enlarged the support it gave the Lakes fur trade. Governor Vaudreuil and French traders opened new posts at Green Bay, at Kaministiquia on Lake Superior (near modern Thunder Bay, Ontario), and at Ouiatenon (modern Lafayette) on the Wabash River. The Crown authorized new trading licenses and temporarily took over the fur trade at unprofitable posts like Fort Niagara, which France had established earlier in the century to let Lakes Indian hunters bypass Albany. The French government also installed smiths at many of the Lakes trading posts to repair Indian visitors’ guns and metal wares. This concession made Indians less dependent on the French but probably more willing to do repeat business for nonmetallic merchandise, particularly clothing. Thanks to this new government support of the fur trade, and traders’ increasing use of large “master canoes” that could carry up to two tons, the volume of French trade goods shipped into the Great Lakes doubled from the 1690s to the 1720s.15
The enlargement of the French trade also furnished the Lakes Indians with new ways to buy European goods. French voyageurs traveling into the Lakes country faced an arduous journey, requiring them to cover twelve hundred miles or more (the distance from Montreal to Illinois) in fourteen-hour days of paddling, and to carry up to three hundred pounds each over portages. To increase the manpower available to them and minimize their need for heavy supplies, fur traders hired Native Americans as porters and purchased food, warm clothing, and other equipment from Lakes Indian women. The Senecas at Niagara, the Potawatomis and Wyandots at Detroit, the Odawas at Michilimackinac, and the Ho-Chunks and Odawas in Wisconsin became not only suppliers of furs and peltries but part of New France’s trading infrastructure.16
The relationship between French traders and their Indian partners was never merely an economic one, and in some cases French men and Native American women agreed to make that relationship familial and biological. Some Lakes Indian nations, like the Odawas and Huron-Wyandots, had developed a female-to-male gender imbalance after their wars with the Iroquois. Liaisons with Frenchmen provided single women from these nations with an alternative to remaining single, of which their kinsmen would have disapproved, or becoming junior wives in a polygynous marriage, which might well prove abusive. (Jesuit missionaries were, in any case, discouraging the Anishinaabeg and Hurons from practicing polygamy.) They also provided both Indian women and French traders with some of the benefits of a more formal marriage: sex, companionship, access to resources like European goods or food and clothing, language instruction, and children who would legitimately belong to at least one society (their mother’s).17
Some traders also gained entry into prominent Indian families through “country” marriages. The Frenchman Sabrevois Descaris married a very prominent Ho-Chunk woman, Hopoekaw (1711–ca. 1770), in the late 1720s, presumably to improve his business relationship with his wife’s relatives. Descaris later deserted his spouse and children, but his breaking of his marital alliance did not injure the larger political alliance he and his fellow countryman sought to build. By midcentury, Hopoekaw had become the Ho-Chunks’ principal chief, and in this capacity she counseled her countrymen to fight as French allies in the Seven Years’ War.18
French officials and Jesuit priests generally did not approve of marriages “à la façon du pays” (in the custom of the country), but they did recognize that, as in Hopoekaw’s and Descaris’s case, Indian-white intermarriage could strengthen alliances and promote cultural conversion. In the 1660s, French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert advised colonists to bring Indians into their own settlements and convert them to French customs and Catholic Christianity. The first royal charter of New France (1663) made intermarriage a means to turn Indians into Frenchmen, extending French identity and privileges to any child of mixed parentage who became a Catholic. Conversion to Catholicism proved appealing to a substantial minority of the Lakes Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: several thousand Hurons, a number of Anishinaabeg, and about two thousand Illiniwek adopted the new faith. Part of Catholicism’s appeal lay in the techniques of the Jesuit missionaries who introduced the faith to the Lakes Indians. The Jesuits moved into potential converts’ communities, learned their languages, and encouraged them to blend indigenous and European religious practices; they were not dismayed but pleased to see Illinois converts giving propitiatory offerings of tobacco to a crucifix or claiming when they died that they would “take possession of paradise in the name of the whole nation.”19
Catholicism proved especially appealing to single women in societies with a reduced male population, both because the Catholic faith honored celibacy among the female laity and because conversion made it easier for Indian women to contract sacramental marriages with French traders. Catholic women like Marie Rouensa-Oucatewa, a Kaskaskia chief’s daughter, could use the option of celibacy to negotiate with their parents regarding an unwanted marriage. They could employ the Church and its saints, like Margaret and Bridget (both patronesses of married women), as sources of personal spiritual power. Missionaries sometimes encouraged fur traders to marry Catholic Indians in the expectation that convert wives would make their unruly husbands better Catholics. This influence sometimes extended beyond the home; among the Illiniwek, female converts worked as lay teachers (as Rouensa did) and church bell ringers. French traders who married Catholic Indian converts, meanwhile, might find those marriages harder to dissolve than a “country” partnership, but they became more thoroughly part of their wives’ kinship networks and usually also gained an introduction to their spouses’ new religious “kinsmen”—their Catholic godparents.20
Intermarriage became particularly common in southwestern Illinois, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, where Frenchmen and Illiniwek had established two bicultural villages, Cahokia and Kaskaskia, in the early eighteenth century. During the first few decades of the 1700s, about one-fifth of the sacramental marriages in the province were between French men and Indian, usually Illini, women. The inhabitants of these settlements created what on the surface resembled European farming villages, complete with churches, mills, herds of livestock, and wheat fields. In many respects, however, their inhabitants’ lives resembled those of Lakes Indians: the white male settlers were usually fur traders and militiamen (warriors, of a sort), while their Illini wives worked in the fields and tended the livestock. Some Lakes Indian women became well-to-do through their marital alliances. Marie Rouensa left behind a large material estate, including several houses and barns and several dozen head of livestock. Her near-contemporary, Marie Réaume, acquired a different but equally important “estate”: a social network that tied her, through her godpar-enting of Indian converts and the marriage of her daughters to French traders, to prominent families in Michilimackinac and Saint Joseph.21
Illinois’s bicultural and accommodative character began to change in 1717, when the French government annexed the territory to Louisiana and commandant Pierre de Boisbriant began issuing land grants to French settlers. By the 1750s there were six French towns in the region, with 750 free inhabitants and 600 slaves, most of them African. The region was by then annually producing one million pounds of flour, which its farmers sold to the French garrisons and settlements in lower Louisiana. The French settlements in Illinois still retained some Native American features: several dozen of their free inhabitants were Catholic Indians or their biracial children, about 25 percent of the villages’ slave population was Native American, and the French male habitants still avoided field work, preferring to leave this to their bondsmen. However, segregation and conflict were becoming more the order of the day in the province. Local officials had ordered many of Kaskaskia’s original Indian inhabitants to leave the town, and by the 1730s both French settlers and their Indian neighbors were squabbling over straying cattle and French encroachment on Illini lands. By the 1740s interracial marriages had become vanishingly rare in the province.22
As Illinois’s experiences show, while the French and the Lakes Indians generally sought mutual accommodation, they did not always succeed. Rivalry and conflict periodically disrupted peaceful human relations in the region. The bloodiest disruption, the “Fox Wars,” lasted two decades and pitted the Mesquakies (Foxes) and their allies against the Anishinaabeg, Huron-Wyandots, and Illiniwek. Both of the Fox Wars grew out of internecine rivalry between these adversaries, and the French tried to stay out of both conflicts.
