Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey
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Название: Empire by Collaboration
Автор: Robert Michael Morrissey
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Early American Studies
isbn: 9780812291117
isbn:
Although many of the Jesuits’ early “flying missions” in the Great Lakes were destroyed in the 1640s by Iroquois attacks, peace between the Iroquois and New France beginning in 1667 had allowed for new activity.36 Over the next ten years, the Jesuits extended their missions to ever more remote sites, weeks away from Quebec. In 1666, Allouez traveled to Chequamegon Bay, where he established the mission of St. Esprit. In 1668, Marquette left Trois-Rivières to found a mission at Sault-Ste. Marie. After Claude Dablon joined Allouez and Marquette in the West in 1669, the priests pushed even farther into the interior. While Marquette took over St. Esprit, Allouez went to establish the mission of St. Francis Xavier in Green Bay in December 1669. Two years later, Allouez pressed on to a Mascouten village on the Fox River.37 These were the places where the Jesuits first encountered the Illinois Indians.
Throughout this period, Colbert disapproved. He wrote to condemn the Jesuits’ new distant missions and their method of “keeping the converted Indians’ ordinary lifestyle [rather than] bringing them among the French.” From his perspective, he wrote, “it is only too obvious how such a course is harmful both to Religion and to the State.”38 The king himself urged the Jesuits to change their ways, to “attract [the Indians] into a civil society and to quit their form of living, with which they will never be able to become good Christians.”39 In 1672, the new governor Frontenac criticized the Jesuits’ distant missions as “pure mockeries.” As he told the minister, “I don’t think that [the Jesuits] should be permitted to extend them any further than they already have until we see in one of these places a church of Indians better formed.”40
But the Jesuits remained convinced that distant missions were the best way to convert Indians. Indeed, when Marquette founded the Immaculate Conception mission in 1674 it was not merely another distant mission, it was the most distant mission the Jesuits had ever established.41 Deep in the West, totally outside the priorities of the French empire and remote from the influence of French colonists, here the Jesuits could foster among the Natives an ideal “primitive Christianity,” “just like the First Christians.”42 Far from making the Indians live as Frenchmen, Marquette, setting out for the Illinois Country in the 1670s, predicted that he would soon be living on their terms: “After the fashion of the Savages, the Illinois wish for us in order that we may share their miseries with them, and suffer every imaginable hardship of barbarism. They are lost sheep, that must be sought for among the thickets and woods, since for the most part they cry so loudly that one hastens to rescue them from the jaws of the Wolf.”43
All this helps us understand why the Jesuits were so thrilled to report how Illinois Indians practiced a kind of idiosyncratic Christianity in their earliest encounters, “honor[ing] our Lord among themselves in this own way.”44 As Jesuits saw it, the Illinois had spiritual traditions that echoed Christianity, which was why Marquette could boast that “we keep a little of the usage, and take from it all that is bad.”45 Here was the realization of the Jesuit ideal. Isolated from the French colonial project, they made a new indigenous Christianity, “in their own fashion.”
In some ways, the Jesuits must have been glad when the administration rejected Jolliet’s plan. They viewed Illinois as an opportunity to conduct a religious mission separate from other French colonial activity, and Jolliet’s project—canal and all—would only have attracted Frenchmen to corrupt the infant church. But of course the French government did not reject Jolliet in order to preserve the Jesuits’ isolated mission. French officials opposed the Jesuits, too. Taken together, the earliest Frenchmen in Illinois had incompatible visions and no support from the government. If this made prospects for empire in the region look dim, Robert La Salle only added to the discord when he arrived in the region.
Just as Jolliet received news of the king’s rejection of his plan in 1677, La Salle was visiting the Illinois for the first time and devising a new vision of empire. Having heard about the discovery of the Mississippi River in the 1670s, La Salle began to imagine a future colonial project centered at the Gulf of Mexico and oriented to the South, where a port could remain open all year round. From here, free of the cold-weather challenges faced by Quebec, La Salle anticipated a more profitable fur trade and better agricultural possibilities.
New France officials, interested in protecting their fur trade at Montreal, were naturally skeptical of this new project. But La Salle gained an ally in Governor Frontenac, who was himself opposed to the Montreal fur traders. With his help, La Salle began creating a new trade route beginning in 1672 that extended south of the Great Lakes. After establishing a fort on Lake Ontario, La Salle won permission to create an outpost in Illinois, the first settlement in his future imperial scheme.46 He established a fort in Illinois in 1680 near the Kaskaskia village, where he settled several men under his command in what would become the base camp for his ambitious enterprises.
It was in 1682 that La Salle finally reached the Gulf of Mexico after descending the Mississippi River. Here he made clear his intention that the little colony in Illinois would now belong to a whole new imperial system, outside of New France. Planting a cross and a flag at the bottom of the Mississippi, La Salle conducted a brief but elaborate ceremony in front of a small audience of Indians, signaling the official start of this new colonial project. Shouting “vive le Roi” and “chanting the Te Deum, the Exaudiat, the Domine salvum fa Regum,” La Salle took possession of the entire Mississippi Valley, which he promptly renamed “this country of Louisiana.” He then placed in the ground a lead plate, inscribed with a short description of his historic journey from the Illinois down the Mississippi, nearly the entire extent of his possession. As part of the legal proceedings, he made a note of the fact that various Indians present had consented to this possession and allied themselves to this future government in Louisiana. Within this list of Indians were the Illinois, among “the most considerable nations dwelling therein.”47
La Salle’s ceremony was the mirror image, in many ways, of a similar ceremony conducted by the explorer Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson in 1671. Standing on the edge of Lake Superior, Saint-Lusson had claimed the entire western Great Lakes for France, also in front of an audience of local Indians. Like La Salle, he had made a note of the various Indian groups whose territory he meant his claim to include. And like La Salle, he singled out the Illinois among these. So while Saint-Lusson had claimed the Illinois as part of an empire oriented to the north and centered in Quebec, La Salle now reversed this orientation and reimagined their territory in a landscape oriented south. When La Salle claimed Louisiana, he included the marginal Illinois Country as an important part of his claim, providing a vision that located the territory within a new empire separate from New France. When he created his new outpost in the Illinois Country in 1681, he called it Fort Saint Louis de Louisiane, reflecting its inclusion in this alternative plan.
Officials in New France strongly opposed La Salle’s vision for a Mississippi Valley empire, as well as his specific activities in Illinois. As they knew, La Salle intended to siphon away fur trade from the northern route and from Montreal. Even before the actual creation of the Illinois outpost, New France authorities worried about competition from the new project and forced La Salle to promise never to interfere with the northern trade.48 During the initial stages, La Salle’s project was frequently under suspicion of such illegal trading activity.49 In 1680, Intendant Duchesneau complained to the king that La Salle was not just an explorer but an illegal fur trader and empire builder: “La Salle, under the pretext of [making] a discovery sent two traders and himself traded in the Outaoases [Ottawa] nations which are not part of his [Illinois] concession. And he gave licenses to several individuals and habitants who he does not at all use for discoveries, to go and trade [in the north].
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