If the Kahnewakes’ cultural transformation had been partial and carefully managed, not so their political alignment. Christian Mohawks had come to the Saint Lawrence valley in pursuit of French spiritual power, and now they aligned themselves with French military power as well. Kahnewake warriors helped French soldiers attack the Five Nations Mohawks in 1693 and the Oneidas and Onondagas in 1696. The attackers burned towns and killed or captured several hundred English-aligned Iroquois. The Hodenosaunee could not replace these losses through capture and adoption, and by the end of the decade the Five Nations had lost nearly half of their male fighting population. They also lost a substantial part of their territory. The Mississaugas (People of the River’s Mouth), an Anishinaabe people closely related to the Ojibwas, drove the Iroquois from the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The region became the Mississaugas’ homeland, the place where they dwelled, fished, harvested crops, and held their festivals. The Five Nations now had a dynamic and powerful Native adversary at the threshold of the Longhouse.7
The war between France and the Iroquois’s principal ally, England, came to an end, and the Iroquois lacked the manpower to continue fighting on their own. They chose now to stop. Following a preliminary ceasefire in 1700, the Five Nations sent delegates to a peace conference in Montreal, the cramped, palisaded French trading town at the rapids of the Saint Lawrence. There two hundred Iroquois joined Governor Louis-Hector de Callière and over one thousand Lakes Indians and spent the summer of 1701 feasting, returning captives, and exchanging wampum belts and words of condolence for the departed. At length the delegates affixed their marks or clan totems to a formal treaty, establishing peace between the signatory nations and admitting all parties into one another’s homelands to trade. It might have represented the apex of French power and prestige in North America.8
* * *
Shortly after the conclusion of the Treaty of Montreal, trader and adventurer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac received approval to establish a multiracial settlement, Detroit (“the Strait”), on the river connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie. The new outpost would slow Iroquois commercial expansion into the upper Lakes (though Cadillac did encourage Iroquois hunters to trade there), discourage English expansion into the region, and concentrate the Indians of lower Michigan in one more easily governable place. While Detroit would include a French garrison and Jesuit missionaries, its principal settlers would be Native Americans: Odawas and Huron/Wyandots from Michilimackinac, Potawatomis from the Saint Joseph River in southwestern Michigan. These communities’ leaders expressed reluctance to emigrate, but their people began moving in small groups to the Detroit River in 1702, and by 1710 over eighteen hundred Lakes Indians resided there.9
In 1706, an incident at Detroit demonstrated both the limits of French power and the need for Frenchmen and Indians to accommodate one another’s differences if they wished to continue living in the same settlements. A party of Odawas, believing that the Miamis planned to attack their village, preemptively struck the Miami settlement near Fort Pontchartrain and killed five people; subsequently, Odawa warriors killed two French soldiers and a Jesuit outside of the fort. Normally, the Odawas compensated the families of murder victims by giving them valuable gifts, a ritual known as “covering the dead” or “covering the grave,” but Governor Philippe de Vaudreuil told Odawa leaders that “French blood is not paid for by beavers or belts.” Instead, the attackers must throw themselves on his mercy. In the fall of 1707, the Odawa captain who led the previous year’s attack, Le Pésant, surrendered to the French at Detroit. Cadillac, after briefly imprisoning Le Pésant (registering thereby his submission to French authority), quietly allowed the captain to escape from custody.10
This “drama” of submission and reprieve synthesized both French and Lakes Indian judicial cultures. Where the French, like other Europeans, believed in retributive justice, most of the Native peoples of the Great Lakes region favored redemptive justice: the forgiving of criminals and their payment of presents to their victim’s family. In a similar episode two decades earlier, French trader Daniel Greysolon Dulhut blended the two legal cultures himself: he executed a Menominee man and an Ojibwa man for killing two Frenchmen, but then he gave compensatory gifts to the Ojibwa man’s father and accepted wampum belts from Anishinaabe leaders to “cover the [French] dead.” In another case, sixteen years after the killings at Detroit, officials in Illinois freed a Frenchman accused of killing another Frenchman because an Illinois chief intervened on the killer’s behalf. Even in conflicts involving only their own countrymen, French officials could not behave exactly as they pleased; in Native country, they had to adhere to Indians’ rules, so long as they wished to keep living and doing business there.11
This principle applied not only to France’s administration of justice in the Upper Country but also to everyday economic and social relationships between colonists and Indians. The Franco-Indian fur trade, in particular, depended on large concessions the French made to Lakes Indian needs, sensibilities, and expectations. These included fixed, bon marché (“good deal”) prices for furs and European merchandise, and the obligation of French traders and officials to give their Indian clients regular presents of ammunition, clothing, and tobacco. “All the nations of Canada,” observed Governor Beauharnois in 1730, “regard the governor-general as their father, who as a result in this capacity . . . should give them something to eat, to dress themselves with and to hunt.” Such gifts annually cost the Crown 20,000 livres (about $180,000 in 2016 US dollars) per year by 1716, and they imposed additional costs on traders, insofar as Lakes Indians treated preseason advances as gifts and often declined to repay the loans in full. The French had to understand, or pretend to understand, that for Native Americans the fur trade was not a rationalized exchange of goods but a display of reciprocity and solidarity between French “fathers” and Indian “children.”12
French traders and officials also had to understand what the term “father” meant to the Lakes Indians. If the newcomers hoped that metaphorical “fatherhood” gave them the ability to command their dutiful Indian progeny, they hoped in vain. In the Great Lakes region, Indian families usually traced descent through the father’s line, but many patrilineal nations (like the Potawatomis) adopted matrilocal dwelling customs, and over time authority in matrilocal households tended to shift to the mother’s line. Moreover, some Lakes Indians applied the kinship term “father” to a range of male relatives. The Kickapoos used “father” (mo’sa) to describe a person’s biological father, paternal uncles, and all the male relatives in his/her mother’s family. Native speakers thus might—indeed, commonly did—use “father” not to describe a dread authority figure but to evince a jolly avuncular relative, who dispensed gifts and settled arguments between his children. Fathers did not rule; they indulged.13
If the French did not meet these expectations, their Native American trading partners had other options. After the 1701 peace conference gave them access to the trading center of Albany, they could do business with the English. Odawa leaders made this clear to French officials when Governor Callière announced he would let French traders lower the prices they paid for furs: many objected to the announcement, and Le Pésant declared that his people would henceforth trade with the English. (The governor backed down.) The Lakes Indians could also go without European goods for several years, having retained the ability to make hide clothing, stone blades, and other traditional wares. As late as 1718, the former commandant of Detroit noted that French merchandise diffused but slowly through the Lakes Indian population: the Ho-Chunks and Mesquakies near Green Bay and Illiniwek and Miamis south of the Lakes still wore skin clothing (women in Wisconsin wore some cloth garments), and Illinois men still commonly used bows and arrows. When in 1697 the French Crown tried to restrain unruly traders by suspending trading licenses and obliging Indian hunters to come to Montreal, those hunters stayed home, dealt with smugglers, or came no further downstream than Detroit. Fur exports from Canada fell dramatically, and in 1714 New France’s governor began efforts to return French traders to the Lakes country.14
Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14), with France facing a fur shortage after decades of glut and with British access to the
