Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey
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Dictionary, ca. 1690, manuscript held at Watkinson Library Special Collections, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.
Unlike woodlands hunters, the Illinois had given themselves over to a resource that required organization and scale. This probably made the prairie bison hunters into a more unified and cohesive society than was typical of Algonquians and pre-bison Oneota. The new lifeway may have given rise to a more hierarchical social structure, and it certainly required larger villages, especially in the summer and winter when the Illinois came together for the bison hunt. Whereas other Algonquians broke up into small villages to chase animals like deer and bears, the Illinois could stay together in their large groups throughout the year.63
The bison economy also fostered another change, which was a new gendered division of labor. Contact-era evidence suggests that women processed the hides, smoked the meat, and made bison products like wool and robes.64 Moreover, since each male-headed household in Illinois “owned” the specific meat that its male hunters killed, and since each family processed their meat separately, this created an incentive for each man to have lots of women in his household.65 The bison economy may have helped encourage the polygamous households that were common among the Illinois at the time of contact, just like among bison hunters on the plains.66
Given the huge size of bison herds in the region, bison hunting made the Illinois prosperous. Herds spread across the prairies of Illinois in the 1600s and remained large through the colonial period.67 Marquette counted herds of 400 in 1673, and others counted herds in the thousands.68 Typical hunts produced 200 animals or more, according to the seventeenth-century sources, and the Illinois were taking at least 2,000 bison annually by the early 1700s.69 Bison provided the largest source of meat to the Illinois and likely a good portion of their overall calories.70 It seems likely that this made them healthier than other Algonquians of their era and better-off than pre-bison Oneota as well. At contact Marquette was impressed by the prosperity of the Illinois people. As he wrote, “They raise Indian corn, which they have in great abundance, have squashes as large as those of France, and have a great many roots and fruits. There is fine hunting there of Wild Cattle, Bears, Stags, Turkeys, Ducks, Bustards, Pigeons, and Cranes. The people quit their Village sometime in the year, to go all together to the places where the animals are killed, and better to resist the enemy who come to attack them.”71
The bison also became central to the Illinois’s material culture. Liette noted that the Illinois used skins for clothing, shelter, and other purposes. They made tools out of the animals’ bones. Marquette noted that bison was the main medium for the Illinois’s artistic traditions, and on several occasions during his travels he remarked on belts, garters, and accessories that were given as gifts or worn by prominent people among the Illinois. These included the scarves, made from bison hair, that distinguished the “captains” of the Illinois, “made, with considerable skill, from the hair of bears and wild cattle.”72 Indeed, the new animal gave the Illinois a distinctly different material culture from that of many of their Algonquian neighbors. While Indians in the region of Illinois had poor beaver resources, Marquette noted that “Their wealth consists in the skins of wild cattle.”73
Figure 3. “Chasse Génèrale au Boeuf, mais à pied,” published in Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz’s Histoire de Louisiane (Paris, 1758). Le Page du Pratz’s depiction of non-equestrian bison hunting resembles many of the descriptions from eyewitnesses to the Illinois in the contact period.
Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Bison hide painting became an important artistic expression in the Illinois culture. As Marquette noted, “[Bison hair] … falls off in Summer, and the skin becomes as soft as Velvet. At that season, the savages use the hides for making fine Robes, which they paint in various Colors.”74 It is intriguing to speculate about how the bison became central to the Illinois culture as they migrated, perhaps even helping create a new kind of identity. But this was not simply a new culture but something more complex. It was a blended culture, a synthesis of Oneota and Algonquian. To the point, consider the bird motif on the hide robe that Marquette supposedly brought back from Illinois in 1673. Evidence suggests that this was a very important motif in Oneota culture, perhaps even associated with Oneota ethnogenesis centuries before the Illinois’s arrival. According to one scholar, birds—and particularly hawks—were at the center of Oneota ritual tradition and identity.75 The hawk motif on Marquette’s hide robe closely resembles a similar decoration on pottery unearthed in an Oneota site in Polk County, Iowa.76 It is also similar to the thunderbird pictogram used to represent the Winnebago—descendants of the Oneota—at the 1701
Great Peace treaty at Montreal, which ended the Beaver Wars. Of course it is impossible to be conclusive about what these similarities really suggest, if anything. But it does seem possible to read this rare pre-contact Illinois material culture as a reflection of how the Illinois newcomers assimilated and integrated the culture of the Natives in the region and incorporated it with their own identity in the seventeenth century, together with the bison material itself.77 The Illinois had colonized the region and adopted the transitional lifeway pioneered by the Oneota.78 They had become a cooperative, cohesive, hybrid set of colonizers.
The thunderbird on the Illinois hide reflects possible social interactions and affiliations between Oneota people and the Illinois newcomers and hints at how the Illinois may have integrated or assimilated outsiders as part of their colonizing history. It is impossible to know for sure how the Illinois newcomers made community and negotiated social life as they arrived in the Illinois Country. But what does seem clear is that as they colonized, the Illinois built a strong and complex network of villages, united by language and probably kinship.
Figure 4. Bison arrow-shaft wrench. Made from bison femur, unearthed at Guebert site, eighteenth-century Illinois village in Illinois Valley. The Illinois based much of their material culture on bison products.
Courtesy of the Collection of the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Ill. Doug Carr, museum photographer.
Figure 5. Illinois hide robe with thunderbird. A long tradition has it that this robe was presented to Marquette when he visited the Peoria Indians on the Des Moines River in 1673. Hide robes like this are an artistic tradition the Illinois picked up from their grasslands neighbors and are not typical Algonquian art forms. They reflect the Illinois’s “transitional culture.”
Courtesy of SCALA Archives, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.
Figure 6. Winnebago pictogram on 1701 Great Peace treaty, Montreal. Note the symbol for the Winnebago, Siouan neighbors of the Illinois, is the “thunderbird.” C11a, vol. 19, fols. 41–44v, ANOM.
Courtesy of the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Although we must rely on post-contact descriptions for much of our understanding of Illinois social life, there are some things we can be reasonably confident about regarding the Illinois in the early 1600s. For one thing, as it was for all eastern North American Indians, kinship was the most important means of separating friends from foreign peoples.79 Contrary to how European observers saw them, the Illinois did not really organize themselves primarily into a “tribe” or “nation” or even a “confederacy.” Rather, they did most things in life—resided, went to war, negotiated, identified—as families. Families were the center of life. While we don’t know a lot of specifics about the social organization of the