Showing posts with label French Colonial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French Colonial. Show all posts

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Happy Independence Day

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence? If not, you should. It’s a fine piece of writing. The beginning and the end are poetry. But what’s with the middle? All those “he has” sentences. An enumeration of all the terrible things King George did to the colonists to justify their decision to break with Great Britain. And some of them seem to have been written in code.

“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies”

For all of you living in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio – this part is for you. Yes, your state was an enumerated reason for the 13 colonies to break with Great Britain. It was all because YOU were included within the 14th colony. What? What 14th colony? Quebec of course. Britain defeated France in the Seven Years war and France ceded all of its land east of the Mississippi (except New Orleans) to Britain. Quebec became a part of Great Britain.

But what to do with it? It was full of people. And they all spoke French! And they were all Catholic and they had NO interest in taking an oath of allegiance that referenced protestantism. And they had their own way of doing things including an entire system of contractual rights through which they ran their fur trade.

Hence, the Quebec Act. In 1774 parliament finally got around to passing an act for the administration of all that land that France ceded them. They replaced the oath of allegiance with one that didn’t mention protestantism. They guaranteed the Quebecois the free practice of their Catholic faith. They kept English common law for government matters and criminal matters but restored the French civil law to private matters (i.e. contracts etc.).

And while they were at it, Britain threw all the rest of French North America under the administration of Quebec and put it under the same rules. That’s where Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio come in.

The 13 colonies were furious about this. They called the Quebec Act one of the Intolerable Acts. People in the Ohio Country were free to be Catholic? OMG. That Royal Proclamation of 1763 in which Britain recognized the right of the Indians to the land? They had to be bound by that? And the Virginia and Pennsylvania land companies couldn’t freely drive the Indians out because the Indians “belonged” to Quebec? Are you kidding? Is THAT the American way? What if that happened all over the 13 colonies? What a terrible proposition. Catholics everywhere! And Indians with land rights! And all of our dreams of profiting from the land beyond the mountains dashed. It must be stopped!

You can see why the 13 colonies were compelled to rebel. Right?

So Happy Independence Day to everyone. Go out and live the American Dream, especially you in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio (oh, and Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota, which were also French).

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

A Little Indiana History

AndiF asked if there was anything about her home state of Indiana in my books on the French Colonial history of the Ohio Valley.  Most Ohio Valley history is told from the British/American point of view and so mostly it focuses on Eastern Ohio and the forks of the Ohio River (Pittsburgh).   To the extent that the French and Indians further west are discussed, the focus is on the Southern lllinois towns of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Nouvelle Chartres and St. Phillipe which were located along the Mississippi River just above the confluence with the Ohio River.  Of those, only the tiny village of  Prairie du Rocher can still be considered a community. The mighty Mississippi wiped out the rest.  The Mississippi even changed its course, wiping out most of Kaskaskia and stranding the rest (which is still part of Illinois) on the Missouri side of the river.  

But there were some important French trading towns in Indiana.  And they didn’t just spring up naturally, they were chosen to be towns by a joint decision of the Indian Nations and the French who supplied them.  In most histories of the American West the settlers are trying to avoid the Indians.  In the American Midwest of the 1700’s the French were trying to attract Indians.  This is the difference between a people who want to develop farming and ranching communities where control of specific parcels of land is important (the Americans) and a people who want a commercial trading relationship (the French).   Unlike the Southern Illinois communities, the Indiana communities are still around. 

So here’s an excerpt from one of the books in my pile that talks about Indiana.  And for my Michigan readers, there’s a little touch of Michigan too.

In 1701 France’s minister of the marine approved a proposal for yet another large central post in the region.  The new post was to be constructed at a place known as Detroit:  located on the straits between Lakes Huron and Erie, Detroit stood on the threshold separating the settled parts of New France from the vast western territories claimed by the colony. The plan was conceived by Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, a director and prime mover of the newly reorganized company that enjoyed Canada’s fur trade monopoly. Cadillac was ignorant of the ecological and political constraints that made large, multiethnic settlement sites problematic, but he hoped that good terms of trade could attract a very large Indian population around Detroit to become home to the Ottawas, Hurons, Potawatomis, Mascoutens, and Kickapoos. All of them might live in contiguous villages, he thought, and conduct all of their trade at Detroit …

… Within a few years of its founding Detroit had drawn nearly 6000 Indians to the area and Cadillac, in his enthusiasm, referred to his new settlement as the “Paris of America".” But the Miamis [Indians] were reluctant transplants and they did not stay long … Once they had taken up residence, it was not long until the Miami band was embroiled in a series of conflicts with the Ottawas there.  They finally abandoned the post altogether in 1712 and requested that individual trading posts be established at their village sites on the Maumee and Wabash Rivers. 

Canadian officials were reluctant to build additional, decentralized outposts for the Miami tribes – Detroit was conceived partly in an effort to consolidate French activity in the west – but they recognized the very real possibility that the Miamis might otherwise opt for even stronger ties with the English colonies.  They chose to comply with the request, and around the end of the second decade of the 18th Century two new posts were built:  Fort Miamis, near the Miami towns on the Maumee River [present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana]: and Fort Ouiatanon, near the town of Ouiatanon on the upper Wabash [present day West Lafayette, Indiana].  A little more than a decade later, in 1731, a third French post, called Vincennes, was established farther down the Wabash alongside the Piankashaw town of Chippekoke. These posts did not make the Miami tribes absolutely loyal to the French alliance – they continued to maintain connections with British traders, often through Iroquois intermediaries, throughout the colonial period – but they did help to confirm and solidify the new spatial arrangement of Miami territories, while they strengthened the force of the alliance between the Miamis and New France.

excerpt from “Elusive Empires:  Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800” by Eric Hinderaker, pp. 49-50.

One of my ancestors was one of the first French women to move from the St. Lawrence River Valley to the new post at Detroit.  Her second husband was the surgeon at the post.   Many of her sons became voyageurs.  One of them eventually married a French girl in Detroit and that family ended up in Vincennes. Their daughter and her husband, a French soldier who came over for the French and Indian War, eventually moved to the newly founded town of St. Louis after France ceded all of the land east of the Mississippi River to Britain at the end of war.  A brother of one of my ancestors was the chief French trader at the Ouiatenon post for a time.  A cousin of one of my ancestors was the French military commander at Ouiatenon for a time. 

Monday, June 28, 2010

What I’m Reading

I haven’t blogged about what I’ve been reading lately because I’ve been lost in French Colonial History,

IMG_0721

particularly the history of the French in the Ohio River Valley, and I doubt anyone is much interested in that.  That’s a picture of '”the pile” I’m working on.  The only one I’ve finished is Elusive Empires by Erik Hinderaker which came out in 1997 but I hadn’t yet read. Starting with the culture of the Mississippian Indians (the mound builders) he works his way through the refugees from the Iroquois wars, the French entering the Illinois Country and the Ohio Valley through Detroit and the English entering through Pennsylvania and Virginia.  It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know but it was an excellent overview of the history and put much in a timeline perspective.  Although it seemed to lean more heavily on the “American” side of the history than on the French, it was much more balanced than many other histories. 

The others I’m reading more or less simultaneously as the spirit moves me.  The New Peoples edited by Jacqueline Peterson isn’t really about the Ohio Valley.  These appear to be papers written by participants at the first international Conference on the Metis in North America, hosted by the Newberry Library in Chicago.  But since some of the peoples of the Ohio Valley (especially on the French side) were metis, I thought it fit into the bunch.  Metis means “mixed” and literally the metis people were children of europeans and native americans. 

Chasing Empire Across the Sea, by Kenneth J. Banks is about communications in the 18th Century between France and her American colonies, including the French Caribbean.  Communication between France and Canada was limited by the freezing of the St. Lawrence River each winter.  Communication between France and the West Indies was relatively simple.  Surprisingly, communication with Louisiana was the slowest because it was the longest distance and the journey up the Mississippi to New Orleans was treacherous.  This book is full of a wealth of information that I’m slowly digesting. 

The Ohio Valley in Colonial Days by Berthold Fernow is a reprint of a book published in 1890 and written by the custodian of the State Archives of New York.  I haven’t started it yet but I never discount books because they are old, especially when they are written by someone who has access to an archive. The language is sometimes florid but there is often good information to be had.

Finally, there is The French and Indian War by Walter R. Borneman, published in 2006.  I’ve read much about that portion of the great world war known in Europe as the Seven Years War. But I never get enough. 

As far as fiction goes, despite my desire to start a new mystery series I’ve been catching up on old friends.  I just read This Body of Death by Elizabeth George and all I have to say is … Tommy, Tommy, Tommy.   Alcoholics are not people you want to mess around with.   I also read The Judgment of Caesar and am now reading The Triumph of Caesar, both by Steven Saylor and featuring Gordianus the Finder.   Don’t know how I fell behind by two books on that series.  Probably because my local library is always late on getting the next one.   I know my Roman History enough to know that Caesar comes to a bad end.  Beware the Ides … and all that.

And I’m still working on Eliza Fay’s Letters from India.   She’s finally reached India after many, many adventures.  In some ways it’s hard to remember that this isn’t a novel.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Some Unrelated - Related Thoughts

The intersection between my various areas of interest never ceases to amaze me. I'm constantly finding connections between areas of interest that I would never have thought had any connection at all.

For instance, I'm very interested in "The Arts", particularly the writing arts, and as a part of that interest I've been following some of the ongoing discussions regarding copyright law over the past ten years. I'm also interested in French colonial history in North America. You wouldn't think there'd be much overlap between those subjects, would you? Neither did I, until this morning when, stuck on a couch with my box of kleenex, I caught up on my NY Times reading.

Reading the book section, I happened upon a long and thought provoking piece by Daniel Smith on Lewis Hyde, the poet, essayist, translator and thinker-about-the-arts. Although I knew the name, Lewis Hyde, I knew little about him and had never read Hyde's seminal 1983 book, The Gift. Hyde is working on a new book that will apparently discuss the ongoing issues with respect to copyright.

After finishing the piece, I decided that I needed to read The Gift. Smith's brief statement that Margaret Atwood "keeps a half dozen copies of The Gift on hand at all times to distribute to artists she thinks will benefit from it" was probably enough to make me think that I should read it. But as Smith described it, I found myself wanting to read it for its own sake and partly because it connected with some of my reading on French colonial history.

The Gift, according to Smith, grew out of Hyde's reading of Marcel Mauss' essay about gift exchange societies.
His [Mauss] essay on gift exchange drew on the work of the seminal turn-of-the-century ethnographers Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski to explore aboriginal societies in which the person of consequence — the man or woman who is deemed worthy of adulation, respect and emulation — is not the one who accumulates the most goods but the one who disperses them. Gift economies, as Mauss defines them, are marked by circulation and connectivity: goods have value only insofar as they are treated as gifts, and gifts can remain gifts only if they are continually given away. This results in a kind of engine of community cohesion, in which objects create social, psychological, emotional and spiritual bonds as they pass from hand to hand.
Hyde found this idea useful in his thinking about why The Arts are valuable in a market based society.
The ideas resonated deeply with Hyde. For nearly a decade he had been struggling to explain — to his family, to nonartist friends, to himself — why he devoted so much of his time and energy to something as nonremunerative as poetry. The literature on gift exchange — tales, for example, of South Sea tribesman circulating shells and necklaces in a slow-moving, broad circle around the Trobriand Islands — gave him the conceptual tool he needed to understand his predicament, which was, he came to believe, the predicament of all artists living “in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities.” For centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts; Hyde’s basic argument was that this language must extend to the products of talent and inspiration too. Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.
Without reading The Gift, I can't tell if I agree with Hyde's premise but the idea of the importance of gifts corresponds to my reading about the relations between the colonial French and the Algonquian and Illini tribes of the 17th century Great Lakes region.

One of the most enlightening books I have ever read is Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in The Great Lakes Region 1650-1815. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that my entire way of thinking about French colonial life changed after reading this book.

Part of White's book examines the importance of gifts in Algonquian society. The French noted early in their relationship with the Algonquians that the Algonquians held liberality in high regard. Gift giving was a mark of the status and power of the giver and it was also a route to greater status and power. The French noted that sometimes the chief of a tribe had fewer possessions than other members of the tribe because he always gave away what he had.

Gifts were key to every transaction in society. A request had no significance if it was not accompanied by a gift. An agreement was not binding without an exchange of gifts. Marriages involved the giving of gifts. The power to mediate between opposing factions required the ability to present gifts to each side either to seal an agreement or to compensate one side for a loss it had received from the other side. Although the French understood the giving of gifts in the European sense, they had not encountered this volume of exchange of goods in any form other than trade before. They would need to adjust their way of thinking.

White contrasts the hierarchical, highly coercive French society in which the King was at the top, to be obeyed upon pain of death, and the society of the Algonquians. At the top of the French colonial society was the Governor of New France, the representative of the King in North America. The Governor was called Onontio by the tribes, a Mohawk term meaning Great Mountain that was probably the literal rendering of the actual name of an early Governor.

White's central premise is this:
Because the French and Algonquians were trading partners and allies, the boundaries of the Algonquian and French worlds melted at the edges and merged. Although identifiable Frenchmen and identifiable Indians continued to exist, whether a particular practice or way of doing things was French or Indian was, after a time, not so clear. This was not because individual Indians became "Frenchified" or because individual Frenchmen went native, although both might occur. Rather, it was because Algonquians who were perfectly comfortable with their status and practices as Indians and Frenchmen, confident in the rightness of French ways, none the less had to deal with people who shared neither their values nor their assumptions about the appropriate way of accomplishing tasks. They had to arrive at some common conception of suitable ways of acting; they had to create ... a middle ground.
White points out that the establishment of what eventually became the middle ground evolved through many steps, beginning with the crude first step in which each side tried to assimilate the other side into its own conceptual order - the French categorizing the Indians as sauvages with religions that amounted to devil worship and witchcraft and the Indians categorizing the French as manitous. And because the French were literate and wrote down these first impressions, people on the far side of the Atlantic who had never set foot in North America and perhaps had never met a native American gave these first impressions staying power and influenced how Frenchmen not on the ground in North America continued to view the native peoples.

The most important thing to remember about French/Algonquian relations was that neither side had the upper hand. Unlike other European powers in the New World, France never sent enough people to gain its ends by force. The French were always outnumbered. They were outnumbered by their Indian allies and they were outnumbered by their enemies - the Iroquois and the Iroquois' English allies. In order to protect themselves from the Iroquois and the English, the French needed the alliance with the Algonquians.

In addition, the French needed the Algonquians because the French economy in the New World was an economy based on trade - the trade of European goods for furs. Not an economy based on exploitation of the land, like the English, or an economy based on exploitation of silver mines, like the Spanish.

The Algonquians, in turn, needed the French. Not, as is commonly thought, for their trade goods. It would be a long time before the Indians were so dependent on European trade goods that they could not live without them. No, they needed the French to be an honest broker between tribes. As the Iroquois and disease pushed the Algonquian and other peoples west of the Great Lakes, they were jumbled together as refugees often are. Their ability to fight against the Iroquois (and the Sioux, against whom they were pushing on their western boundaries) depended on their ability to get along with each other. The French, as outsiders with access to goods that were highly prized presents, allowed them to act as mediators among the warring blocks crammed together along the shores of Lake Michigan and back into what is now Wisconsin. It allowed them to convince the refugee Indian tribes to act, and to help them coordinate the actions, in concert against a common enemy; to stop the bleeding so to speak.
The middle ground depended on the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force. The middle ground grew through the need of people to find a means, other than force, to gain the cooperation or consent of foreigners. To suceed, those who operated on the middle ground had, of necessity, to attempt to understand the world and the reasoning of others and to assimilate enough of that reasoning to put it to their own purposes.
The other important thing to recognize about the French/Algonquian middle ground is that it is based on congruences that did not necessarily derive from a true understanding of the other side. Again, White:
Those operating in the middle ground acted from interests derived from their own culture, but they had to convince people of another culture that some mutual action was fair and legitimate. In attempting such persuasion people quite naturally sought out congruences, either perceived or actual, between the two cultures. The congruences arrived at often seemed -- and indeed were -- results of misunderstandings or accidents. Indeed, to later observers, the interpretations offered by members of one society for the practices of another can appear ludicrous. This, however, does not matter. Any congruence, no matter how tenuous, can be put to work and can take on a life of its own if it is accepted by both sides. Cultural conventions do not have to be true to be effective any more than legal precedents do. They have only to be accepted.
One of the congruences that worked for the French and the Algonquians was the concept of father/child that took hold. For the French, to be thought of as "the Father" played into its feeling of being the person in charge who was to be obeyed which it saw as the natural order, despite the greater number of Indians.

For the Algonquians, the term "father" had a different connotation. Fathers weren't to be obeyed, they had no coercive power. But as the person with the ability to provide, Fathers were expected and obligated to provide. And as the person with more access to goods necessary for presents, fathers were expected to try to convince their children to get along. The fact that the French had access to goods that made wonderful gifts gave the French the obligation from the point of view the Algonquians, to provide those gifts and to mediate. There was no reciprocal obligation on the part of the Algonquians to obey. On this misunderstanding was the entire long lasting father/child relationship between the French and the Indians born.

One of the biggest hurdles that the French and the Indians had to cross was to understand how coercion did or did not play a part in the other society.
... Algonquian village leaders, unlike Onontio and his French officials, were not rulers. The French equated leadership with political power, and power of coercion. Leaders commanded; followers obeyed. But what distinguished most Algonquian politics from European politis was the absence of coercion. ... As Chigabe, a Salteur chief, and probably a lineage head of one of the proto-Ojibwe bands of Lake Superior told Governor Frontenac: "Father: It is not the same with us as with you. When you command, all the French obey and go to war. But I shall not be heeded and obeyed by my nation in a like manner. Therefore, I cannot answer except for myself and for those immediately allied or related to me.
If an Algonquian leader could not coerce, he could convince. And presents were a way to convince. By giving Algonquian leaders gifts that could in turn be passed along to others, the French were giving the Algonquian leaders the ability to convince their people to go along with plans that the French desired.

Keeping all of this in mind, White looks at the fur trade which is normally looked at from the French point of view with most exchanges being a form of commerce and other occasional exchanges being a form of gift giving.
It is just possible, however, to create a counter image in which the fur trade proper is merely an arbitrary selection from a fuller and quite coherent spectrum of exchange that was embedded in particular social relations. The fur trade was a constantly changing compromise, a conduit, between two local models of exchange -- the French and the Algonquian.

Both sides had models of equitable exchange. ... The Algonquian model proceeded from a different logic [than the French market model] and can be distinguished from the French on a series of important points. First of all, the goal of the transaction was not necessarily profit - securing the maximum material advantage. It was ... to to satisfy ... the needs of each party. Second, the relation of the buyer and the seller was not incidental to the transaction; it was critical. If none existed, one had to be established. Third, the need of the buyer was an important element in the logic of the exchange, but it exerted an influence opposite to that it exerted in the French model. The greater the need ... the greater the claim of the buyer on the seller.
In other words, the Algonquians only "traded" with those with whom they had a personal relationship (family, either real or symbolic) and the exchanges took the form of providing for the needs of the other person and if one side had greater need, the person with the greater means was obligated to try to meet their needs.

If the French wanted to trade with the Algonquians they had to understand at some level that exchanges of goods could not always be for mercenary reasons. At the same time, although the Algonquians had their own reasons for exchange of goods, by trading with the French at any level they had, without a doubt, entered into a global world market in which the furs they traded were eventually distributed all over Europe in the form of finished goods such as hats. And thus, the market system of Europe did impact their lives, as gluts of furs would cause Europe to send over fewer trade goods that could be used for presents to assist in mediation between the tribes. But the market never dominated the fur trade system because the French, especially in the 18th century as England became more and more powerful and her reach grew further, were fully aware that the requirements of the military alliance would necessitate the taking of actions that the market would not tolerate. As White says:
But precisely because the fur trade could not be completely separated from the .... relations of political and military alliance, a straightforward domination of the local Algonquian village by the market never emerged. Instead, a system of exchange developed that was notably different from earlier Algonquian models; it was a system influenced by, and yet buffered from, the market. The French-Algonquian alliance was the buffer. To allow profit alone to govern the fur trade threatened the alliance, and when necessary, French officals subordinated the fur trade to the demands of the alliance.
In other words, when the alliance demanded it, the French would countenance "trade" at unprofitable levels to keep the allies happy; they would act in the Algonquian mode as a giver of gifts that were needed because allies were tied by familial bonds that required those with more to take care of those with less.

How does this fit with Hyde's work? In the Times article, Smith says that Hyde's thinking over the years has evolved.
Since the mid-1980s, when his work began to gain in popularity, Hyde has often been invited to speak publicly about creativity and gift exchange. Invariably, the discussions following his lectures have wound their way to a practical question: If creative work doesn’t necessarily have any market value, how is the artist to survive?

In the course of writing “The Gift,” Hyde underwent an intellectual transformation on this subject. He began the work believing there was “an irreconcilable conflict” between gift exchange and the market; the enduring (if not necessarily the happy) artist was the one who most successfully fended off commercial demands. By the time he was finished, Hyde had come to a less-dogmatic conclusion. It was still true, he believed, that the marketplace could destroy an artist’s gift, but it was equally true that the marketplace wasn’t going anywhere; it had always existed, and it always would. The key was to find a good way to reconcile the two economies.


In other words, Hyde is looking for a middle ground.

I haven't even touched on my other interest in Hyde's current work, which has to do with the the tradition of the "commons" and how it influences his thought on trademarks. The "commons" played a role in French colonial life too, slightly different than that of English colonial life. But that would be the subject of a post for another day.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

A Family Affair

On June 11, 1636 a family of French immigrants arrived in Québec. The principal members of this family, the LeGardeur family of Normandy, were destined to become some of the most powerful men in New France. But the most interesting person in the group, at least from my perspective, was a little girl named Anne LeNeuf. I am descended from her.

Four years old, Anne arrived in New France with her thirty-five year old father Michel LeNeuf, her widowed grandmother Jeanne Le Marchand LeNeuf, her aunt Marie LeNeuf and her uncle Jacques LeNeuf de la Poterie and his family.

Anne’s uncle Jacques was married to Marguerite LeGardeur and that is why Anne and her family were with the LeGardeur family. The LeGardeurs and the LeNeufs were not by any means the first French persons to set foot on North American soil; they may not even have been the first members of my family to come to North America. They were, however, among the first European settlers to arrive in North America as a family with a young child.

Anne's father and uncle were fur traders. They were not traders in the style of the later 19th century Mountain Men, roaming the wilds of North America in search of furs. No, the French did not, at first, travel deep into the continent in search of furs. It was not encouraged by the French government. The continent was to be left to the "savages" and the missionaries, Frenchmen would set up small civilized posts and trade from these posts. Only a few explorers, licensed to look for the mythic Northwest passage, would head into the interior.

And, for a time, this worked. The Huron and the Algonquian were the principal trading partners of the French, acting as middlemen between the French and the northern and western tribes who did not travel to the St. Lawrence river valley. As far as the French government was concerned, the Huron would control their own territories and their own alliances, and would conduct trade throughout the winters with these northern and western tribes. In the spring they would bring furs to Québec and to the newly established Trois-Rivieres, the two principal settlements along the St. Lawrence. They would return with European trade goods that they would then use to barter for more furs. That, at least, was the plan.

The French tried to look at the relationship with the Huron and Algonquian as a purely business relationship. But relationships are two sided and the French were a small minority dealing with a vast Huron/Algonquin majority; they realized quite early that all trade took place on Indian terms. "Trade" for the Huron/Algonquian generally consisted of exchanges of gifts between friends. They did not look upon "trade" as a business enterprise that could take place among peoples who were otherwise unrelated to each other. If you weren't a friend, you were an enemy and "trade" never happened with enemies.

So, if the French wanted to trade with the Huron/Algonquians they were constantly required to prove their friendship with them. The most effective way of proving this friendship was by by siding with the Huron/Algonquians against the powerful Iroquois Confederation. In fact, the Huron demanded French assistance against the Iroquois as a condition to trade. And the French gave it.

The Iroquois Confederation lived to the south of the St. Lawrence River in what is now upstate New York. Commonly known as the Five Nations, this alliance of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca was the strongest military power in eastern North America in the 1600’s. The Huron were determined to keep the Five Nations south of the St. Lawrence river. The Five Nations, in turn, were determined to incorporate the Huron and all other local tribes into their alliance. The warfare was constant. The introduction of European arms into the conflict was devastating.

Things didn't work out as either the French or their Indian allies expected. More than half of the Huron were dead by the end of the 1630’s from exposure to European diseases such as smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and influenza. The Huron who survived sickness fell victim to the Iroquois. By 1639, the original Huron population of thirty thousand had been reduced to about nine thousand. The Algonquins would migrate to the western Great Lakes area now known as Wisconsin. French policy for years was to entice them back to the St. Lawrence to regain their status as middlemen of the fur trade so that Frenchmen would NOT have to travel away from the St. Lawrence river valle. The Algonquians, no fools, could not be lured back to a land of constant warfare and disease.

But this was all in the future when Anne LeNeuf stepped off that ship in Quebec. Anne would spend the rest of her long life in the area in and around Trois Rivieres. But her sons, beginning in the 1680's, would set out on trading expeditions to the west in search of the migrating Indians and the furs they could trade. Some of their sons would leave the relative safety of the St. Lawrence and live in the new French settlements at Detroit and Vincennes (in what is now Indiana). Eventually France would abandon them, conceding the land east of the Mississippi to the English, and the descendants of Anne LeNeuf would cross the Mississippi River to the last French settlement, St. Louis, only to find that France had ceded that territory to Spain. Finally the United States would come to them.

The complicated relationship between the French and their Indian allies and the 100 years long dispute with the Iroquois usually receive short shrift in American history books. For the full story, you must look back to the original French records. Or to Canadian historians.

April Reading

I had a few goals at the start of the year:  (1) to read more classic novels, (ii) to re-read more books (I used to re-read a lot), (3) to b...