Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

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      The period from the 1670s through the 1680s witnessed the first explorations of the Illinois Country by Frenchmen. Even before Marquette’s famous exploration in 1673, Jesuit priest Claude Allouez made initial contact with Illinois Indians on Lake Superior in the 1660s. In 1671, Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson explored the westernmost edge of the Great Lakes and interacted with Illinois Indians.¹⁰ In 1673, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet made their famous voyage into the Mississippi Valley watershed, exploring the Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Illinois rivers. Robert La Salle and Louis Hennepin entered the Mississippi Valley several times beginning in 1680, and in 1682 La Salle voyaged from Illinois almost to the mouth of the Mississippi River. In several of these early explorations, French travelers passed through the Illinois River Valley and first laid eyes on the territory that later would be known as the Illinois Country. Crossing the watershed that separated the Great Lakes from the Mississippi Valley, they entered into “strange lands.”¹¹

      What they found impressed them. Explorers reported how “you could not find any land better [suited] for the production of wheat, and for vines, and for other fruits as well.”¹² The land featured bison and game that were “innumerable”¹³ and soil in the bottomlands that “looks as if it had been already manured.”¹⁴ They found the Illinois Indians affable, “of good birth,” and eager for trade and religious instruction.¹⁵ The rumors concerning the presence of hostile Indians here in the Mississippi Valley proved false, and explorers quickly found ways to win friends among Indians in the region.¹⁶ One explorer was especially direct in his praise of Illinois: “It may be said to contain the finest lands ever seen.”¹⁷ Jesuits found Illinois to be a “fine field for Gospel laborers.”¹⁸ Taken together, these discoveries inspired explorers with visions of empire.¹⁹

      But officials were more than skeptical. In 1663, the royal government had taken over New France after years of company management. The French government reorganized the colony and embarked on an era of centralized planning.²⁰ New royal officials, led by Minister of the Marine Jean-Baptiste Colbert, brought new priorities. As they saw it, fur trade was important, but trade should not dominate or overshadow other potentially profitable activities in the colony. Nor could it be allowed to tempt would-be farmers into the woods.²¹ The stability of the colony relied on settling Frenchmen in the St. Lawrence Valley and employing them in productive industry there. Without outposts in the West, Colbert believed, “the settlers would be obliged to engage in fishing, prospecting, and manufacturing, which would yield them far greater benefits.”²²

      Practical realities added to the official bias against western expansion. Iroquois attacks had destroyed western outposts of New France in the 1640s, and Iroquois power had reached its zenith in 1651. The missions and fur trade outposts in the West had been pulled back, and trade dried up through much of the 1650s and 1660s.²³ Reestablishing these posts would be expensive and risky. In 1666, Colbert announced the major principle of his imperial vision when he called for a tightly focused colonization in New France: “It would be worth much more to restrain [the colonies] to a space of land in which the colony would be able to sustain itself, rather than to embrace too great a quantity of land which one day we might have to abandon with some diminution of the reputation of His Majesty and the crown.”²⁴

      Ignoring this opposition, Jolliet was the first Frenchman to seriously propose an outpost of an expanded French empire in the Illinois Country in 1673.²⁵ Of all the lands he saw in the new Mississippi Valley, Jolliet praised the Illinois Country, just beyond the Great Lakes watershed, and south of Lake Michigan, as “the most beautiful and the easiest for inhabiting.”²⁶ The weather was mild. Unlike in the valley of the St. Lawrence, “A habitant here would not have to work some ten years to knock down the trees and burn them; the same day he arrives, he could put the plow in the field.”²⁷ It was a land of plenty: there were prairies that stretched out for twenty miles and Indians who were “honest … and obliging.”²⁸ To realize his plan, Jolliet proposed a harbor at the southern end of Lake Michigan, by which his colony would maintain easy communication with Michilimackinac. Further, if the continental divide meant that the rivers here flowed south, and away from New France, Jolliet envisioned conquering this inconvenient geographical circumstance. A canal joining the Chicago and the Illinois rivers, he asserted, would connect this Mississippi River Valley to the Great Lakes, integrating the newly discovered territory into New France in the north.

      Jolliet proposed building his canal in the area where he and Marquette had recently found the Kaskaskia, a prosperous village of Illinois-speakers. Jolliet did not mention them as part of his plan, but clearly he singled out their homeland as the prime place for French colonization. Containing a growing population of Indians eager for trade, this was the village to which Marquette had promised to return the following year to establish a permanent mission. It could become the heart of a new French colonial region.

      But when Jolliet made his proposal for a colony in Illinois, the official answer was, simply, no: “His Majesty does not want to give to Sieur Jolliet the permission which he has asked to establish himself with 20 men in the Country of Illinois. It is necessary to multiply the habitants of Canada before thinking of other lands, and [the governor of New France] should hold this as your maxim in regard to new discoveries which are made.”²⁹

      Meanwhile, however, Marquette did not even wait for permission. Returning to the precise area that Jolliet described at the top of the Illinois Valley, in 1674 he established the mission of the Immaculate Conception in the village of the Kaskaskia. Having shared a number of interactions with the Illinois at various mission outposts in the Great Lakes in the 1660s, Marquette and his partner, Claude Allouez, now would have a home base right in the center of Illinois Country. This is where Marquette intended to create a flourishing mission among these Indians whom he already knew to be enthusiastic about and receptive to Christianity. However, having disapproved Jolliet’s plan for a colony in Illinois, New France officials opposed the Jesuits’ earliest efforts in Illinois as well.