Evidence from the contact era suggests that female slaves were welcomed into polygamous families among the Illinois as second and third wives and put under the subordination of a mistress.124 As La Salle would write in the 1680s, by the early contact period, female slaves in Illinois were not just replacement kin but people “who they compel to labor for them.”125 It seems almost certain that the bison economy’s labor demands and the traditional kinshipreplacement imperatives of slavery dovetailed in Illinois in the contact era. The Illinois’s location in the borderlands allowed them to replace kin and to expand the capacity of their bison-based mode of production.
By the 1660s, through slavery and adoption, the Illinois had probably begun to replace the people they had lost in early Iroquois attacks and probable epidemics, as their population figures suggest.126 This created a fork in the road. It seems clear that the Illinois might have stayed out of further conflicts, safe from the fighting that embroiled the Algonquian world. They could have remained, heedlessly hunting bison west of the Mississippi, avoiding Iroquois aggression. Instead the ambitious Illinois continued their opportunistic trajectory. Taking advantage of a respite from Iroquois attacks beginning in the late 1660s, the Illinois resumed their trading to the north vigorously. Several French accounts from this period report the Illinois making their first visits to newly established French outposts in Green Bay, the Fox River, and Lake Superior (St. Esprit).127 As Allouez wrote in 1669, by this time the Illinois were entrepreneurs, traveling north “from time to time in great numbers, as Merchants, to carry away hatchets and kettles, guns, and other articles that they need.”128 Allouez commented that one Illinois merchant—Chachagwessiou—had distinguished himself as a skilled trader and a tough negotiator. Commenting on the Illinois, Allouez wrote: “They act like traders and give hardly any more than do the French.”129
But every good merchant needs a commodity for sale. For the Illinois, their prairie homeland lacked lakes and woods that made for good beaver habitat, as many French pointed out. And so it just made sense: living in the borderlands, the Illinois were in a strategic spot. They projected power both in the Algonquian world to the northeast and in the Siouan-speaking world to the south and west. They were slavers, having restored their own depleted population with a whole village of Winnebagos and probably others. They had a long tradition of acting as merchants and middlemen. Taking a bold and aggressive step, they combined the roles. The Illinois continued to capture and trade for ever more slaves in the south and west, Siouans and Caddoans like the Pawnee, Osage, and Missouri. Then, following the trade routes that they had established earlier in the protohistoric period for trade with the Huron, the Illinois now brought these slaves north. Using a market-oriented logic, they began to “traffic” in slaves, as one French observer later put it.130 Ambitious merchants who lacked good beaver for the fur trade, the Illinois took advantage of the other commodity available to themselves: people. By 1673, when Marquette visited the Illinois, the strategy was consummate: “They are warlike, and make themselves dreaded by the Distant tribes to the south and west, whither they go to procure Slaves; these they barter, selling them at a high price to other Nations, in exchange for other Wares.”131
Like their migration to the Illinois Valley in the late 1500s, the Illinois’s embrace of slavery and slave trading was not defensive but aggressive. And as Marquette realized while traveling to the Illinois Country, the aggressive Illinois were now “feared” by groups all over the pays d’en haut. In the 1670s, the Ketchigamis saved two Illinois prisoners from death for fear of reprisals by the Illinois.132 The Menominees told Marquette not to travel any farther south than the Fox River, on account of the Illinois—the “ferocious people”—who lived beyond.133 The Illinois themselves told the French that they held influence over all the “remote nations” and “very distant savages” to the South of them.134 It was likely their power as slavers that made them so feared. First exploiting bison and then slaves, the Illinois had invaded and conquered the borderlands, seizing opportunity.
It is precisely this kind of opportunism that the Illinois used to welcome the French when they showed up in the Illinois Country during the 1670s. The Jesuits Marquette and his partner, Claude Allouez, were among the first Frenchmen to travel to the Illinois’s new homelands. Arriving at Illinois villages on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, the Frenchmen met a powerful Indian group, whose “traditions” were all about innovation, flexibility, and conquest. As they reveal in their earliest writings for the Jesuit Relations from Illinois, the Jesuits thought that the Illinois were very eager Christians. What is more accurate to say is that the Illinois were extraordinarily opportunistic and willing to experiment with the Jesuits’ ideas just as they had done in their recent cultural, ecological, and social adaptations while moving to the prairies. They had a “tradition” of innovation, and it was the cornerstone of their history.
From Allouez’s very first meeting with the Illinois at St. Esprit, he singled them out as exceptionally enthusiastic about Christianity. As he wrote in 1670, the Illinois “offer[ed] a fine field for Gospel laborers, as it is impossible to find [a group of Indians] better fitted for receiving Christian influences.”135 Unlike many other Indian groups, the Illinois were not hostile to missionaries and were open to prayer. “If they do not all pray as yet, they at least esteem prayer. They are far from having an aversion to it, or from dreading it as a dangerous thing, as all the other Savages of this New France did when we began preaching the Gospel to them.”136 Their speeches had “no savor of the Savage,”137 and they listened attentively to the priests’ lengthy sermons.138 Not only did the Illinois at St. Esprit eagerly await Allouez’s lessons, they also promised to become evangelists in their own right.139
The Illinois began to experiment with Christianity willingly in almost every one of the early encounters between themselves and the Jesuits. In 1673, Marquette proudly watched Indians worshiping the cross with animal skins.140 Allouez noted that the Illinois mixed Christianity into a spiritual practice featuring dreams and thrilled at how the Illinois reported seeing Jesus in their dreams.141 During their visit to the mission of St. Francis Xavier in 1674, Allouez observed some Illinois burning tobacco at the altar.142 Especially interesting was the Indians’ treatment of the church building itself. As Allouez noted, Illinois chiefs began to pray to the church, “address[ing] their speeches to this house of God, and speak[ing] to it as to an animate being.” Then they began to do something even more unusual: “When they pass by here they throw tobacco all around the church, which is a kind of devotion to their divinity.” Finally, the Illinois Indians “also [came] sometimes and offer[ed] presents [to the church], to beg God to have pity upon their deceased relatives.”143 Combined with their feasts honoring Jesus and the fasts that they conducted in order to find God in their dreams, these gestures suggested an idiosyncratic, but positive, embrace of Christianity. The priests proudly boasted about the “honors they pay to our Holy Church, after their fashion.”144 The Illinois approached the priests and the other-than-human spirits they represented in typical fashion, opportunistically.
It is almost certain that Christianity became another additive to a diverse and complex Illinois spiritual worldview.145 The Illinois practiced Christianity alongside more traditional manitou worship, itself likely newly tailored to the Illinois environment. The Illinois were flexible and adaptive, and this is what made them such good pupils. “They honor the lord among themselves in their own way,” as Marquette noted.146 Of course, it is hard to imagine them doing it any other way. After all, they were powerful and not desperate. Indeed, Marquette himself seemed to acknowledge the Illinois’s own agency in the creation of a hybrid version of Christianity. Recognizing the Illinois’s active participation in appropriating Christianity to their own needs, Marquette noted how an Illinois man on his deathbed went “to go take possession of paradise in the name of the whole nation.”147 If a “spiritual conquest” was happening here, the Illinois were the ones conquering Christianity, on their own terms.
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