Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey
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traders in the Illinois.134 No other part of the Great Lakes interior operated like this, with its own rules. Even as Colbert had tried to systematize the fur trade, Illinois was outside the system.
Another example is land. La Barre was frustrated that La Salle issued grants to habitants. For instance, in his 1683 grant to a voyageur called Jacques Bourdon, La Salle gave seigneurial rights, as though the colony was its own entity free of restrictions from New France.135 This practice continued through the 1680s, and administrators often wondered whether this was even licit. As La Barre complained, the colony was attracting habitants and “debauch[ing] all the lazy men of [New France].”136 To the New France authorities, the whole settlement flew in the face of efforts to keep farmers in the St. Lawrence Valley. Governor Denonville wrote in 1687, “M. de la Salle has made grants at Fort St. Louis to several Frenchmen who have been living there for several years without caring to return. This has occasioned a host of disorders and abominations.” Elaborating this view, Denonville complained: “These people to whom M. de la Salle has made grants are all youths who have done nothing toward cultivating the land…. These people set themselves up as independent and masters on their grants.”137 In other areas of the West, illegal settlers were recalled and arrested. In Illinois, New France did not shut them down but rather allowed these “independent” colonists to be their own “masters.”
Another problem with the Illinois colony from an imperial standpoint was the question of authority itself. New France officials realized that La Salle considered his new colony to be autonomous. “I have been advised,” wrote Governor Denonville, “that Monsieur de la Salle claimed that the commandant of his fort in the Illinois was not under my orders.”138 The government of New France became increasingly upset about the state of the Illinois colony in the late 1680s. In 1688, for example, the governor persuaded the king to revoke the charters in Illinois. The fact that this legal action had no effect on the actual goings on at Fort St. Louis reflects the very weak control that New France possessed over the outpost. Still, it is notable: “In regard to the concessions made by Sieur de La Salle in the area of Fort Saint-Louis, since these cause disorders similar to those which have been noted, His Majesty permits that they be revoked.”139 Probably owing to the continued necessity of the Illinois alliance in the war against the Iroquois, the concessions were all renewed in 1690 when the king transferred the official charter of the colony from La Salle, who had died in 1684, to Tonty and La Forest. Not only did the king reconfirm the old concessions, but he granted to Tonty and La Forest the right to make new ones and charged them to “maintain and grow” the outpost.140
If all this suggests that Illinois was in a special position in the empire, perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of its distinctiveness occurred in 1693. It was in that year that Michel Accault, the former engagé and fur trader, signed a contract and paid six thousand livres’ worth of beaver in exchange for a surprising new status—landlord of Illinois. Along with just one other man, Accault now officially controlled the small outpost in the Illinois Country.141 This was the same Michel Accault whom Hennepin once called “a Base Fellow,” “famous in this Illinois country for all his debaucheries.” In the 1680s, he had deserted, disputed, and rebelled. Now he was the landlord, half owner of an official concession.
It is easy to see why Accault was in control in Illinois. Accault was extremely able and powerful in the colony. For one thing, according to La Salle himself, he was expert in dealing with the local Illinois-speaking Indians. He was “tolerably versed in their languages and manners.” Moreover, he “knew all their customs and was esteemed by several of these nations [in Illinois Country].” In the often difficult task of winning the trust and affection of Indian groups, Accault “succeeded completely.” And his character was impressive. Summing up Accault’s qualities, La Salle wrote that the trader was “prudent, brave and cool.”142
That a man like this took control of Illinois Country in 1693 tells us something important about Illinois’s earliest history and its relationship to the French empire. Many early visions for colonial activity in Illinois had failed. New France had failed to keep its empire restricted to the St. Lawrence. Jesuits had failed to keep Illinois an isolated, primitive church. La Salle, now dead, had not created his alternative empire—it remained just an “imaginary kingdom.” And yet Accault had succeeded. He became an important figure amid a powerful Indian population center, a place now reluctantly included in the French colonial empire. Accault’s authority represented compromise and collaboration—among Indians, Frenchmen, and imperialists. To realize their goals, officials would have to collaborate with a man like Accault.
In the 1680s, Indian affairs created a unique situation in Illinois. After the Iroquois attacks, the French became the “glue” that held together a fragmented social world of Algonquians in the pays d’en haut.143 In Illinois, however, the exigencies of Indian policy also had another effect, which was to hold together diverse French people with competing visions of the French empire. While in most of the pays d’en haut it was French glue bonding Indian fragments, here in Illinois there was Indian glue uniting people with diverse schemes for empire. The imperatives of the Beaver Wars forced collaboration among Jesuits, fur traders, schemers, Indians, and officials.
But this collaboration seemed to be only as durable as the need for alliance against the Iroquois. Like so many relationships and experiments on the early American frontier, these accommodations were surely temporary and expedient. But meanwhile, on the ground, affairs at the Grand Village were entering a new phase. In the Grand Village, Jesuits, fur traders, and Indians were coming to understand each other, to forge relationships that went beyond the short-term imperatives of the fur trade or the Iroquois Wars. In 1694, an event was about to take place that would change the history of Illinois forever. Moving far beyond the hasty accommodations of the early years, this would be the beginning of a much more serious collaboration and the foundation of an idiosyncratic colonial community.
Chapter 3
Collaboration and Community
At the dawn of the 1690s, the French empire included an unintentional colonial outpost in the Illinois Country. Containing Jesuits, fur traders, Indians, and the defiant inheritors of La Salle’s early Louisiana concession, it was a far cry from what anybody—whether in the government of New France or on the ground in Illinois—might have hoped it to be. Only the strategic imperative of Indian affairs, the all-important alliance against the Iroquois, kept imperial officials and the people in and around Fort Saint Louis collaborating. But while the resulting collaboration followed nobody’s ideal design, there were measured successes. The Jesuits baptized hundreds of Indians during brief sojourns at their small mission. La Salle’s concession contained a bustling fur trade center. Fur traders like Michel Accault profited. And the government had “infrastructure” to secure its important alliance with the Illinois.
Of course, the real success story of this period belonged to the Illinois themselves. In part owing to French support, the opportunistic Illinois at the Grand Village had reached the climax of their power, built on slaves, bison, and French merchandise. Having reached its maximum strength at twenty thousand persons in the early 1680s, the Grand Village complex still contained an enormous population, so many people that they were forced to relocate to Lake Peoria for more fuel in the early 1690s. From here, the new village known as Pimitéoui, or “fat lake,” the Illinois continued to dominate the Illinois Valley corridor, funneling slaves from Siouan- and Caddoanspeaking communities in the West to Great Lakes Algonquians in need of captives to replace their war dead.1 Exploiting their unique opportunities in the borderlands, the Illinois were some of the most powerful people in North America. But pressures inside the village, pulling at the very fabric of Illinois society, were about to change everything.
Inside the village, tensions went along with the great power of the Illinois. Since their arrival in the prairie borderlands, Illinois-speakers had built power by assimilating outsiders. Much of this assimilation rested on violence and slave trading. In the melting pot of Kaskaskia, this produced