of the Illinois [including] the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaroa, Coiracoentanon, Chinko, Cahokia, Chepoussa, Amonokoa, Cahokia, Quapaw, and many others.” Together they “form[ed] the village of the Illinois made up of about 400 huts.”91 Three years later, the village included the same lineup, including now the Tapouero and Maroa as well.92 In the concept of historian Michael Witgen, the Illinois were “shapeshifting,” adopting the unified identity of “Illinois” even as they preserved their “microlevel” identities as members of what La Salle called their “familles” or, perhaps, doodemag.93 Significantly, it was kinship, the common ancestry dating back before the contact era began, that helped make this shapeshifting possible. La Salle made the point that “all of these nations are comprised beneath the name Illinois because they are related and because there are a few families of each within the village of Kaskaskia.”94
In addition to shapeshifting, this consolidation was facilitated by an inclusivist political strategy.95 In the Grand Village, outsiders were welcomed. Chickasaw and Shawnees, who spoke a totally foreign language, were welcomed to the area of the Grand Village in the 1680s, as were Miami after 1681.96 A short distance away, other groups settled as well, adding to the population center with possibly five to ten thousand more people.97 And of course the Illinois welcomed Frenchmen like La Salle. The Illinois incorporated these “strangers” into their community and built strength. By 1683, they were in the largest population center on the continent north of Mexico—twenty thousand people within walking distance of one another.
The massive size of the Grand Village gave the Illinois safety, allowing them to redouble their efforts in slaving. Throughout the 1680s, La Salle and Hennepin frequently noted how the Illinois brought slaves up the Illinois River after their raids in the West.98 Many of these captives were probably assimilated into the patrilineal households of the Illinois as second and third wives. Put to work as farmers and especially as meat and hide processors in the bison economy, they became slaves “who they force to labor for them,” according to La Salle. Many others were traded to other Algonquian groups in the Great Lakes who were in need of replacement kin. These were, again in the words of La Salle, the “slaves which they are accustomed to traffic.”99 In the context of continued Iroquois violence, the captives became a key to Illinois strength.
Figure 9. Detail of Franquelin’s map of 1684, with the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia. Many of the groups in this massive settlement at the top of the Illinois Valley were Illinois-speakers who had moved from the West, making the Grand Village and surrounding settlements North America’s largest population center in the 1680s.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
As they consolidated, the Illinois continued their violent trajectory from the pre-contact era. Each year, the annual cycle would feature agriculture, a winter hunt, and sometimes a summer or a fall expedition. Frequently in the 1680s, they would go to the east, supported by the French, and make war on the Iroquois, as they did in 1687.100 But their more typical annual routine was to go west for slaves. In 1689, the Illinois brought back 130 captives from a raid on the Osage.101 In the 1690s, they organized an expedition with 1,200 warriors against the Osage and Arkansas.102 Indeed, by the 1690s, French observers noted that “almost all the village marches, and even many women accompany them.”103 The results were impressive. In one march, they “carried away captive [all] the people of a village.”104 And this wasn’t an isolated incident. The general reputation of the Illinois in this period was that “they carry off entire villages.”105 In 1690, slaves brought through the Illinois Country included Siouans and Caddoans from the distant West, like the Kadohadacho, as well as Pawnee, Osage, and Missouria.106
As the Illinois expanded their reach into the Southwest, Siouan-speakers treated the Illinois as regional hegemons. The Illinois were so powerful that Indians like the Osage appeared each year at the Grand Village, as Liette noted, “to recognize some of their people [the Illinois] as chiefs.”107 New France intendant and Indian expert Antoine Denis Raudot echoed Liette: “This honor that they receive makes them believe that all the ground should tremble under them.”108 These were the wages of a hundred years of expansion in the borderlands.
French support helped the Illinois build power, both militarily and economically. With French alliance, the Illinois continued their business as merchants, trading both slaves and bison hides to the French and Algonquian allies.109 In turn, they took French goods to allied groups in the Southwest. The demand for goods there was high, and the Illinois took advantage: “These [western] people not being warlike like themselves and having need of their trade to get axes, knives, awls, and other objects, the Illinois buy these things from us to resell to them.”110 They also likely benefited from the mediation of the French, who helped them make alliances with Algonquians like the Ottawa and Miami, former enemies whom they now were able to provide with slaves.
The Illinois’s culture became quite militaristic in the Grand Village. As mentioned, their yearly cycle included a season of warfare. Liette noted, “It is ordinarily in February that they prepare to go to war.” At this time of year, chiefs hosted feasts, collecting dozens of warriors together to convince them that “the time is approaching to go in search of men.”111 The war tradition in Illinois was animated by patrilineal kinship lines, traced through fathers and brothers.112 Male relatives organized raiding parties to replace their lost brothers, uncles, and fathers. Demonstrating the imperative for patrilineal kinship replacement, one Illinois chief rallied male relatives together for an expedition: “I have not laughed since the time that my brother, father, or uncle died. He was your relative as well as mine, since we are all comrades. If my strength and my courage equalled yours, I believe that I would go to avenge a relative as brave and as good as he was, but being as feeble as I am, I cannot do better than address myself to you. It is from your arms, brothers, that I expect vengeance for our brother.”113
Although Liette noted the rituals involved as the Illinois prepared “to go in search of men,” the more usual situation was that they went in search of women, as noted. This was probably owing in part to the logistics of warfare, since women and children captives were easier to subdue and control. Moreover, the bison economy, as we have seen, created a demand for female laborers in Illinois. Perhaps most important, the preference for women captives may have had to do with the patrilineal kinship systems common to Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes that made women better candidates for assimilation than men.114 In any event, commenting on the Illinois warriors in battle during the 1660s, French commissary and early historian Claude-Charles Bacqueville de La Potherie noted how they had “the generosity to spare the lives of many women and children, part of whom remained among them.”115 Marquette noted the same practice among the Illinois in the 1670s: “The Illinois kill the men and scalp them and take [prisoner] only the women and children, whom they grant life.”116 At the Grand Village in the 1690s, the tradition continued: “They always spare the lives of women and children unless they have lost many of their own people,” Liette noted.117
The massive introduction of female slaves shaped life at the Grand Village. As La Salle said, there were “many more women than men” in Kaskaskia.118 Relatedly, all eyewitnesses noted the polygamy practiced by the Illinois. La Salle wrote that most Illinois men had multiple wives in this period, as many as ten or twelve.119 What the French often did not realize was that many of these wives were likely slaves.120 A specific logic underlay these slave-based polygamous marriages. In the Illinois’s patrilineal society, children took the identity of their fathers, regardless of whether their mothers were native Illinois or outsiders married in, or even slaves. Thus marriages with multiple slaves strengthened the Illinois’s numbers, since all children would be raised as Illinois.121 This mode of reproduction combined with the bison-based mode of production to encourage
