the large number of female slaves among the Illinois in the contact-era forces us to rethink the supposedly devastating attack on the Illinois by Iroquois in 1680. In many French accounts, this was a decisive blow, as the Illinois lost 700–1,200 of their people.122 As Iroquois warriors invaded, Illinois men ran away, leaving women and children behind undefended. To the French, it was a sign that the Illinois were insufficiently warlike, passive victims, and utterly desperate for French support. But what the French did not realize was that the Kaskaskia village in 1680 was likely full of slaves, almost all of them women. The fact that the men gave up this number of women might not be a sign of Illinois weakness or timidity. It is probably better understood as a sign of how many slaves the Illinois had or how many they had access to. In fact, a likely reason the attack was so successful is because “more than half” of the Kaskaskia men were themselves away on a slaving mission.123 The slave economy dominated the Illinois’s life at Great Kaskaskia.
Meanwhile, they underwrote all of this slave-based power by taking advantage of the other unique resource of their borderlands environment: bison. Many descriptions of the Illinois by French observers noted the huge scale of bison exploitation that the Illinois undertook in this period. Hennepin recalled hunting with the Illinois from the Grand Village and observed their capture of four hundred animals. La Salle did likewise. But the most important eyewitness was Pierre-Charles de Liette, the commandant at Fort St. Louis des Illinois in the 1690s.124 On one single summer hunt that Liettes accompanied, the Illinois pursued a “great herd” and killed a “great number of buffalos” after shooting off “an extraordinary number of arrows.” The bottom line? One single hunt that Liette witnessed in the Illinois Valley yielded 1,200 animals.125 Since a typical bison yielded 675 pounds of food, the Illinois utterly maximized their bison advantage at the Grand Village to support their massive population.
The Illinois used their strength to take revenge on the Iroquois. Frequent reports arrived back in Quebec detailing the gruesome rewards of the crucial alliance with the Illinois. In 1688: “96 Iroquois were killed [by the Illinois], the scalps of which victims were brought to fort Saint-Louis.”126 In 1689: “Our Illinois have brought us 25 [Iroquois] slaves. We have caused them to be burned. I did not count those that were killed on the spot.”127 Year after year, the tally grew; in 1694 the governor of New France estimated that the Illinois had taken a total of 400–500 Iroquois casualties.128 The Illinois revenged themselves for their previous losses against the Iroquois.129
The French certainly contributed to the Illinois’s power. They helped mediate disputes with the Ottawa and especially the Miami. But Illinois power was largely independent of the French, and the real logic of Great Kaskaskia was opportunism, not desperation or dependency. Although they could have stayed out of it, they united at the Grand Village during a moment of violence, becoming the masters of the slave trade and the borderlands. Indeed, while the French flattered themselves by thinking that the Illinois were dependent, in fact the Illinois probably came to this place because doing so enabled them to combine their various advantages—bison and slaves—with the new opportunities of the French material support and Algonquian alliance.
As New France supported La Salle’s colony and the Jesuit outposts, this created an unusual colonial situation. For the officials, the imperatives of Indian diplomacy meant tolerating and even supporting a nascent colony that had placed itself apart, outside of the normal rules of French government. Because the administration in New France was dependent on the agency of La Salle and the Jesuits for the alliance, administrators could not easily dictate how the colony ought to operate. Things happened here that would not have been allowed in other parts of the empire.
One example is the fur trade. In 1681, Colbert reformed the fur trade, instituting a license system that limited the number of traders allowed into the West. But Illinois remained outside of the new rules, and La Salle and Tonty had authority to issue their own trade permits.130 La Forest, who became Tonty’s partner in the mid-1680s, explained the logic: the Illinois colony was on its own, financially. If the king wanted the Illinois alliance, he would have to permit Illinois colonists to trade for their own profit.131 As a result, the king did grant exclusive trade rights to the proprietors in 1686 “in order to give them the means of meeting the expense of maintaining the fort.”132 Indeed, by 1686, the officials in New France had to recognize that the Illinois Country was the exclusive trade property of La Salle’s partners. Denonville complained that Tonty and La Forest excluded licensed New France traders from the Illinois trade.133 But nothing was done to stop this, even after Tonty and La Forest confiscated the goods of licensed Canadian traders in the Illinois.134 No other part of the Great Lakes interior operated like this, with its own rules. Even as Colbert had tried to systematize the fur trade, Illinois was outside the system.
Another example is land. La Barre was frustrated that La Salle issued grants to habitants. For instance, in his 1683 grant to a voyageur called Jacques Bourdon, La Salle gave seigneurial rights, as though the colony was its own entity free of restrictions from New France.135 This practice continued through the 1680s, and administrators often wondered whether this was even licit. As La Barre complained, the colony was attracting habitants and “debauch[ing] all the lazy men of [New France].”136 To the New France authorities, the whole settlement flew in the face of efforts to keep farmers in the St. Lawrence Valley. Governor Denonville wrote in 1687, “M. de la Salle has made grants at Fort St. Louis to several Frenchmen who have been living there for several years without caring to return. This has occasioned a host of disorders and abominations.” Elaborating this view, Denonville complained: “These people to whom M. de la Salle has made grants are all youths who have done nothing toward cultivating the land…. These people set themselves up as independent and masters on their grants.”137 In other areas of the West, illegal settlers were recalled and arrested. In Illinois, New France did not shut them down but rather allowed these “independent” colonists to be their own “masters.”
Another problem with the Illinois colony from an imperial standpoint was the question of authority itself. New France officials realized that La Salle considered his new colony to be autonomous. “I have been advised,” wrote Governor Denonville, “that Monsieur de la Salle claimed that the commandant of his fort in the Illinois was not under my orders.”138 The government of New France became increasingly upset about the state of the Illinois colony in the late 1680s. In 1688, for example, the governor persuaded the king to revoke the charters in Illinois. The fact that this legal action had no effect on the actual goings on at Fort St. Louis reflects the very weak control that New France possessed over the outpost. Still, it is notable: “In regard to the concessions made by Sieur de La Salle in the area of Fort Saint-Louis, since these cause disorders similar to those which have been noted, His Majesty permits that they be revoked.”139 Probably owing to the continued necessity of the Illinois alliance in the war against the Iroquois, the concessions were all renewed in 1690 when the king transferred the official charter of the colony from La Salle, who had died in 1684, to Tonty and La Forest. Not only did the king reconfirm the old concessions, but he granted to Tonty and La Forest the right to make new ones and charged them to “maintain and grow” the outpost.140
If all this suggests that Illinois was in a special position in the empire, perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of its distinctiveness occurred in 1693. It was in that year that Michel Accault, the former engagé and fur trader, signed a contract and paid six thousand livres’ worth of beaver in exchange for a surprising new status—landlord of Illinois. Along with just one other man, Accault now officially controlled the small outpost in the Illinois Country.141 This was the same Michel Accault whom Hennepin once called “a Base Fellow,” “famous in this Illinois country for all his debaucheries.” In the 1680s, he had deserted, disputed, and rebelled. Now he was the landlord, half owner of an official concession.
It is easy to
