Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey
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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 female slavery among the Illinois in this period.
Indeed, the large number of female slaves among the Illinois in the contact-era forces us to rethink the supposedly devastating attack on the Illinois by Iroquois in 1680. In many French accounts, this was a decisive blow, as the Illinois lost 700–1,200 of their people.122 As Iroquois warriors invaded, Illinois men ran away, leaving women and children behind undefended. To the French, it was a sign that the Illinois were insufficiently warlike, passive victims, and utterly desperate for French support. But what the French did not realize was that the Kaskaskia village in 1680 was likely full of slaves, almost all of them women. The fact that the men gave up this number of women might not be a sign of Illinois weakness or timidity. It is probably better understood as a sign of how many slaves the Illinois had or how many they had access to. In fact, a likely reason the attack was so successful is because “more than half” of the Kaskaskia men were themselves away on a slaving mission.123 The slave economy dominated the Illinois’s life at Great Kaskaskia.
Meanwhile, they underwrote all of this slave-based power by taking advantage of the other unique resource of their borderlands environment: bison. Many descriptions of the Illinois by French observers noted the huge scale of bison exploitation that the Illinois undertook in this period. Hennepin recalled hunting with the Illinois from the Grand Village and observed their capture of four hundred animals. La Salle did likewise. But the most important eyewitness was Pierre-Charles de Liette, the commandant at Fort St. Louis des Illinois in the 1690s.124 On one single summer hunt that Liettes accompanied, the Illinois pursued a “great herd” and killed a “great number of buffalos” after shooting off “an extraordinary number of arrows.” The bottom line? One single hunt that Liette witnessed in the Illinois Valley yielded 1,200 animals.125 Since a typical bison yielded 675 pounds of food, the Illinois utterly maximized their bison advantage at the Grand Village to support their massive population.
The Illinois used their strength to take revenge on the Iroquois. Frequent reports arrived back in Quebec detailing the gruesome rewards of the crucial alliance with the Illinois. In 1688: “96 Iroquois were killed [by the Illinois], the scalps of which victims were brought to fort Saint-Louis.”126 In 1689: “Our Illinois have brought us 25 [Iroquois] slaves. We have caused them to be burned. I did not count those that were killed on the spot.”127 Year after year, the tally grew; in 1694 the governor of New France estimated that the Illinois had taken a total of 400–500 Iroquois casualties.128 The Illinois revenged themselves for their previous losses against the Iroquois.129
The French certainly contributed to the Illinois’s power. They helped mediate disputes with the Ottawa and especially the Miami. But Illinois power was largely independent of the French, and the real logic of Great Kaskaskia was opportunism, not desperation or dependency. Although they could have stayed out of it, they united at the Grand Village during a moment of violence, becoming the masters of the slave trade and the borderlands. Indeed, while the French flattered themselves by thinking that the Illinois were dependent, in fact the Illinois probably came to this place because doing so enabled them to combine their various advantages—bison and slaves—with the new opportunities of the French material support and Algonquian alliance.
As New France supported La Salle’s colony and the Jesuit outposts, this created an unusual colonial situation. For the officials, the imperatives of Indian diplomacy meant tolerating and even supporting a nascent colony that had placed itself apart, outside of the normal rules of French government. Because the administration in New France was dependent on the agency of La Salle and the Jesuits for the alliance, administrators could not easily dictate how the colony ought to operate. Things happened here that would not have been allowed in other parts of the empire.
One example is the fur trade. In 1681, Colbert reformed the fur trade, instituting a license system that limited the number of traders allowed into the West. But Illinois remained outside of the new rules, and La Salle and Tonty had authority to issue their own trade permits.130 La Forest, who became Tonty’s partner in the mid-1680s, explained the logic: the Illinois colony was on its own, financially. If the king wanted the Illinois alliance, he would have to permit Illinois colonists to trade for their own profit.131 As a result, the king did grant exclusive trade rights to the proprietors in 1686 “in order to give them the means of meeting the expense of maintaining the fort.”132 Indeed, by 1686, the officials in New France had to recognize that the Illinois Country was the exclusive trade property of La Salle’s partners. Denonville complained that Tonty and La Forest excluded licensed New France traders from the Illinois trade.133