region.3
The dance featured many symbols of this distinctive and opportunistic history. For instance, there were the bison materials and bison meat. Bison was the product of the ecosystem—the tallgrass prairie—that the Illinois had recently occupied, and it was the basis of the new lifeway that made them much more prosperous than their Algonquian neighbors. Symbols on the Illinois’s robes probably reflected conquest and assimilation of Siouanspeaking people whose territory they had conquered. The calumet ceremony itself was also a western tradition, suggesting the newcomers’ creation of a “transitional culture” as they adopted the previous inhabitants of the Illinois Valley into their collective.4 And the slave reflected the violence of their invasion and the domination that they had achieved, as well as the basis of a newly emerging economic system that the Illinois were developing in the borderlands: the slave trade. Taken together, all these aspects of the dance added up to an expression and celebration of Native power and opportunism.
Marquette did not really understand the significance of these symbols in the calumet ceremony, but we can. To do so, however, we need to look back to a Native colonial history of Illinois before European contact.5 Beginning in the 1200s, climate change reshaped the Midwest, powerfully affecting the environment and human subsistence south of the Great Lakes.6 Seizing opportunities during this period of change, the proto-Illinois moved west from the region south of Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley into the Illinois prairies and began a unique trajectory in a unique environment. While many Algonquian agriculturalists struggled during this “dark period,” the proto-Illinois experienced expansion and not declension, establishing themselves on the tallgrass. When conflict broke out in the Great Lakes region in the mid-1600s with the start of the so-called Beaver Wars, the Illinois could have stayed out of it. Instead, they became aggressors, making a dangerous bid to capitalize on the violence.7 This is a story of Native power and expansion, of risky behavior and bold intentions.
It could hardly be otherwise, given the setting. The Illinois was a borderland, a place of important divisions, natural and cultural. Ecologically it was the transition between the two major biomes of the middle of the continent, the grasslands of the West and woodlands of the East. Socially and culturally, it lay at the division between two major cultural groupings of Native North America, Siouan-speakers of the Plains and Algonquians of the Great Lakes. And it was also the continental divide that separated the Mississippi Valley from the Great Lakes. In all of these ways, the place was a unique landscape of division, a setting for dynamic human history at the edge. Moving into this space, the proto-Illinois were taking a bold step, seeking power.8
Figure 2. Capitaine de La Nation des Illinois. Louis Nicolas depicted the Illinois chief with military accessories and smoking the calumet, a western diplomatic tradition, while wearing what is probably a painted bison robe. This evokes the Illinois’s ethnogenesis as a “transitional culture.”
Courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Okla.
The Illinois’s colonization was a remarkably successful effort to take advantage of this place of division in a specific moment of change. In the transition, the Illinois found new means of subsistence, as well as sociopolitical opportunities that gave them advantages. Here, on the edge of different worlds, the Illinois seized new prospects and built a new lifeway. When the French arrived, the Illinois would only continue their innovation. The history of empire in Illinois must begin with Native efforts to exploit power in the borderlands. The story begins with Cahokia.
Before European arrival, the region that would become Illinois Country was home to the biggest Native city-state on the continent, Cahokia. Numbering twenty thousand inhabitants at its height, Cahokia shaped the trade and culture of peoples in a huge portion of the continent. Although the story of Cahokia is well told by historians, it is often treated in isolation, disconnected from later historical events. For our purposes, we need to view it as part of a long-term set of processes that continued long after Cahokia was no more.9 The Illinois were not descendants of the Cahokians, but the Illinois’s rise in the Illinois Valley can be seen as a consequence of some of the same forces that brought Cahokia to an end.
Cahokia rose in a region at the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois, and Ohio rivers, the “American Bottom.”10 Based heavily on corn agriculture, the civilization spread its power throughout the Midwest, as revealed by archaeological evidence of trade and tribute coming into the metropolis from the eleventh through the thirteenth century from throughout an expansive territory.11 Beginning as an ordinary village in the Late Woodland period, Cahokia experienced a “big bang”—a sudden and dramatic rise to power.12 By the 1200s, the twenty thousand people in Cahokia represented the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico. It is not clear whether Cahokia was a truly centralized political regime, but the Cahokia Mississippians exercised wide regional influence through a hegemonic culture and trade.13
The middle of the continent was a likely place for the most powerful pre-contact Native society for the same reason that Chicago and St. Louis rose in the nineteenth century: the Midwest contained a tremendously rich variety of ecological resources.14 Given the major river systems that defined the region, the landscape contained numerous alluvial environments with resources for human exploitation. These environments featured wetlands and forests, often with extensive floodplains. Above the river valleys were a mix of hardwood forests, dominated mostly by oak-ash-maple and oak-hickory forests. These forests transitioned into park-like edge habitats, probably maintained by purposeful burning and natural fire, which in turn gave way to plains and the Midwest’s distinctive tallgrass prairies. A discrete biome unto itself, the tallgrass prairie was where evaporation and rainfall were roughly equal but where trees could not establish themselves because of periodic fire, dense grass roots, and other factors.15 While 39 percent of the modern state of Illinois was forested before the advent of the steel plow, fully 55 percent of the state’s landscape was covered with prairie. Much of the rest was dominated by wetlands.16
Despite all the diversity of the region, the Cahokians took advantage of a relatively small portion of the ecological opportunity in the middle of the continent. Because environmental conditions were so favorable for farming, their subsistence focused on a small area, near the confluence of the rivers, and was heavily concentrated in the bottomlands.17 This proved perilous. Climate change started to affect the region in the 1100s. For 140 out of 145 years beginning in 1100, Cahokia experienced drought, probably reducing farming yields.18 Sediment in the Missouri River owing to drought-forced erosion on the Plains may have produced a shallower channel in the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and increased spring flooding in the bottomlands, compromising agriculture.19 Meanwhile, even as drought challenged their subsistence, it seems clear that Cahokians overexploited resources, especially wood, in their local environment, which may have led to difficulties in the city.20 In the 1250s, a new Pacific climate event began to change conditions again, bringing cooler summers and harsher winters, and drier conditions overall.21 With the onset of the Pacific episode, farming became even more difficult at Cahokia. As a result of this and probably other social and political changes, the entire region began to empty out, leaving the middle Mississippi Valley, the lower Illinois Valley, the lower Ohio Valley, and the entire American Bottom increasingly devoid of people. The emerging “vacant quarter” was a dramatic end to the great civilization at Cahokia.22
With the end of the Cahokia, smaller groups reoccupied the region of Illinois. Most likely these migrants came from the West as climate change extended the so-called prairie peninsula and made conditions on the Plains drier and colder. Seeking refuge for a mixed-subsistence lifeway in the river valleys of the Illinois, these people were the Oneota, the ancestors of later Siouan-speakers like the Winnebago, Otoes, Ioways, and others.23
