fledgling colony in Illinois was a threat to New France interests, especially as long as Frontenac was governor. The rivalry between the Illinois proprietors—La Salle and his partner, Henri de Tonty—and New France officials over the fur trade would only grow over the course of the 1680s.51
But if La Salle caused frustration for New France officials, on the ground he had his own frustrations, owing most of all to insubordination among his men. The problems started with La Salle’s earliest settlement in Illinois, when nearly every one of his men deserted either en route or shortly after arriving in the region.52 Altogether, La Salle lost at least thirty men and spent most of his time during these early expeditions chasing after deserters.53 After building a small fort on the Illinois River in November 1679, La Salle returned to Fort Frontenac for more supplies. Arriving back in Illinois in July 1680, he found that his remaining men had abandoned him and destroyed his fort.54
As the priest Louis Hennepin wrote, even the very name of this first fort in Illinois, called Fort Crevecoeur, or broken heart, was a testament to the frustration the leaders felt toward their disloyal men: “We named it the Fort of Crevecoeur, because the desertion of our Men, and the other Difficulties we labour’d under, had almost broke our Hearts.”55 Having fled Fort Crevecoeur in the spring of 1680, a member of the deserting party turned and scrawled a message in a wood block hanging on the remains of the looted fort: “Nous sommes Tous Sauvages” (“We are all savages”).56
Much to La Salle’s frustration, these defiant deserters pursued their own interests. A good example is a man called Michel Accault, a fur trader who accompanied La Salle to the interior. As one priest later wrote, he was “famous in this Illinois country for all his debaucheries.”57 In 1680, Accault almost certainly participated in several attempts to mutiny against La Salle’s leadership. Assigned to help Father Louis Hennepin explore the Mississippi in 1680, Accault abandoned the priest and stole the goods that had been entrusted to him as gifts to the Indians.58 This left Hennepin alone with a single guide to travel through an unknown country.59 Hennepin later found Accault returning from a fruitful hunting season, “descending the River of Bulls with [a] Fleet of Canow’s well stor’d with Provisions.”60 He was “reproached for a Base Fellow, who had refus’d to accompany us for fear of being famished by the way.”61 But he survived, and he profited.
Indeed, men like Accault were opportunistic and self-interested. On one occasion, Hennepin recalled a conversation he had with Accault, one of the very rare moments in which the words of a fur trader are captured in the record. Standing at a fork in the road, disagreeing about which way to turn, Hennepin and Accault began debating about responsibility and authority in the middle of the Illinois woods in 1680. When Hennepin insisted on Accault’s obligations to the government in New France, as well as to La Salle, Accault and some others rejected this notion: “My men would never consent, telling me that they had no Business there, and they were oblig’d to make all the haste they could towards the North, to exchange their Commodities for furs. I told them, that the Public Good was to be preferr’d to the Private Interest; but I could not persuade them to any such thing.”62 Accault felt no allegiance to larger imperial goals or to La Salle’s project, and he did not quibble with Hennepin’s view that he was pursuing only his private interest. In fact, he embraced this description, emphasizing the lack of political allegiance he felt to the government or to local authorities like Hennepin. As Hennepin recalled, “[Accault] told me that every one ought to be free.” Accault then led the canoe up the river, to where he wanted to go.63
Men like Accault were successful, profiting greatly in the Illinois. For their part, Illinois Indians welcomed these men. But in spite of successes like Accault’s, or indeed perhaps because of them, the whole colony frustrated Quebec officials. In 1683, the new governor-general of the colony of New France, Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, wrote a memorial to the king, informing him about La Salle’s activity in Illinois. “You will please tell me what you want me to do,” he wrote, for “Sieur de La Salle by his arrogance has turned his head.” La Barre especially complained about La Salle’s efforts to effect “his plan, which is to attract habitants” to what amounted to an outlaw plantation, full of men like Accault. The governor worried that he would soon “debauch all the lazy and idle men of this country [New France]” by recruiting them to his illicit settlement. As La Barre told it, La Salle aimed to make his own independent colony or, in the words of the frustrated governor, “to try to make an imaginary kingdom.”64
Of course, given La Salle’s struggles to control his men, La Barre’s description was apt. Although he had grand imperial visions, La Salle could not realize them. Nor could the Jesuits, whose hopes of keeping the Illinois separate from the French were now dashed by the arrival of La Salle. Meanwhile, the government in New France opposed colonial activity in the region altogether. It was hard to see what kind of empire would possibly come of these competing agendas, chaotic beginnings, and quixotic visions. None of them was likely to be realized. In the early 1680s, Illinois was an imaginary kingdom, indeed. But this was when Indian affairs suddenly and radically changed the situation.
When the Iroquois attacked the Illinois in 1680, it appeared to the French like the Illinois were too weak to defend themselves. As the Iroquois descended the Illinois Valley, Illinois men pathetically ran away and did not even defend the women and children of their villages. Poignantly, most of the several hundred victims of the attacks were women.65 Moreover, French audiences familiar with descriptions of the Illinois in the Jesuit Relations and other colonial correspondence might have remembered a previous episode in which the Illinois men similarly abandoned women and children to Iroquois violence.66 Shocked by this apparent cowardice, the French concluded that the Illinois were just devastated. La Salle, who gave the most graphic account of the attack and its aftermath, said they were “incapable of resistance.”67
As the Iroquois attacks on the Illinois were followed by more attacks on other Algonquians, the French realized that they had few options. Over the course of the Beaver Wars, the French had supported several Algonquian groups in an effort to prevent the Iroquois from dominating the Great Lakes. The future of the fur trade and the very existence of New France seemed to hinge on making sure Algonquians remained motivated to resist the Iroquois and, most important, never to ally with them.68 When English traders began moving into the Illinois Country in the 1680s, attempting to coax the Illinois into an alliance against French-allied tribes in the Great Lakes, pressure on the French increased.69 The attack on the Illinois in 1680 was a dramatic beginning to a change in policy. As the French now saw it, failure to support the Illinois would be perceived by the latter as “abandonment,” raising the possibility that the tribe would align against Quebec.70 Meanwhile, French explorations in the Illinois region in the 1670s and 1680s had made it clear that the Illinois were a key population in the West. They were, one priest wrote, “the Iroquois of this Country here who will make war with all the other nations.”71 Summing up the new attitude toward the Illinois alliance, the king himself wrote in 1686, “There is nothing more important than sustaining the Illinois and the other allied nations against … those that the Iroquois send in war. It would be better to engage them than to let [the Iroquois] destroy these nations when all of them can be sustained by commerce.”72 Despite reservations, and despite how remote the territory was from Quebec, the French policy became to “hold the hand of the Illinois.”73
The decisions to support the Illinois and to extend commercial routes into their territory represented major changes for a government still reluctant to send traders into the interior, let alone into such a distant zone. The French government now began to send gifts and ammunition regularly into the interior. For the most part the new policy was a program to supply the Illinois with trade goods, arms, and military assistance. In 1686, the government of New France supplied 400 rifles to the Illinois living around Fort St. Louis des Illinois.
