Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

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Figure 9. Detail of Franquelin’s map of 1684, with the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia. Many of the groups in this massive settlement at the top of the Illinois Valley were Illinois-speakers who had moved from the West, making the Grand Village and surrounding settlements North America’s largest population center in the 1680s.

      Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

      As they consolidated, the Illinois continued their violent trajectory from the pre-contact era. Each year, the annual cycle would feature agriculture, a winter hunt, and sometimes a summer or a fall expedition. Frequently in the 1680s, they would go to the east, supported by the French, and make war on the Iroquois, as they did in 1687.¹⁰⁰ But their more typical annual routine was to go west for slaves. In 1689, the Illinois brought back 130 captives from a raid on the Osage.¹⁰¹ In the 1690s, they organized an expedition with 1,200 warriors against the Osage and Arkansas.¹⁰² Indeed, by the 1690s, French observers noted that “almost all the village marches, and even many women accompany them.”¹⁰³ The results were impressive. In one march, they “carried away captive [all] the people of a village.”¹⁰⁴ And this wasn’t an isolated incident. The general reputation of the Illinois in this period was that “they carry off entire villages.”¹⁰⁵ In 1690, slaves brought through the Illinois Country included Siouans and Caddoans from the distant West, like the Kadohadacho, as well as Pawnee, Osage, and Missouria.¹⁰⁶

      As the Illinois expanded their reach into the Southwest, Siouan-speakers treated the Illinois as regional hegemons. The Illinois were so powerful that Indians like the Osage appeared each year at the Grand Village, as Liette noted, “to recognize some of their people [the Illinois] as chiefs.”¹⁰⁷ New France intendant and Indian expert Antoine Denis Raudot echoed Liette: “This honor that they receive makes them believe that all the ground should tremble under them.”¹⁰⁸ These were the wages of a hundred years of expansion in the borderlands.

      French support helped the Illinois build power, both militarily and economically. With French alliance, the Illinois continued their business as merchants, trading both slaves and bison hides to the French and Algonquian allies.¹⁰⁹ In turn, they took French goods to allied groups in the Southwest. The demand for goods there was high, and the Illinois took advantage: “These [western] people not being warlike like themselves and having need of their trade to get axes, knives, awls, and other objects, the Illinois buy these things from us to resell to them.”¹¹⁰ They also likely benefited from the mediation of the French, who helped them make alliances with Algonquians like the Ottawa and Miami, former enemies whom they now were able to provide with slaves.

      The Illinois’s culture became quite militaristic in the Grand Village. As mentioned, their yearly cycle included a season of warfare. Liette noted, “It is ordinarily in February that they prepare to go to war.” At this time of year, chiefs hosted feasts, collecting dozens of warriors together to convince them that “the time is approaching to go in search of men.”¹¹¹ The war tradition in Illinois was animated by patrilineal kinship lines, traced through fathers and brothers.¹¹² Male relatives organized raiding parties to replace their lost brothers, uncles, and fathers. Demonstrating the imperative for patrilineal kinship replacement, one Illinois chief rallied male relatives together for an expedition: “I have not laughed since the time that my brother, father, or uncle died. He was your relative as well as mine, since we are all comrades. If my strength and my courage equalled yours, I believe that I would go to avenge a relative as brave and as good as he was, but being as feeble as I am, I cannot do better than address myself to you. It is from your arms, brothers, that I expect vengeance for our brother.”¹¹³

      Although Liette noted the rituals involved as the Illinois prepared “to go in search of men,” the more usual situation was that they went in search of women, as noted. This was probably owing in part to the logistics of warfare, since women and children captives were easier to subdue and control. Moreover, the bison economy, as we have seen, created a demand for female laborers in Illinois. Perhaps most important, the preference for women captives may have had to do with the patrilineal kinship systems common to Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes that made women better candidates for assimilation than men.¹¹⁴ In any event, commenting on the Illinois warriors in battle during the 1660s, French commissary and early historian Claude-Charles Bacqueville de La Potherie noted how they had “the generosity to spare the lives of many women and children, part of whom remained among them.”¹¹⁵ Marquette noted the same practice among the Illinois in the 1670s: “The Illinois kill the men and scalp them and take [prisoner] only the women and children, whom they grant life.”¹¹⁶ At the Grand Village in the 1690s, the tradition continued: “They always spare the lives of women and children unless they have lost many of their own people,” Liette noted.¹¹⁷

      The massive introduction of female slaves shaped life at the Grand Village. As La Salle said, there were “many more women than men” in Kaskaskia.¹¹⁸ Relatedly, all eyewitnesses noted the polygamy practiced by the Illinois. La Salle wrote that most Illinois men had multiple wives in this period, as many as ten or twelve.¹¹⁹ What the French often did not realize was that many of these wives were likely slaves.¹²⁰ A specific logic underlay these slave-based polygamous marriages. In the Illinois’s patrilineal society, children took the identity of their fathers, regardless of whether their mothers were native Illinois or outsiders married in, or even slaves. Thus marriages with multiple slaves strengthened the Illinois’s numbers, since all children would be raised as Illinois.¹²¹ This mode of reproduction combined with the bison-based mode of production to encourage СКАЧАТЬ