Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

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СКАЧАТЬ In exchange for supplies, according to the proprietors of Fort St. Louis, the Illinois chiefs “promised to do their duty to fight the Iroquois.”⁷⁴

      In addition to providing ammunition, the French also supported the Illinois through military organization. In 1683, La Barre raised troops and planned a joint French-Algonquian attack on the Iroquois. When it failed at the last minute, the Illinois felt betrayed. In the wake of this debacle, the king recalled governor La Barre.⁷⁵ His replacement, Jacques-René de Brisay Denonville, quickly summoned all the Algonquians to support the Illinois in a major counterattack against the Iroquois in 1687, which was successful.

      But gifts and military supplies, while important, were not enough to secure the Illinois to the alliance, especially in a period when French support seemed to waver. As Duchesneau put it, the French must mediate the rivalries among the Algonquians and “keep these people united” under the leadership of Onontio, the French governor.⁷⁶ And yet if the French hoped to have the Illinois and all their Algonquian neighbors follow the commands of Onontio, they had to learn “to take cognizance of all their differences, however trifling these may be.”⁷⁷ This was not a simple matter. The Illinois, like most Algonquians, dealt with outsiders only after they had been turned from strangers into relatives. Algonquian diplomacy relied on personal relationships and face-to-face negotiations. Thus the alliance could not be achieved remotely from Quebec by a figurehead like Onontio. Instead it had to be achieved by actual people who had established personal relations with the Illinois.

      Fortunately for the officials, there were people who had done just that. Since the 1660s, the Illinois had welcomed French newcomers into their world, especially at Kaskaskia. Examples abound. An Illinois chief named Oumahouha adopted the Recollect priest Zenobé Membré in 1680, welcoming him and telling him that “he loved him like a son.”⁷⁸ A French trader named Villeneuve was assimilated into an Illinois lineage, his identity so thoroughly transformed that he wore the distinctive tattoos of an Illinois warrior all over his torso.⁷⁹ French fur traders married into Illinois families. Priests were treated to calumet ceremonies. These were the kinds of relationships that turned French strangers into Illinois kinsmen.

      These relationships could be instrumental for mediating the alliance. Consider the example of La Salle himself, who used personal connections and status in Kaskaskia to mediate an alliance between the Illinois and Miami in the early 1680s.⁸⁰ As a fur trader observed, longstanding enmity had poisoned the relationship between the Miami and the Illinois, who “hate each other reciprocally.”⁸¹ In the early 1680s, this mutual antagonism threatened the whole French strategy, as the Miami and Iroquois colluded to attack the Illinois.⁸² Since this would have started a major war for which the French were clearly not prepared, the diplomacy became complicated.⁸³ The French needed to make the Miami stand down.

      It was La Salle who achieved this, and he did so through on-the-ground relationships that were clearly impossible for French administrators to establish back in Quebec. Together, the Illinois, Miami, and La Salle worked out an arrangement whereby La Salle became a trusted kinsman, helping to seal the alliance. To do this, La Salle adopted the identity of Ouabicolcata, a deceased Miami chief. He became Ouabicolcata, reincarnated. Delivering a speech to the Miami, he promised them that his identity had transformed: “Think him not dead; I have his mind and soul in my own body; I am going to revive his name and be another Ouabicolcata; I shall take the same care of his family that he took in his lifetime…. My name is Ouabicolcata; he is not dead; he lives still, and his family shall want for nothing, since his soul is entered into the body of a Frenchman, who can provide his kinsmen abundantly with all things needful.”⁸⁴ With this speech, La Salle appealed to the Natives in language that, as he said himself, was “perfectly adapted to their sensibilities.” He promised to become, like Ouabicolcata had been, a provider, bringing goods and “all things needful.” In so doing, La Salle was welcomed among the opportunistic Miami. Through him, a kinsman, they allied themselves to the Illinois.⁸⁵

      This kind of mediation was impossible for the French to achieve just by sending weapons and goods. It was agents like La Salle and the Jesuits who could provide the important “infrastructure” of the alliance.⁸⁶ The nascent colony at Fort St. Louis and the mission of the Immaculate Conception were the necessary infrastructure of French policy and alliance among all these crucial Indian groups of the West. Ironically, La Salle’s installation in Illinois, envisioned as a separate colonial project and formerly opposed by New France officials and merchants, was now indispensable to New France as officials sought to prosecute the war. Collaborating, officials and colonial schemers worked together for mutual goals. Now the Illinois outpost was becoming an unplanned, even unintentional, part of the empire. But an even more unintentional reality was this: the French were supporting an Indian world on the rise.

      As they came to support the Illinois, the French misunderstood the Illinois’s power. For instance, as Indians gathered around the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, La Salle boasted that they were there to be with the French and that they were “dependent” on him.⁸⁷ In fact, Illinois motives in this period went well beyond what the French understood. Rather than meekly seeking protection, the Illinois were continuing a decades-old rise to power and following a course that was aggressive, not defensive. Even moments that the French perceived as signs of weakness—such as the attack they suffered in 1680—can actually be read as a sign of the Illinois’s power and ambition in this period. The Illinois were building strength, and French support only added to an ongoing bid for power.

      Although La Salle thought that the Illinois’s arrival at the Grand Village was a response to his presence, the Illinois were actually coming together well before the French arrived in Illinois. Frenchmen often badly misinterpreted what was happening as Illinois migrants moved to the Grand Village in a massive consolidation that had begun years earlier. Father Claude Allouez is a good example. As he wrote in 1666, “[The Illinois] used to be a populous nation, divided into ten large Villages; but now they are reduced to two.”⁸⁸

Figure 8. Marquette map of 1673, detail. Although most Illinois villages were located to the west of the Mississippi River in the 1670s, they moved east in the 1680s to unite at the top of the Illinois River Valley.

      Courtesy of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

      Allouez said “reduced,” but the villages he visited at the top of the Illinois Valley were much larger than previous Illinois settlements. Moreover, additional Illinois-speakers were arriving here from the West all the time. As Allouez himself confirmed in the 1670s, Kaskaskia had grown huge. “I found this Village largely increased,” he wrote of Kaskaskia, as the village increased from seventy-five to about three hundred cabins in 1675.⁸⁹ After the attack by the Iroquois in 1680, the Illinois-speakers immediately gathered even more people together at Kaskaskia, right in the center of the violence. They simply continued a consolidation that was already underway. In some respects, they were not weakened but strengthened.

      It is important to note that when the Iroquois attacks began, many of the Illinois were located to west of the Mississippi River, where they had built power on bison and slaving. Surely when violence began in the Illinois Valley, they could have stayed to the west, out of the way and aloof from the Iroquois Wars. Instead they began to move east, back to the Algonquian world, to the top of the Illinois River Valley, and into the heart of the violence. As Allouez said, they were collecting at Great Kaskaskia in a huge melting pot: “Formerly, it was Composed of but one nation, that of the Kachkachkia; at the present time, there are 8 tribes in it, the first having summoned the others, who inhabited the neighborhood of the river Mississippi.”⁹⁰ Allouez acknowledged that the Illinois were moving eastward in this violent time. By 1681, as СКАЧАТЬ