the beginning of a real community, a genuine collaboration.3
This would shape the rest of Illinois Country history in unique ways. Totally unplanned and contrary to the agenda of most people in the colony, let alone the government, the new community was an improvisation. With the marriage of Accault and Rouensa, Illinois was no longer just a bunch of defiant fur traders, opportunistic Indians, and schemers. The marriage created the kernel of an interracial Christian community, around which an idiosyncratic colonial culture would soon develop. Even as the consolidated Kaskaskia village at Pimitéoui was coming apart, this community would persist.
It is Gravier who gives us a window into this set of events. Not a totally reliable narrator, he probably exaggerated many things in the long letters he wrote to his Jesuit superiors. But Gravier’s accounts of intercultural collaboration cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda, nor as the consequence of naïve misunderstanding, delusions of grandeur, or the failure to try to see the Native perspective.4 Like other Jesuits of his generation in the Grand Village, he deeply understood the Illinois, had close alliances with them, and thus was probably one of the most sensitive observers of the Illinois’s culture, ever.5 His dictionary and writings are the best sources to understand this period of transformation, and together they reveal a depth of knowledge about the Illinois.6 And if Gravier’s accounts were based on real understanding, so too were those of other eyewitnesses, such as Pierre-Charles de Liette, Tonty’s nephew and a military officer who arrived in the Illinois Country as commandant in 1687. Like Gravier and the other Jesuits, Liette studied the Illinois and deeply understood them, producing a 195-page manuscript, perhaps the most sensitive quasi-ethnographic description of any Algonquian people in the seventeenth century.7 Through sources like these, we can witness so much about the beginnings of this idiosyncratic, pragmatic colonial community. Moving beyond transitory frontier relations, the inhabitants of Illinois began a new era of real intercultural understanding.
Jesuits and Illinois Indians made early and opportunistic accommodations at the mission of the Immaculate Conception in the 1670s. But for various reasons, the earliest Jesuits did not spend much time in their new mission after 1675. Indeed, the initial conversions and baptisms, all the optimistic descriptions of the early mission in the Jesuit Relations, rested on surprisingly little contact between the Illinois and the priests. Marquette was only able to spend about three months in Illinois villages before his death in 1675. His partner, Claude Allouez, spent most of his time traveling and moving throughout the Great Lakes region from 1666 through 1689.8 He thus spent no more than a few months with the Illinois prior to 1676 and only a short time with them during the 1680s.9 When Allouez and Marquette wrote their reports of harmonious accommodation in Illinois, they were really describing a highly itinerant and impermanent frontier in which they themselves were sojourners.
When Jacques Gravier arrived to reestablish the neglected mission project of Illinois in 1689, he ushered in a whole new phase of the missionary frontier. In many ways, he brought the same goal that had motivated the early Jesuits: an idiosyncratic Christianity on Illinois terms. But although he had the same hopes, he and his fellow second-generation missionaries in Illinois had a very different experience. The biggest difference was permanence. Because they lived in Illinois for such a long period of time, Gravier and his partners among the second generation came to truly know the Illinois.
The differences between the first and second generations of Jesuits in Illinois are many, but the most important place to begin is with numbers. Before 1676, Marquette and Allouez spent no more than a few months in Illinois villages, in total. By contrast, the second generation—including Gravier, Gabriel Marest, Jean Mermet, Jean Baptiste Le Boullenger, Sébastien Rasles, Jacques Largillier, and Pierre-François Pinet—began a period of truly remarkable stability for Jesuits in the mission. By the end of his life, Gravier had spent fifteen years in Illinois. Marest spent sixteen, Pinet spent close to four years, and Mermet was an eighteen-year veteran of the mission by the time of his death. Le Boullenger, who arrived in Illinois in 1702, would spend fully thirty-seven years in Illinois. And Jacques Largillier would also spend more than thirty years of his life there.10 Meanwhile, a number of other non-Jesuits also became particularly rooted in the colony. Most important, Pierre-Charles de Liette would spend many years in the colony through the early eighteenth century.
Because they lived there on a permanent basis, the French in Illinois, and particularly the Jesuits, were able to establish much better channels of intercultural communication with the Illinois in the 1690s. Allouez and Marquette had been able to achieve a basic competency in the Illinois language, which they viewed as “somewhat like the Algonquian.”11 Using an Illinois prayer book and assistance from a slave Marquette had received from Ottawa allies at St. Esprit, the early priests were able to communicate with the Illinois sufficiently to, as Allouez put it, “make myself understood.”12 By contrast, the men of the second generation expended heroic efforts to develop true fluency in the Illinois language. Indeed, the second generation of Illinois priests included five of the most exceptional linguists in the history of New France—Marest, Pinet, Gravier, Le Boullenger, and Rasles.13 Jacques Largillier, a lay brother who lived in the Illinois Country from 1676 to 1714 and who copied Gravier’s dictionary into the final form that survives today, was also an impressive linguist.14 Together this group of priests achieved mastery of the language, as surviving sources demonstrate.15
How they mastered the Illinois language matters for our story. Like other Jesuits throughout North America, Gravier and his partners practiced, by necessity, a kind of “total immersion” language acquisition program in Illinois.16 One aspect of their method consisted of constant practice and a great deal of solitary study.17 Upon his arrival in the Illinois colony in the late 1690s, Gabriel Marest demonstrated the typical dedication to language learning: as one of his fellow Jesuits described it, Marest threw himself into the task.18 In addition to working “excessively during the day,” he reportedly sat “up at night to improve himself in the language.”19 Sébastien Rasles worked hard to master pronunciation, noting the various phonetic sounds in Illinois that were difficult for French-speakers.20 Other Jesuits worked tirelessly to master the mechanics of the language, to comprehend rules of grammar, and to master the operation of verbs.21
But independent study and practice were not enough. As Rasles wrote, learning Indian languages like that of the Illinois was “very difficult; for it is not sufficient to study its terms and their signification, and to acquire a supply of words and phrases—it is further necessary to know the turn and arrangement that the Savages give them, which can hardly ever be caught except by familiar and frequent intercourse.”22 They simply had to go and live with the Indians, since “there are no books to teach these languages, and even though we had them, they would be quite useless; practice is the only master that is able to teach us.”23
The second generation of Jesuits lived and traveled with the Illinois throughout their yearly cycle. This had always been Allouez’s plan, to “live among them in the beginning … after their own mode.”24 But while Allouez seems to have spent just one winter traveling with Illinois hunters,25 Gravier and his partners pursued the Illinois wherever they went, all year long, for years on end. As Marest wrote, the winter bison hunt was a major challenge.
“It is then that we wish that we could multiply ourselves, so as not to lose sight of them. All that we can do is to go in succession through the various camps in which they are, in order to keep piety alive in them, and administer to them the Sacraments.”26 But if this was “all they could do,” it was a lot. Following the Illinois, the Jesuits traveled through the country in order to maintain constant relations: “During the winter we separate, going to various places where the savages pass that season.”27 Rather than hanging back at the fort at the Grand Village or returning to Michilimackinac, Gravier and Marest followed the Indians
