Lakes Indians were not mercenaries, however. They entered into their alliance expecting the French not only to supply them with goods and blacksmiths but also to marry into their families, adhere to their customs, and respect their autonomy. “You who are great chiefs,” an Illini chief told French officials during a 1725 visit to France, “should leave us masters of the country where we have placed our fire.” Most of all, they expected the French to fight for them. The Anishinaabeg and Illiniwek used this mutual obligation to push the French into a war with the Fox Indians; when it appeared New France might make peace, these Indian nations used slave raiding to reignite the conflict. West of the Lakes country, one might note, the Cree and Assiniboine sold Sioux slaves to French traders in order to sow discord between the French and the Sioux, checking New France’s commercial expansion. The Franco-Indian alliance was not one that the French controlled, nor was it based solely on peaceful commerce.30
While some of the Lakes Indians tried to prevent the French from allying with their own Native adversaries, so too did French officials worry about their Indian allies uniting against them. New France needed strong Indian defenders, but not too strong. Fear of an Iroquois alliance with the Odawas and Wyandots had produced a risky and expensive anti-Iroquois diplomatic mission in 1690 and probably helped motivate Governor Frontenac’s offensives against Iroquoia later that decade. Fear of a Chickasaw alliance with the Illinois and other southern Lakes nations helped ignite and sustain the Chickasaw war of the 1730s and ’40s. The French might periodically fret about inter-Indian conflict, but they preferred to let such fighting occur, and even to participate in it themselves, to keep their allies separated and weak. The Franco-Indian alliance wasn’t merely a violent one: it also generated mutual suspicion. This would only grow as French officials contemplated both the fragility of their North American dominion and their growing inability to separate their Indian “children” from the greatest threat to their empire: the rapidly expanding colonies of Great Britain.
4
The Hazards of War
IMPERIALISM USUALLY FEEDS OFF EMPIRE BUILDERS’ FEARS: FEAR that their own empire is weak; fear that an end to expansion will bring economic collapse; fear that if one’s own empire doesn’t seize a prized territory, some rival surely will. This last fear weighed heavily on the early modern imperial mind, and it drove the French to build their tenuous and economically unproductive North American empire. Tens of thousands of Indians supported that empire, partly with furs and food and slaves, partly by their profession of kinship with the French and their monarch, and partly with their military labor, their willingness to fight France’s adversaries. Fear of British competition for those Native allies drove officers to build forts hundreds of miles from the nearest French settlement, and to mount showy and expensive military campaigns from New York to Mississippi. Fear eventually drove the French to initiate the war that brought down their extensive and expensive North American empire.1
French officials particularly feared the potential consequences of Native Americans’ autonomy. The Indians in their empire were not subjects but allies, independent nations who manipulated the French to their own ends, and who might at some future date “defect” to the British. In point of fact, only a small minority of Lakes Indians sought to break with the French by the mid-eighteenth century. While many traded with the British colonists, they also continued to buy goods from and pledge their loyalty to their French fathers, and during the Seven Years’ War (1754–1760), most demonstrated that they preferred the French as allies. Lakes Indian warriors raided Britain’s settlements, besieged its forts, and helped the French oppose its armies. Their aid, ultimately, did not suffice to save the French empire, for Britain had resources that neither Louis XV nor his Indian supporters could match: a huge navy, ample money and credit, and an American colonial population fifteen times larger than French America’s. When the war ended, however, the Lakes Indians would demonstrate quite clearly that they retained their independence and power, and that Britons could not safely belittle or ignore Native peoples.2
* * *
The European kingdom that would become France’s principal colonial rival, England, paid little attention to the North American interior in the seventeenth century. Like its French neighbor, England—after 1707, part of the Kingdom of Great Britain—had been in past centuries a province (a marginal province) of the Roman Empire, then a cluster of tribal kingdoms unified in the eleventh century CE by the Danes and Normans. It remained an unstable realm for another seven hundred years, experiencing a major rebellion or civil war once or twice each century. The seventeenth century brought to England a bloody civil war and a royal coup d’état, which (not surprisingly) distracted its royal government from goings-on in the new overseas settlements. The English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard functioned as chartered companies or family properties with substantial local autonomy; as long as they sent valuable exports back to England and served as dumping grounds for vagrants, criminals, religious malcontents, and unplaced younger sons of the aristocracy, the Crown usually left them alone. Despite this neglect, and thanks to “push” factors like a stagnant English economy that drove hundreds of thousands of people across the North Atlantic, the English American colonies’ settler population steadily grew. By 1700 it reached 250,000 colonists, sixteen times as many whites as one could find in New France, and their numbers would quadruple during the next half-century.3
Though the English colonists had little interest in the country west of the Appalachians, their influence already extended there. The Dutch colony of New Netherland and its successor colony of New York sold the Iroquois the weapons they used to disperse the Hurons, fight the Anishinaabeg, and harry the Illiniwek. New York later became an alternative trading center, if a somewhat remote one, for Lakes Indians dissatisfied with French goods or prices; hunters could canoe to Lake Erie or Lake Ontario and traverse Iroquoia, stopping along the way to pay respect and gifts to the Five Nations. Some French traders came to Albany and bought English textiles for resale to their own Indian customers. Meanwhile, the colony of South Carolina became the center of the English Indian slave trade, which ensnared thirty thousand to forty thousand people by 1715. While this trade mainly occurred in the southeast, it extended into the southern Lakes country: one of Carolina’s principal slave-trading partners, the Chickasaws, sent war parties into Illinois in search of captives, and French settlers sold Illini and Kickapoo slaves to Carolina traders.4
Albany stood distant from the Lakes Indians’ settlements, and Carolina’s Indian slave trade collapsed after the Yamasee War of 1715–
16. Shortly thereafter, though, two other British colonies began to pose a more serious challenge to French authority. Both played a part in igniting the conflict that ultimately destroyed the French empire in North America. The first was Pennsylvania, established in 1681 as a refuge for Quakers and other religious dissidents, and as a real-estate venture by founder William Penn. Pennsylvania’s Quaker-controlled government refused to create a provincial militia, instead cultivating good relations with the colony’s Delaware Indian neighbors, trading them weapons and using them to defend the colony’s borders. After it became clear that the Pennsylvanians wanted peace and that their government had legally restricted the purchase of Indian lands, Native peoples from other regions began relocating to Pennsylvania’s river valleys. The Indian settlers included a faction of the Five Nations Iroquois, known to their detractors as “Mingoes” (here we will refer to them as “Ohio Iroquois”), and some of the Shawnees.5
Pennsylvania’s white settler population also grew rapidly, rising to 160,000 by 1760. As the colony grew, the Penn family used land cession treaties, some of them fraudulent, to push their Indian neighbors and allies westward. Their main targets were the Delawares, an Algonquian-speaking nation known sometimes by the names of their divisions, the Lenapes and Munsees. Both of these Delaware groups distinguished themselves by their fluid gender boundaries: Lenape and Munsee men and women both dressed alike and both sexes could serve as sachems and religious leaders. The Iroquois derided all of the Delawares as “women,” but the targets of their scorn did not take this as an
