Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

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      Over the course of the next generations, the Illinois-speakers colonized the whole region formerly occupied by the Oneota in modern-day Illinois. Moving into their new homeland, the Illinois adopted bison hunting as the basis of a radically new lifeway. Perhaps because the Illinois still spoke an Algonquian language at contact, French eyewitnesses often did not emphasize in their accounts how different the Illinois were from other Great Lakes Algonquians by that time. In fact, upon moving into the prairies, the Illinois embarked on a total transformation, becoming the only bison-based Algonquians, with many new cultural and economic practices.⁵⁴

      The Illinois newcomers perfected the seasonal lifeway previously established by the Oneota peoples. Like the Oneota, they were farmers, but evidence suggests they became more committed to hunting and abandoned less useful, less nutritious agricultural resources.⁵⁵ At the same time, they became consummate bison people. While archaeological evidence suggests that they took advantage of various animals in their yearly cycle, it is clear that bison made up a great percentage of their subsistence. One study suggests that bison constituted 57 percent of the meat at a contact-era Illinois village. Deer and elk were another 30 percent, and fish and birds together constituted no more than 4 percent of the meat.⁵⁶ Like the Oneota before them, the Illinois committed to the bison.

      Bison hunting shaped the Illinois’s new lifeway. Descriptions of bison hunting in the post-contact period make it clear that this was a communal, cooperative, and well-organized enterprise. Unlike hunting for deer and other species, which was solitary and required stealthy stalking in the forest edges, bison were herd animals for which different strategies were required. Nonequestrians, the Illinois hunted bison in large groups, in carefully coordinated expeditions and by employing new tools for the prairie environment, especially fire.

      Contact-era evidence of this new bison lifeway comes from several important eyewitness sources.⁵⁷ For instance, Pierre-Charles de Liette, a commandant at Fort St. Louis des Illinois, an early French outpost in the Illinois Valley in the 1690s, went hunting with the Illinois and reported their technique. As he explained, the Illinois worked together in groups to slay a large number of the animals at a single time.

      The next day we saw in a prairie a great herd of buffalos. A halt was called and two old men harangued the young men for half an hour, urging them to show their skill in shooting down all the buffalos that we saw, and to manage so as to make all those that they could not kill move toward us. After removing us to the nearest spot, they started out in two bands, running always at a trot. When they were about a quarter of a league from the animals, they all ran at full speed, and when within gunshot they fired several volleys and shot off an extraordinary number of arrows. A great number of buffalos remained on the ground, and they pursued the rest in such manner that they were driven toward us. Our old men butchered these.⁵⁸

      Explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle gave another description, noting that fire was essential to the Illinois’s bison-hunting technique: “When they see a herd, they assemble in great numbers and set fire to the grass all round, with the exception of a few passages which they leave open, and at which they station themselves with their bows and arrows. In attempting to escape from the fire, the cattle are thus compelled to pass by these savages, who sometimes kill as many as two hundred in a single day.”⁵⁹ As eyewitness descriptions make clear, this was a cooperative, shared enterprise. Liette also described how the Illinois ensured the success of their hunts by enforcing teamwork and punishing behavior that would threaten the group’s success.⁶⁰

      Other evidence from the contact period fleshes out our picture of communal bison hunts, which were at the center of the Illinois lifeway. The Illinois-language dictionary made by Jesuit Jacques Gravier in the 1690s gives the most interesting window into the Illinois’s subsistence.⁶¹ Of particular note are a number of Illinois words and phrases relating to bison hunting, which taken together help us understand the Illinois’s adaptation as pedestrian bison hunters in the tallgrass prairies. Like Liette’s description, Gravier’s dictionary suggests that Illinois hunters worked in large groups, sometimes embarking on long-range hunting expeditions of several days’ duration, echoing explorers in the 1680s who noted that the Illinois “went inland” on long journeys to hunt bison.⁶² Finally, the dictionary shows their important strategy of burning the prairie to encourage game and to corral the bison toward a kill site. Myriad words detail the use of fire in Illinois’s hunting.

Table 1. Bison-Hunting Vocabulary in Contact-Era Illinois Language