would sustain a French claim of territorial sovereignty. They found that the region’s Native peoples were ready to form such partnerships, modeled on the alliances they had earlier made with one another. What the French would learn in the eighteenth century, however, is that whatever losses the Lakes Indians suffered in the 1600s, and however much they had come to rely on French goods and whatever offers of fealty they tendered, Native peoples still held the balance of power in the Upper Country. If the French wanted to claim the region as part of their empire—that is, if they wanted to exclude other Europeans from the Great Lakes—they needed first to learn how to weave themselves into the social fabric of what remained an Indian country.
3
France’s Uneasy Imperium
DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, THE first Europeans to encounter the Great Lakes Indians shifted the emphasis of their colonial project from commerce to empire. The new goal of French officials in Canada was to hold territory, with the aid of Native American allies, and use it as a barrier against English expansion. A secondary goal, projected into the long term, was to persuade those allies to become French subjects, less through force than through voluntary religious conversion and intermarriage with French colonists. The new empire had little place in it for independent Indian nations, and French flags, forts, and soldiers demonstrated both France’s imperial goals and its willingness to pursue them with violence. At various times between 1680 and 1750, the Iroquois, Mesquakies, and Chickasaws felt the sharp end of French imperial policy. Yet many, if not most, of the Native peoples of the Lakes country would later recall the era of French dominion as something of a golden age.
When they waxed nostalgic for the era of French rule, the Lakes Indians observed that the French, unlike their British and American successors, never coveted their land nor destroyed their settlements. The nineteenth-century US historian Francis Parkman attributed this to differences between English and French views of Indians: where the English “scorned and neglected” the Indians, the French “embraced and cherished” them. Parkman’s comparison would have puzzled France’s Native American adversaries, and the understanding of European motives that it displayed was shallow, but it does oblige one to ask why the two colonial powers had such different relationships with Indians and leads one to find answers in the empires’ differing goals. What drove most English colonists to North America was colonialism, the desire to subjugate indigenous peoples and seize their land and resources. Furs and converts drew the French into the North American interior, but what kept them there was imperialism, the desire to assert sovereignty over the continent and deny other empires the use of its resources.1
Imperialism was hardly a peaceful or benevolent motive, but since it resulted from conflict with other European empires, it prevented France from concentrating on the subdual of Native Americans. On the contrary, France depended absolutely on its Indian allies to help protect the remote forts and settlements where the French flag waved and contain the expansion of England’s fast-growing colonies. French officials could not afford to alienate the Indians of the Great Lakes region. The French regime in Canada went to some trouble to accommodate its allies’ demands and expectations, to provide them with regular gifts and regulated trade, to set aside their own standards of justice in favor of the Lakes Indians’ customs, and even, through intermarriage, to tie Frenchmen to Indians’ kinship networks.2
Accommodation did not always bring peace. Maintaining alliances with some Indian nations could create enmity between the French and other Native American groups. Moreover, France’s reliance on Indians, whose motives they did not always understand, did not make French officials feel especially secure. Indeed, with the passing decades they grew increasingly worried about their “subjects’” reliability and were prone to view every sign of disaffection or discontent as evidence of an anti-French conspiracy. In these fears lay the seeds both of French warfare against some of its Indian neighbors and ultimately of another radical change in policy that helped wreck the fragile edifice of French rule.
That edifice lasted for approximately seventy years, however, and the Indians of the Great Lakes region did not find it a terrible place in which to dwell.
* * *
France’s shift to an American military empire arguably began in the 1660s, when Louis XIV royalized and garrisoned New France, and when Quebec’s governor used royal troops to invade Iroquoia and coerce the Five Nations into a peace treaty. Initially this change had little impact on New France’s policies or the Upper Country; Louis informed his new governors that he still intended Quebec to function as a trading colony and preferred it should remain compact. In the 1680s, though, the Iroquois’s devastating raids into Illinois provoked French military intervention in the Great Lakes region and shifted that region’s balance of power and alliances.3
In 1684, one of the Five Nations’ war parties plundered French voyageurs and attacked a trading post, Fort Saint Louis, in Illinois. The Iroquois probably viewed France’s shipment of weapons to the Five Nations’ western adversaries as a hostile act, and decided to respond in kind. The attack provoked a similar response from the French. New France’s governor, Joseph-Antoine de La Barre, had already begun to station troops at the Lakes trading posts, and in retaliation for the 1684 raid he organized a punitive expedition against the Hodenosaunee. Influenza crippled La Barre’s army, however, and he essentially capitulated to Iroquois emissaries’ demands without firing a shot. Three years later La Barre’s successor, the Marquis de Denonville, organized a more successful strike: twenty-one hundred gunmen, including four hundred Indians, landed in Seneca country and destroyed several towns and four hundred thousand bushels of corn. This did not prove a knockout blow, and its main effect was to strengthen a budding alliance between the Five Nations and the English colony of New York.4
The outbreak of war between England and France in 1689 placed New France on the defensive. Louis XIV declined to send reinforcements to Canada while he needed them in Europe, and England’s American colonists and Indian allies launched a powerful offensive. In the summer of 1689 over fifteen hundred Iroquois warriors raided the French village of Lachine, near Montreal, killing or capturing one hundred residents, while in 1690 a Massachusetts naval expedition under William Phips attacked the French colonial capital of Quebec. When garbled news of the Lachine raid reached the upper Lakes, some of the Native American chiefs there believed the French had lost Montreal and would soon abandon their Indian allies. A peace party emerged among the Odawas, Hurons, and Mascoutens, and the new governor of Canada, Louis de Frontenac, feared that the dissidents would form their own separate alliance with the Iroquois. To forestall this possibility, Frontenac sent emissaries to Michilimackinac to meet with the disaffected nations. The diplomats told the Hurons and Odawas that France remained still powerful and able to punish its adversaries, but the haste with which they had traveled to Michilimackinac (a journey that included fighting their way through an Iroquois ambush) and the boatloads of presents they brought indicated the extent of their masters’ anxiety. France could neither defeat the Iroquois nor maintain its regional power without the Lakes Indians’ cooperation.5
The crisis passed, and the French and their allies resumed their offensive against the Five Nations. War parties from the Anishinaabe, Illini, Miami, and Wyandot nations raided the Senecas and Onondagas, two of the more important Hodenosaunee nations, allegedly taking over four hundred scalps. French troops also undertook two more expeditions against the Iroquois, accompanied by a knowledgeable and formidable ally, the Kahnewakes. This nation originated with the Franco-Iroquois peace treaty of 1666, which allowed French Jesuits to establish a mission in Iroquoia. Several hundred Iroquois men and women, chiefly Mohawks, became Christian converts, and in the 1670s French officials persuaded many of them to move to Kahnewake, a mission settlement adjoining Montreal. The converts, who collectively took the name of their new home, retained many of their old lifeways. They continued to hunt, raise corn, and wear their hair in Iroquois fashion, and they found continuities between their new faith and indigenous traditions, substituting the Mass for sacrificial feasts and using
