Americans used the term “Western World.” It is evident, however, that the lands around the Great Lakes had been a center of human culture and development for thousands of years. Indians had been hunting in that region since the Pleistocene, had there learned to mine copper and domesticate dogs earlier than any other people in North America, and had built some of the largest towns and cities the continent would see prior to the eighteenth century. Far from a wild periphery, the Lakes region was long-settled, lay at the center of a continent-wide trading network, and for many centuries hosted highly sophisticated Native American cultures.22
The various “Mound Builder” cultures had almost all dispersed by the sixteenth century, but if their 2,500-year-long history makes one thing clear, it is that their disappearance need not have been permanent. The decline of one complex culture did not preclude the rise of a successor culture in the future. Hopewell succeeded Adena, the Mississippian and Fort Ancient cultures succeeded Hopewell, and there was no reason to assume, from the vantage point of 1600 CE, that the Indians of the Great Lakes region would not eventually create another complex, urban culture. Certainly there was still a large Native American population in the region, along with trading networks that could supply enough prestige goods to enrich and empower a future elite.
What prevented such a revival from occurring was the introduction of a new group of migrants who—largely inadvertently—decimated the region’s Indian population and introduced a new supply of exotic goods too large for the region’s surviving elite to control. The new migrants called themselves by several names; collectively, we would call them Europeans. Their invasion of the Midwest began the most revolutionary charge the region had seen since the rise of Cahokia, and possibly since the end of the Ice Ages.
2
The European Disruption
A MOSAIC OF HUMAN SOCIETIES ADORNED THE GREAT LAKES country in the era of European colonization. There were Algonquian speakers and Iroquoian speakers, patrilineal and matrilineal cultures, people who resided in longhouses and those who built smaller dwellings or temporary shelters. The Native American nations of the region also had much in common. The majority of them, or more precisely the majority of Lakes Indian women, practiced agriculture, and most of the region’s people lived in settled villages and towns. All of the Lakes Indians traded with one another, and their commercial networks extended hundreds of miles to the north, east, and west. All gave young men the responsibility for becoming warriors, and all fought internecine wars with their neighbors for glory and captives. The Lakes Indians even shared some of the same mythologies, with several attributing their origins to divine or celestial realms, many describing the material world as a great island supported on the back of a giant turtle, and most believing that they shared the world with powerful manitous that influenced human affairs. These similarities were not merely coincidental: they demonstrated that the contact-era Lakes Indians had been interacting with one another and sharing goods and ideas for centuries.1
The web of interaction that Native Americans created would later magnify the destructive impact of European colonization. Trade routes carried new diseases, which decimated the Huron-Wendat and Iroquois confederacies at the eastern end of the Great Lakes. Old warpaths now provided passage to Iroquois raiders and Illiniwek slavers armed with European guns. French intruders found that, with a little help from their Indian allies, they could employ Native American paths and waterways to penetrate to the center of the continent. Having initially come to North America to trade and evangelize, the French would by the end of the seventeenth century use these routes to build and supply churches, forts, and settlements. All of these became instruments of an empire with which most Lakes Indians felt compelled to align themselves.
* * *
The first Europeans to encounter the Great Lakes Indians came from France, a western European kingdom with roughly the same population as fifteenth-century Mexico. France was an old land, colonized by modern humans long before the first Paleo-Indians arrived in North America, but its culture and institutions developed much more recently. The kingdom’s principal language and its bookish, bureaucratized Catholic faith derived ultimately from the Romans, who had bloodily conquered Gaul (as France was then known) in the first century BCE and ruled it for five hundred years. The agricultural staples that fed the French people, grain and livestock, had been domesticated several millennia earlier, but the productivity of early-modern France’s farms, and thus the subsistence of its twenty million people, depended on medieval innovations like crop rotation and the horse collar. The machinery (mine pumps and powered bellows) that allowed French smiths to manufacture cheap metal wares, the goods most desired by France’s Indian trading partners, came into use even more recently, in the fifteenth century. Even France’s ruling class experienced significant change, with the old warrior-aristocracy of the Middle Ages losing power to wealthy merchants and guild masters, who used their money to buy land, educate their children, and acquire honorable offices in the royal government. France was still a rural, parochial, and often violent society, but its people increasingly devoted themselves to industry, commerce, and exploration.2
The first Frenchmen to spend significant time in North America and trade with its Native peoples were humble fishermen from marginal coastal provinces, like Brittany and the Basque country. Early in the sixteenth century, these men began outfitting voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to the Grand Banks, a region of shoals off the coast of Newfoundland. There, currents deflected by the steep banks churned up nutrients that sustained huge quantities of plankton, which in turn fed millions of codfish. Cod was a protein-rich fish that fishermen could preserve for months, and for which there was a considerable demand among Europe’s protein-starved working population. Cod became North America’s first profitable transatlantic export, and by the 1550s hundreds of fishing vessels from France and other nations were plying the Grand Banks.3
To dry and salt their catch, cod fishermen landed on the coasts of Newfoundland, Labrador, and Quebec and spent weeks or months at temporary encampments. There some encountered Miqmaq and Montagnais Indians, who from an early date began to barter with these uninvited guests, exchanging food and animal furs for knives and glass beads. The Indians’ furs, particularly the wooly pelts of American beaver, proved valuable to French hatters, and Canadian furs became the second significant North American export to Europe. Even while a series of religious wars (1562–98) disrupted the French economy, French mariners continued to catch cod and purchase beaver pelts, and around 1600 some established a semipermanent trading rendezvous on the Saint Lawrence River.4
Since American furs were a luxury item with a low production volume and high value, French merchants believed it possible to establish an effective monopoly over the fur trade, and in the early 1600s several companies of courtiers and merchants asked the king to grant them such a monopoly. In 1607 one of these partnerships asked mariner Samuel Champlain to help them find an appropriate site in Canada for a trading base and settlement. Champlain persuaded his sponsors to choose the narrows of the Saint Lawrence River, a site relatively secure from attack and closer than Tadoussac to the homelands of the region’s principal Indians. The result was the outpost of Quebec (1608), which grew into both a successful trading center and the nucleus of French settlement in North America.5
Quebec occupied the land of the Montagnais Indians, but its principal trading partners, who accounted for over two-thirds of the furs sold to the Company of New France, belonged to a Great Lakes nation, the Hurons. The Hurons were members of the Northern Iroquoian cultural and language group, whose progenitors, according to archaeologist Dean Snow, probably migrated to the Great Lakes region after 900 CE, at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period (900–1300) that preceded the Little Ice Age. By the seventeenth century CE, there were about twenty thousand Hurons residing in a cluster of towns east of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Huron towns consisted of several dozen wooden longhouses, each housing upwards of thirty people; their largest communities had two thousand inhabitants. Like other Iroquoians, the Hurons were matrilineal, tracing familial descent through the mother’s side of the family, and they were also
