start of their dances and invoked in diplomatic proceedings. Below this supreme deity lived a multitude of manitous, spiritual beings associated with totemic animals and powerful humans. The Illinois initially identified the Jesuits and their secular companions as manitous because of their cultivated aura of other-worldliness and the powerful goods that they sold. One did not have to be European to be a manitou: Illinois berdache, men who dressed as women and assumed cross-gender identities, were also regarded by their kinsmen as manitous—“spirits or persons of consequence,” as Marquette put it.23
The Illinois people displayed great friendliness toward Frenchmen but had also devised for themselves a fearsome military reputation. The confederacy’s warriors fought routinely with the Indian nations residing to their west, north, and south, using firearms obtained from French trading partners. The principal aim of Illinois warfare, as with many other Native North Americans, was to acquire human captives. Some of these the Illiniwek tortured to death, while many others they turned into slaves, whom they referred to as “dogs.” The Illiniwek used their slaves as laborers, working in the fields under women’s supervision or hewing wood and drawing water for their masters. Some elite men exploited slave women’s reproductive labor, coercing them into sexual relationships as their second or third wives—in the Illinois language, “other wives,” a term of contempt. The threat of violence hung over all slaves, but the Illiniwek periodically returned captives to their kinfolk to restore peace. As often, they traded slaves to other nations, including the French, to solidify alliances in advance of future wars.24
Even one of the confederacy’s ostensible rites of peace, the calumet ceremony, had an underlying military purpose. The calumet was a long, stone-and-wood tobacco pipe that the western Lakes Indians had adopted from the Plains Indians, with the first examples probably entering the region via Wisconsin around 1350 CE. The Illinois and their neighbors decorated calumets with feathers and ceremonially presented them to the sun, thereby consecrating the pipes and infusing them with celestial power. They employed the calumet like a baton in a balletic dance, which they performed to honor and ceremonially adopt esteemed visitors. However, they also used the calumet dance to seal alliances and to show off their warriors’ prowess. Before the calumet dance the Illinois displayed their warriors’ weapons, and during the ceremony warriors performed war dances and recited their martial exploits. The calumet served as a military instrument as much as the war club or gun.25
If the Illinois seemed militaristic, it was probably because they believed it best, while living on a flat floodplain accessible to potential enemies, to cultivate a strong military reputation. This did not prove helpful, however, when the Five Nations of Iroquois struck into Illinois country in the 1680s. During the previous two decades the Iroquois had been preoccupied with fighting the French and the Susquehannock Indians, but in 1666 French troops had coerced the Five Nations into signing a peace treaty, and in 1676 the Iroquois absorbed the Susquehannocks, who had survived a bitter war with English colonists. Soon thereafter the Iroquois were ready to resume their western campaigns for hunting territory and captives.26
In two devastating attacks in 1680 and 1681, Iroquois war parties killed or captured between 1,700 and 2,700 Illiniwek and Illini slaves, or 17 to 27 percent of the confederacy’s population. By themselves, or even with the help of one or two Native allies, the Illinois could not punish or deter the Iroquois invaders. To do so, Illinois captains would need a large supply of firearms and a military ally capable of assembling a regional Indian alliance against the Five Nations. That ally would turn out to be France, which was about to convert its thin commercial and ecclesiastical presence in the Great Lakes into a more formidable imperial establishment.27
The transformation came too late to help some of the region’s Indian peoples, in particular the precursors of the nation later known as the Shawnees. These Algonquian-speaking people were known in the seventeenth century as the Monytons and Ouabashe, and they probably, along with the Miamis of present-day Indiana, descended from the Fort Ancient culture. Most resided in farming settlements in present-day Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia, though early seventeenth-century European maps identify “Shawnees” living on the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. Certainly the Monytons and Ouabashe had trading connections with the Indians of present-day Pennsylvania, who sold their furs to Dutch and English traders and supplied them with beads, knives, and other European wares. The subdual of the Susquehannocks, however, cut this east-west trading connection, and in 1669 Iroquois war parties began raiding Monyton and Ouabashe towns for captives. By the mid-1680s, the two nations had lost several hundred people to the raiders, as well as others to epidemic disease. Seeking refuge and new trade links with Europeans, the proto-Shawnees dispersed, many of them moving south to present-day Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. A few moved to the English colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania, whence they began recolonizing the Ohio country in the late 1720s. By then the entire social and political landscape south of the Great Lakes had changed once more—perhaps as much as it had changed during the half century before the Shawnees’ initial departure.28
* * *
The people of the Lakes country displayed considerable diversity when Europeans first encountered them shortly after 1600. Numbering about 125,000 or 150,000 people, the Lakes Indians grouped themselves into more than a dozen nations and confederacies and spoke languages belonging to three distinct linguistic families. Like most human beings, however, they did not live in isolation; the human landscape of the Great Lakes region was not a mosaic of distinct tribes but a network of relationships, sustained by trade, warfare, and intermarriage. Since people who interact with one another tend, over time, to share cultural traits with one another, it is unsurprising that the region’s Native Americans had many features in common. With the exception of the Ojibwas, all of the Lakes Indians were farmers, relying on squash, corn, and beans for a large portion of their calories. Some, like the Hurons and Illiniwek, had agricultural surpluses that contemporary European peasants would have envied. All were traders to one degree or another, and their networks extended for hundreds of miles; the Hurons’ and Ojibwas’ into northwestern Canada, the Illiniweks’ to Lake Superior and the Missouri valley, the Monytons’ to the Dutch and English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. And all had ceremonies and institutions, like redistributive feasts, that allowed them to maintain harmony within their communities, while some had developed rituals, like the calumet ceremony, that helped them forge alliances with other nations.29
MAP 1. Native Americans in the Great Lakes region to 1700 CE. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
While the Great Lakes Indians were used to adopting outsiders’ culture and had developed mechanisms for promoting social harmony, the stresses and changes that Europeans brought to America proved too profoundly unsettling to manage, at least in the short term. The French came to the Upper Country in the seventeenth century neither to make war on the Indians nor to found permanent settlements, but they brought disruption and death all the same. French goods intensified rivalries among the region’s Indian peoples, as they struggled for access to furs and French trade goods. New diseases weakened some Indian nations, such as the Hurons, Ho-Chunks, and Monytons, and drove others into destructive “mourning wars” for captives. By the 1680s the human landscape of the Lakes region had changed considerably, with the eastern districts (Huronia and the upper Ohio valley) depopulated, the powerful Illinois confederacy besieged and damaged, and northern Michigan and Wisconsin full of refugees. In the eastern Lakes country, the land itself experienced “rewilding,” as Indians’ timber-clearing burns ceased and oak and maple spread into abandoned fields and towns. (Drawing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, these new trees contributed to the fall in global temperatures that characterized the century.) In the upper Lakes, the newcomers’ crowded settlements placed pressure on their localities’ thin-stretched food supply.30
Meanwhile, as their European homeland entered a long period of imperial rivalry with Britain, French officials hoped to treat the much-altered Lakes region as a tabula
