from their villages in the Illinois Valley, they desecrated graves, burned buildings, and ruined fields. Catching up with their victims, they committed, according to one French account, “mutilation, by slaying, and by a thousand tortures besides.”1 After this destruction, the Iroquois aggressors left the Illinois Valley full of markers of their violence, including “the half denuded skulls of Illinois dead” and pictographic memorials commemorating the Iroquois victory.2
To the French in Quebec and throughout the pays d’en haut, who were only barely familiar with the region, this looked like devastation. Recounting the Iroquois attacks on the Illinois, La Salle wrote that there were seven hundred casualties and four hundred slaves taken.3 New France intendant Jacques Duchesneau put the number even higher.4 To the French, this episode was a major blow, if not a crushing one, for the Illinois people whom the French considered weak and “indifferently warlike.”5 According to French sources, the Illinois were “well nigh exterminated.”6 They had to “abandon their country” and “seek refuge in distant parts.”7
In viewing the Illinois as devastated victims, the French exaggerated and misunderstood this episode of Indian warfare and underestimated Illinois power. Nevertheless, the Iroquois attack of 1680–81 marked a turning point in French diplomacy with regard to western peoples like the Illinois. Convinced that the Iroquois were poised to dominate the Great Lakes, the French faced an important choice. One alternative was to allow the Iroquois to continue their aggression against the Illinois and other Algonquians, which would put at risk the fur trade and balance of power that New France relied on. The other alternative was to support the western allies, unify them, and help them defeat the Iroquois. In fact, this was no real choice at all. Over the course of the next several years, French officials committed to becoming the mediators of the alliance, the “glue” of the Algonquian world.8 They resolved to support the most important targets of Iroquois attacks, the Illinois.
This change produced enormous effects for the Illinois. Nowhere near as devastated by the attack in 1680 as the French thought, the Illinois continued on an opportunistic trajectory they had begun well before contact. With French support, they expanded their power to the Southwest, increasing their activity as slavers in the Siouan borderlands. Coalescing in larger groups, they united at the so-called Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, modern-day Starved Rock, which soon became the largest population center north of Mexico. Here they created a center of exploitation, basing their tremendous power on bison, slaves, and now the French alliance. Far from devastated by the attack in 1680, the Illinois moved into an even more ambitious phase of their history.
But if these changes in French diplomacy had important effects for the Illinois, they also had important effects for the French themselves. For in resolving to help build the Algonquian alliance and support the Illinois, Quebec officials were committing themselves to a whole new policy regarding the distant West. Prior to the 1680s, the only people who went to the remote country of the Illinois Valley were schemers with quixotic and even defiant plans. These included Jesuits, explorers like Robert La Salle, and, most important, fur traders. Officials in Quebec openly opposed western expansion of the empire. Now, in the mid-1680s, the imperatives of Indian diplomacy forced officials to change their views. Importantly, officials had to look to the schemers on the ground in Illinois as the agents of their new Indian policy. For their part, visionaries like La Salle had to look to the government as essential partners in their projects.
This was the beginning of a unique, halting, and uncertain colonial experiment on New France’s periphery. To support the Indian allies, New France officials relied on an “infrastructure” of disloyal explorers, priests, and fur traders whose activities they previously discouraged.9 Fur traders pursued their self-interest, but they gained imperial support and military assistance. Priests and fur traders disagreed about priorities, but they came together and cooperated to solidify their fledgling presence among the Illinois. The necessities of Indian affairs forced the French—with all their competing priorities and different interests—to find a common ground. It was the beginning of empire by collaboration.
Meanwhile, of course, the real winners were the Illinois. This period marked the height of their power. Far from devastated, they launched an aggressive phase, uniting at the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia. Here, exploiting bison and the slave trade, they made one of the most important bids for power in all of seventeenth-century America. Together, Indians, French schemers, and Quebec officials collaborated to realize disparate goals.
The period from the 1670s through the 1680s witnessed the first explorations of the Illinois Country by Frenchmen. Even before Marquette’s famous exploration in 1673, Jesuit priest Claude Allouez made initial contact with Illinois Indians on Lake Superior in the 1660s. In 1671, Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson explored the westernmost edge of the Great Lakes and interacted with Illinois Indians.10 In 1673, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet made their famous voyage into the Mississippi Valley watershed, exploring the Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Illinois rivers. Robert La Salle and Louis Hennepin entered the Mississippi Valley several times beginning in 1680, and in 1682 La Salle voyaged from Illinois almost to the mouth of the Mississippi River. In several of these early explorations, French travelers passed through the Illinois River Valley and first laid eyes on the territory that later would be known as the Illinois Country. Crossing the watershed that separated the Great Lakes from the Mississippi Valley, they entered into “strange lands.”11
What they found impressed them. Explorers reported how “you could not find any land better [suited] for the production of wheat, and for vines, and for other fruits as well.”12 The land featured bison and game that were “innumerable”13 and soil in the bottomlands that “looks as if it had been already manured.”14 They found the Illinois Indians affable, “of good birth,” and eager for trade and religious instruction.15 The rumors concerning the presence of hostile Indians here in the Mississippi Valley proved false, and explorers quickly found ways to win friends among Indians in the region.16 One explorer was especially direct in his praise of Illinois: “It may be said to contain the finest lands ever seen.”17 Jesuits found Illinois to be a “fine field for Gospel laborers.”18 Taken together, these discoveries inspired explorers with visions of empire.19
But officials were more than skeptical. In 1663, the royal government had taken over New France after years of company management. The French government reorganized the colony and embarked on an era of centralized planning.20 New royal officials, led by Minister of the Marine Jean-Baptiste Colbert, brought new priorities. As they saw it, fur trade was important, but trade should not dominate or overshadow other potentially profitable activities in the colony. Nor could it be allowed to tempt would-be farmers into the woods.21 The stability of the colony relied on settling Frenchmen in the St. Lawrence Valley and employing them in productive industry there. Without outposts in the West, Colbert believed, “the settlers would be obliged to engage in fishing, prospecting, and manufacturing, which would yield them far greater benefits.”22
Practical realities added to the official bias against western expansion. Iroquois attacks had destroyed western outposts of New France in the 1640s, and Iroquois power had reached its zenith in 1651. The missions and fur trade outposts in the West had been pulled back, and trade dried up through much of the 1650s and 1660s.23 Reestablishing these posts would be expensive and risky. In 1666, Colbert announced the major principle of his imperial vision when he called for a tightly focused colonization in New France: “It would be worth much more to restrain [the colonies] to a space of land in which the colony would be able to sustain itself, rather than to embrace too great a quantity of land which one day we might have to abandon with some diminution of the reputation of His Majesty and the crown.”24
Ignoring this opposition, Jolliet was the first Frenchman to seriously propose an outpost of an expanded French empire in the Illinois Country in 1673.25 Of all the lands he saw in the new Mississippi Valley, Jolliet praised the Illinois Country, just beyond the Great Lakes watershed, and south of Lake Michigan, as “the most beautiful