Europeans to fight.
The Mesquakies had intermittently fought their Lakes Indian rivals for several decades, and a brief period of peace, during which the rival nations united to fight the Iroquois, had ended with the 1701 Montreal treaty. French and Mesquakie relations had become strained at about the same time, when some of the Foxes blocked the Wisconsin-Fox River portage in order to deprive their Dakota rivals of trade. In 1710, Sieur de Cadillac invited the Mesquakies and their Mascouten allies to Michigan, hoping thereby to clear the portage and build up Detroit’s trading population. About one thousand people accepted his invitation, but war captain Pemoussa’s band of Mesquakies alarmed the French by settling directly adjacent to Detroit. Meanwhile, the Mascouten migrants became embroiled in a war with the Odawas and, in 1712, lost over two hundred people to an Odawa attack. The surviving Mascoutens took refuge with their Mesquakie allies at Detroit. The increasingly agitated French commandant ordered both nations to leave their settlement and called on his own Native allies for reinforcements. In May 1712 a large Anishinaabe, Huron, and Illinois war party attacked and dispersed the Fox settlement, then pursued the fleeing Mesquakies and killed or enslaved more than one thousand of them.23
Such massively disproportionate violence is difficult to explain, but most likely France’s allies wanted to make a show of force that would impress and intimidate the French. The attack had quite a different effect on Pemoussa’s Mesquakie kinsmen, who in retaliation raided Anishinaabe and other Indian towns around Lake Michigan. Eventually, Governor Vaudreuil had to launch a punitive expedition, which in 1716 attacked the principal town of the Wisconsin Mesquakies, forcing the defenders to capitulate. Casualties proved so light, however, that at least one historian suspects the French attack was a “sham,” intended less to punish the Foxes than to pacify them and reopen the faltering fur trade. Certainly the peace terms that the French imposed on the Mesquakies included the payment of furs and Indian slaves to repay the costs of the war, and the expedition’s commander boasted that his efforts yielded “an extraordinary abundance of rich and valuable peltries.”24
Peace between the French and Mesquakies lasted for a decade, but the Foxes resumed fighting their Native rivals soon after 1716. French slave traders played a role in reigniting the conflict, encouraging the Mesquakies’ enemies to raid Fox settlements for captives. In retaliation, the Mesquakies destroyed two Illini towns, driving the remaining Illiniwek southward, and made war on the Ojibwas. Fox warriors tortured and executed their own captives: a French priest visiting the Mesquakie homeland observed the racked and burned bodies of Fox victims outside their towns. French officials, hoping to preserve the slowly reviving Lakes fur trade, tried to keep their nation out of the internecine war, but the conciliatory Governor Vaudreuil died in 1725 and his successor feared the Mesquakies would endanger the new French settlements in Illinois. Negotiations between that new governor, Charles de Beauharnois, and Fox chiefs broke down when the Illiniwek refused to return Mesquakie slaves. In 1728 Beauharnois initiated the final phase of the Fox Wars, sending sixteen hundred warriors and French troops to extirpate the Mesquakies. The governor’s adversaries did not lack allies of their own, however, and from one of these, the Six Nations of Iroquois, the Foxes received warning of the attack. When the expedition reached Green Bay in the summer of 1728, the attackers discovered that their quarry had retreated westward. The French consoled themselves by burning the Mesquakies’ abandoned towns and fields.25
The allies changed tactics. Smaller Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee war bands harried Mesquakie settlements and travelers. By the summer of 1730, these raiders had killed or enslaved five hundred Fox Indians, and the surviving Mesquakies decided, for their own safety, to seek refuge with the Six Nations. To reach Iroquoia the Foxes had to cross the territory of their Illini enemies, and neither Illini nor French military leaders would give the Foxes free passage. The Illiniwek and their allies assembled thirteen hundred warriors and colonial militia to intercept the Mesquakies. After a brief siege of the Foxes’ camp on the Sangamon River, and a failed parley, the attackers killed about six hundred Mesquakies and enslaved most of the survivors. Only a few hundred Foxes survived to take refuge over the Mississippi River. In less than twenty years the Fox Indians lost over 80 percent of their population.26
In their duration and ferocity, the Fox Wars evoked the Iroquois wars of the previous century. In both of these conflicts, the intense desire for captives turned ordinary internecine fighting into wars of annihilation. While the Iroquois primarily wanted captives to replace their own losses, however, the Mesquakies’ adversaries intended to sell most of their prisoners as slaves. New France became the primary destination for these bondsmen, and hard labor and degradation their lot. Most of the eighteen hundred Indians whom French Canadians enslaved became construction and field workers in French towns or found themselves forced into concubinage in an habitant’s bed. If the Fox Wars proved anything, it was the diversity of French motives in North America: French traders and officials might want peaceful relations with the Lakes Indians, but French settlers wanted land and laborers, and their desires made peaceful coexistence difficult if not impossible. The wars also showed that the desire for vengeance, prestige, captives, or a combination thereof could push virtually any group of people, Native American or European, into a war of annihilation. It could even, as in the case of the Iroquois wars, push them into a war hundreds of miles from their homeland. Prosecuting such a war to a successful conclusion, however, was another thing, as the French learned during their other major conflict with Native Americans in the continental interior: the Chickasaw War.27
Although the Chickasaws resided in present-day Mississippi, their hunting ranges extended north to the Ohio River, and since the late seventeenth century they had been fighting a desultory war with the Illiniwek, whose towns they raided for plunder and slaves. (The Illiniwek periodically returned the favor.) By 1730, however, Chickasaw leaders had become alarmed by French Louisiana’s campaign against the neighboring Natchez Indians, and they sent emissaries to Illinois to organize a Native American defensive alliance against France. French officials instead arrested the three diplomats and sent them to New Orleans, where the governor burned them alive. Subsequently the Chickasaws gave asylum to Natchez refugees and began raiding French shipping in the Mississippi River. Governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville of Louisiana decided that he could not preserve his government’s credibility with its Indian allies—protect “the honor of the French name”—unless he extirpated the Chickasaws, and thus at great expense he organized two military expeditions against the Chickasaws’ towns.28
Bienville’s two expeditions drew on both Louisiana and the Great Lakes region for manpower. The first army, dispatched in 1736, included Illini and Miami warriors, who participated in a failed assault on a fortified Chickasaw town; the Illiniwek fled the field after their French commander was wounded, and Bienville’s army took over sixty casualties. Bienville spent three years organizing another army, but his second expedition essentially collapsed in the field, depleted by desertion and illness. The governor’s mutinous officers forced him to sign a truce with the Chickasaws before his soldiers ever reached Chickasaw country. The truce itself was short-lived; in the early 1740s, Chickasaw warriors raided French shipping on the lower Ohio River, and their nation’s war with France lasted nearly two more decades. The Franco-Indian expeditions of 1736 and 1739 had proven so expensive, however, that Bienville decided to rely henceforth on his southern Indian allies, particularly the Choctaws, to harry and raid the Chickasaws.29
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The “Great Peace” of 1701, which marked the end of the Iroquois wars in the Lakes country, did not inaugurate a peaceful epoch in that region’s history. For three decades Lakes Indian warriors and French officers and paymasters preoccupied themselves with two protracted, expensive interethnic wars. Both of these conflicts, and to some extent the final phase of the Iroquois war, were consequences of the French alliance with the Lakes Indians. New France wanted to hold onto its thinly dispersed empire in the pays d’en haut and their Mississippi River communication line with Louisiana. They needed their Indian “children’s” good offices, but they particularly needed their military services, without which they could neither intimidate France’s North American adversaries
