over the next two centuries.14
* * *
The Huron/Wyandots first took refuge in the homeland of the Odawa15 and Ojibwa Indian nations, who along with the Nipissings and Potawatomis made up the confederacy of Algonquian-speakers known as the Anishinaabeg, or First People. The Anishinaabeg had resided in the Great Lakes region for several centuries before the Hurons and other Iroquoians moved into the eastern Lakes country. By the seventeenth century they probably numbered thirty or forty thousand, divided into kinship groups that traced descent from totemic animal ancestors—beaver, otter, pike, catfish, crane, moose, or heron. Residing on the northern Great Lakes, at or above the climatic boundary for farming in the region, they relied on fishing, hunting, and wild plant foods for their subsistence. The Potawatomis and some of the Odawas raised corn in fields they visited seasonally. The Ojibwas traded with the Hurons for agricultural produce, supplying their trading partners with most of the furs they resold to the French at Quebec and receiving in return maize and French goods. The Ojibwas would later become Huron/Wyandot allies against the Iroquois, who found the Anishinaabeg formidable adversaries. Ojibwa warriors defeated several Iroquois war parties between 1653 and 1662, nearly annihilating the raiders in the last of these battles.16
The Anishinaabeg, particularly the Ojibwas, Odawas, and Nipissings, covered great distances to hunt, fish, and trade. Nipissing families traveled as far north as James Bay, while the Odawas (“Trading People”) would range up to fifteen hundred miles in a season, using large birch-and-cedar canoes that could cross open waters out of sight of shore, carrying up to four tons of cargo and passengers. One could not, however, call any of these nations nomadic. All spent a large part of the year in sedentary farming or fishing villages, and when hunting or trading, several bands usually kept their camps within one to two days’ travel of one another, so that they could pool resources or help other bands in an emergency. The northern Anishinaabeg bands also used an arc of rendezvous sites, including Michilimackinac, Manitoulin Island, and Lake Nipissing, to gather during the summer months. Like the Hurons, the Anishinaabeg held at their gatherings periodic Feasts of the Dead, in which hundreds of people interred their relatives’ bones and helped other families, some of them from other nations, lay their dead to rest. Participants in these feasts also performed military and social dances, elected new chiefs, and received gifts from their leaders, reaffirming the social bonds that held bands together. These were not the only institutions that united the Anishinaabeg. Intermarriage joined the members of different clans in bonds of kinship (since women had to marry outside of their clan), and medicinal and lore-keeping societies known as midewiwin, founded sometime before the arrival of Europeans, tied together different kinship groups and different nations.17
Strong and cohesive as the Anishinaabeg clearly were, the Huron/Wyandots feared that their new homes in the Huron-Michigan-Superior confluence region remained vulnerable to Iroquois attack. In 1652 they moved west to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they lived on several islands near the mouth of that inlet. Several years later the refugees moved onto the mainland and into the valley of the upper Mississippi River, settling for three years on an island in Lake Pepin (sixty miles south of present-day Minneapolis) and for another year near the headwaters of Wisconsin’s Black River. Much of the region through which they passed had fertile soil and an abundance of wild animals, the latter drawn to the resource-rich ecological boundary separating the Illinois-Wisconsin prairie from the northern Lakes forests. Approximately twenty thousand Indians from a half-dozen nations dwelt together in the Wisconsin country in the mid-seventeenth century: the Ho-Chunks, known to their adversaries as the Winnebagos; the Mascoutens, or Fire People; the Mesquakies or Red Earth People, known to the French as the Fox Indians; and the Menominees, or “Folles Avoines.” The Menominees’ French name referred to wild rice, an abundant aquatic grain that many Native American women harvested in the northern Lakes country. Throughout the region, women produced and provided most of the food Indians consumed: wild rice, maple sugar, strawberries and other wild fruits, and crops like maize and pumpkins. Native American women also collectively owned the local resource sites that sustained their kinfolk: rice lakes, maple groves, berry patches, and fields. Indian men in the region worked as hunters and fishermen, and, as the local Indian nations were patrilineal, they passed their familial and clan identities to their children.18
In the Wisconsin country, Indians from different nations often lived together in the same settlements. It was not always a land of peace, however. In the early seventeenth century, the Illinois, Odawas, and Mesquakies fought with the Ho-Chunks, whom warfare, smallpox, and other disasters (like the sinking of one of their canoe fleets on the eve of a military campaign) dramatically weakened. In 1655, an Odawa and Huron refugee community near Green Bay repelled an Iroquois raiding party, whose warriors the Illiniwek and Ojibwas subsequently captured or killed. And in the 1660s, after traders Pierre Radisson and Medard des Groseilliers introduced them to the European fur trade, the Dakota Sioux expanded into the lands bordering Lake Superior. Numbering around thirty-eight thousand, the Sioux dwelt for part of the year in fixed settlements in the upper Mississippi valley but spent most of the year in mobile camps hunting deer, elk, and beaver. The prospect of trading with the French became an alluring one for the Dakotas, not only because French traders offered metal wares and firearms (which the Sioux initially called “sacred iron”), but because they offered potential marriage partners for single women in a society with strong incest taboos.19
In the process of extending their hunting and trading eastward, the Dakotas came into conflict with the Wyandots, who in 1662 had moved to Chequamegon (or Shagwaamikong) Bay, off Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin. The Chequamegon Bay settlement had been founded the preceding year by the Wyandots’ Odawa allies, who wanted access to the beaver-hunting grounds in northern Wisconsin and refuge from the Iroquois. Instead they and the Wyandots found themselves in a new war with the Dakotas, an on-again, off-again fight for captives and hunting territories that lasted a decade. In 1671, the Wyandots retreated to Michilimackinac, where they would remain for three decades, while the Sioux continued to hunt and fish in the upper Great Lakes for half a century.20
The Wyandots’ French allies had by now begun to establish their own tentative presence in the upper Great Lakes region. As early as 1634, the explorer Jean Nicolet had landed by Green Bay and met with the Ho-Chunks, whom he impressed with an embroidered mandarin robe he had brought in case he discovered a passage to China. French traders were slow to follow, as the Iroquois-Huron war had disrupted the fur trade and as the Odawas and Ojibwas were willing to bring furs to the new town of Montreal. Eventually, some traders began traveling to the upper Lakes, and Jesuit missionaries followed them into the pays d’en haut, establishing missions at Point Saint Esprit in 1665 and at Sault Sainte Marie in 1668. They began another mission at Green Bay, where several Indian nations had settled to defend themselves against the Iroquois, in 1669.21
One of these missions, Point Saint Esprit by Chequamegon Bay, the Jesuits established to preach to the Odawas and to the Huron/Wyandots, but they also received Indian visitors from further south, including trading parties from the Illinois confederacy. Some of these Illini travelers expressed interest in receiving Jesuit missionaries in their homeland, and in 1673 a priest from Saint Esprit, Jacques Marquette, accompanied other French explorers through the Fox-Wisconsin River portage and down the Mississippi River to the Illinois country. He and subsequent French explorers wrote detailed accounts of how the people of the powerful Illini confederacy lived in the seventeenth century.22
The Illinois or Illiniwek (“The People”) resided between the Illinois, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers, with outliers in present-day Indiana and Arkansas. Their contact-era homeland occupied the ecological borderland between the tallgrass prairies and the forested region south of the Great Lakes. The rich farmland and ample fish and game of their domain—the latter including bison, which lived on the Illinois prairie in herds of four hundred or more—sustained an Illinois population of more than ten thousand. Like the pre-Columbian cultures of the Ohio valley, the Illinois lived in dispersed towns but gathered periodically in their “Grand Village” (really a small city) to attend feasts, lacrosse games, and religious ceremonies. Their religious
