississippi, provided that he would explore the river to its mouth within the next five years. Within a few years there was string of trading posts at geographically strategic points throughout the Great Lakes region, which the French called the pays d'en haut, or the upper country. Other posts along with Fort St. Louis and Fort Crevecoeur had been constructed along the Illinois River south of Lake Michigan, a region known as Kaskaskia. In addition the French built Fort Prudhomme on the Mississippi in what is today Tennessee.
Actual French occupation of these newly claimed lands was thin. French traders traveled through them, but their purpose here was to obtain furs and ship them back to Montréal to sell, not to establish villages or settlements. By 1680 there were some 800 traders in the pays d'en haut. Most operated without permits and spent much of the year living among the Indians, typically taking Indian wives and becoming assimilated into their villages. A small number of soldiers were sent to protect the trading posts during the 1680s. But for the most part traders spent their time far from the protection of the garrisons. Meanwhile, the Iroquois, asserting that they had the right to control the passage of trade through much of the area, became increasingly aggressive. France's ability to maintain a continued presence in this region would depend on its success in sustaining alliances with trading partners who were willing to help counter the Iroquois.
Map 17 French claims in North America, circa 1700, showing major forts in the Great Lakes region, the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, and major settlements in New France.
The Indians who lived in the pays d'en haut by 1680 were a motley group made up mostly of recently arrived refugees from tribal lands further to the east. From the 1640s to the 1660s, the Iroquois, armed with Dutch guns, had made war on the various peoples who lived in the Ohio and Illinois valleys, forcing them to flee their homelands and move further west. The refugees of these wars now lived west and south of the Great Lakes. They included members of the Fox, Huron-Petun, Illinois, Miami, Kickapoo, Noquet, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Sauk, and Wyandot peoples, along with other, smaller bands. Most were Algonquian speakers; a few spoke Iroquoian languages but were not members of the Five Nations. The region's original inhabitants, the Menominees and Winnebagos, had been so weakened by disease and war that they were willing to accept newcomers, so the refugees had settled here in villages, clustered close together and without any clear sense of territorial boundaries. Surrounded by strangers, they were wary of one another. Old rivalries bubbled up. In a few cases mixed groups had formed new kinship ties, intermarrying or exchanging gifts in order to produce the bonds of mutual obligation that could help them to survive. But for the most part they remained divided.
These disparate groups might never have become allied with one another but for the fact that the Iroquois fell on them again after 1680. A short-lived truce between the Five Nations and the French had ended when the English and the Iroquois created the Covenant Chain alliance in New York. Now the Iroquois had resumed their attacks, not only against the allies of New France around Québec and Montréal but also against the Illinois and the Miamis. French leaders in Québec and Montréal realized that the Iroquois posed a major threat to French interests, since if they could destroy each of these tribes one at a time, Canada would be cut off and the French fur trade would disappear. What was needed was a French effort to unify their different western allies and trading partners. The French therefore agreed to an alliance with the Illinois and the Miamis in 1681, and began to organize a loose coalition between the various peoples who lived in the region.11
The coalition was fragile at first, but in the long run became surprisingly effective. French traders in the West took steps to help defend their various trading partners and to provide them with supplies. La Salle brought Miamis, Illinois, and Shawnees together into his garrison. The French leader at Michilimackinac, Governor La Barre, provisioned the fort for a siege. Unfortuantely La Barre lost his nerve and betrayed the Illinois to the Iroquois; however, the French government promptly sent a replacement governor to Michilimackinac, repudiated La Barre's agreement with the Iroquois, and renewed French support for the Illinois and the Algonquians. The alliance between the French and the Algonquians was never completely secure, since both the Indians and the French always feared the other would abandon the coalition and make a separate peace with their enemies. But French Canadians increasingly realized that this large-scale French–Algonquian alliance was necessary to their own survival, since it could provide them with a buffer against attacks by the Iroquois and the English, and help them to keep
the English from expanding their colonies even further. In time, the alliance turned the tables on the Iroquois. By the 1690s, with combined French and Algonquian forces launching attacks on Iroquois villages, killing warriors and burning cornfields, the Five Nations had been put on the defensive. The Iroquois' own participation in the disastrous English expeditions against Montréal and Québec, as we have seen, magnified the scope of their losses, finally convincing the Iroquois to agree to the general peace established by the Grand Settlement of 1701.
Since neither the French nor any of the disparate Algonquian allies in the West had the power to enforce their will on the others, working together in a coalition meant having to establish mutual trust. One institutional mechanism which enabled the creation of cross-cultural confidence was marriage. The loss of warriors in the recent wars had created a shortage of men in many Algonquian kin groups. Families therefore encouraged young Algonquian women to marry French traders. These marriages were advantageous to both parties since they brought traders into kinship networks within Indian communities, and gave the women and their families special access to European trade goods. Women who married French traders gained considerable power and prestige, since they played such vital roles both in their marriages and in their families of origin. The mixed-race children of these marriages often served important functions within the French–Algonquian coalition as well. Because they typically spoke both Algonquian and European languages and understood the expectations of both groups, they could mediate between them in arranging trade deals and resolving disputes.
Misunderstandings between members of such culturally distinct groups were common, so it was vital for all parties to develop effective mechanisms for dispute resolution. Indeed, the failure to find a middle ground could sometimes be lethal, especially in cases involving violent crimes. The French legal system dealt with crime by insisting upon the punishment of the guilty offender, which usually meant executing the offender if the crime was murder. The problem was that if the French (or any of their allies) executed an Indian to punish him for his crimes, his kin would be bound to take revenge on the kin of the executioner. Algonquian legal systems dealt with violent crime by requiring compensation to be offered to the victim's family in the forms of gifts of goods or slaves, in order to prevent the killing from setting off a cycle of revenge killings between kin groups. To prevent the kind of destabilizing consequences that these blood feuds were likely to cause, the French developed new protocols to satisfy all sides: criminals were imprisoned and tried for their crimes but they paid for their crimes by compensating their victims' families rather than being executed. Such compromises allowed all parties to feel that justice had been served, thereby avoiding further dissension and violence.
Another kind of misunderstanding had to do with the meaning of trade. French traders, at least initially, had expected their trades with the Indians to be governed by the same laws that governed the marketplace, the laws of supply and demand. The Algonquians, though, persisted in seeing their transactions with the French as exchanges of gifts. They expected these gift exchanges to be made in accordance with traditional protocols. For example if the Indians offered gifts that they considered valuable, like moose hides or wampum, and the French turned them down because they preferred furs that they could market in Europe, the Indians accused them of being greedy and refused to trade with them in the future. The French had to accept the Algonquians' terms because they needed the Algonquians as allies against the Iroquois, and because they knew the Algonquians could always go to the English for trade goods if they became offended with the French. Thus, just as in Canada, French vulnerability gave the Indians considerable bargaining power.
By 1700 the French–Algonquian alliance had become so central to French imperial policy in North America that the French government was willing to operate the western fur trade at a loss in order to preserve it. During the 1690s an oversupply of furs caused prices to drop, and the French government considered shutting down virtually all of its western trading posts, which by now had expanded west of the Great Lakes into the territory of the Sioux. However, in the end, the French continued to supply trade goods to the Indians despite their declining profits. By 1700 Louis XIV had decided that the western alliance was critical to France's future policy in North America. Instead of concentrating only on the fur trade, France's objective now would be to control the North American West. Officials in New France were ordered to build military posts from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, which could be used to stop the English, as well as positioning France to take over some or all of the Spanish colonies, if necessary. Meanwhile French traders and priests were to maintain the loyalty of the western tribes, thereby controlling the bulk of North American territory.
The task of sustaining the French–Algonquian alliance became more complicated after 1710, since the Iroquois had declared their neutrality and stopped attacking the western Algonquians. In addition, in the years after 1713, British traders began to venture west in order to engage in commerce with the western nations. Now that they could trade with the British without interference from the Iroquois, some of the Algonquians sought to assert their independence from the French. In particular, the Fox, in the area of the Wisconsin River, became so confident in their ability to act as independent agents that they tried to bar the French from crossing their lands in order to trade with the Sioux further to the west. The Fox even attempted to negotiate a separate alliance with the Iroquois and the British. The French government retaliated by launching a concerted assault against the Fox, using 400 French soldiers along with about 1,200 of their Algonquian allies to attack Fox villages. The major goal of this heavy-handed action by the French against the Fox was to demonstrate to the rest of their western allies the dire consequences of turning against the French.
As time went on, however, the French lost the ability to control the terms of the alliance. Other Algonquian allies decided that surviving members of the Fox should be allowed to rejoin the coalition, despite French opposition, and mediated their return. Having lost the power to dictate terms to their Algonquian allies, the French became even more adept at the rituals of gift-giving so that they could prevent particular chiefs and villages from defecting to the British. Though the changing balance of power made their alliances more expensive, French leaders continued to cultivate them, at times even operating the fur trade at a loss.
Why were these alliances so important to the French? Clearly alliances were helpful in consolidating fur-trading relationships in the West. But when the expense of gifts undercut the profitability of the fur trade, why did French leaders continue to invest so heavily in their alliances? One reason is that their friendships with the Indians were vital to their strategic interests, because the Indians not only kept the British from venturing into the pays d'en haut and Kaskaskia; they also shielded Canada from British attack. The French population in Canada was continuing to grow, reaching 40,000 by 1737, and 55,000 by 1755, and its economy had at last begun to prosper, as merchants developed a small shipbuilding industry and farmers began to export some of their grain and livestock to the French West Indies for sale to French plantation-owners. A second and possibly more important reason, it has recently been shown, is that French officials continued to hope that control over the West would eventually yield profits greater than those available through the fur trade. Perhaps they could still find a river leading to the Pacific, or discover mineral deposits west of the Mississippi that would yield riches like those of New Spain. The potential future value of the West justified spending considerable amounts of money to keep it.12
From a British point of view, of course, the French commitment to its loose alliances with the Algonquians had the effect of encircling the British colonies, hemming them into the area east of the Allegheny Mountains and preventing their expansion westwards. Meanwhile another barrier to the expansion of their colonies was being developed further south, where a French colony had been established in 169
9 at the mouth of the Mississippi River. It was called Louisiana.
5 Louisiana
Since 1682 the French had been trying to establish themselves in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Valley. Their reasons were varied. The French wanted to expand their empire. They had been distracted from overseas ventures by domestic political and religious strife for much of the previous century. Now, under Louis XIV, France had become the most powerful country in Europe, a seventeenth-century equivalent of a twenty-first-century superpower. It seemed fitting that France should now take her place in the imperial order. The French sugar islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies had been highly successful, but were not sufficient to make France an imperial power like Spain or even England, whose colonial possessions were rapidly expanding. In the late seventeenth century hopes remained high of finding mineral wealth in the West as well as a passage to the Pacific, in order to gain access to trade with China, Japan, and Peru. Controlling the Mississippi would be critical to achieving these ambitions. A base on the Gulf of Mexico might even allow France to invade Mexico by sea, or to capture other Spanish possessions in the West Indies. Finally, there was the fur trade. Now that the trade was being expanded into the Great Lakes region and the Illinois country, the French wanted to develop it further to the south as well.
By 1678, La Salle had a formal commission from Louis XIV to explore the full length of the Mississippi. He had his first view of the river in December 1680, but required another year to assemble sufficient men and supplies for his main expedition. He finally entered the Mississippi on February 6, 1682. As he proceeded downstream he noted much promising countryside, both for hunting and for agriculture. The mouth of the river was reached on April 6, 1682 where three days later formal possession was proclaimed on behalf of Louis XIV. The party then retraced its passage up the Mississippi.