Frontiers come into existence when individuals get ahead of the political and economic policies that are meant to control them, but frontiers are also the farthest point to which an imperial power can throw its voice and expect to hear an echo of that voice come back. They can be transitional zones or lines in the sand. In what French authorities in the eighteenth century called the pays d’en haut, or upper country of the vast territory watered by the Great Lakes, Detroit was both place of transition and place of settlement. Prior to this time, Algonquian and Iroquois nations had lived at Detroit and traveled through the region to hunt and make war. It was coveted by British and French imperial authorities for the easy access by waterway it provided to Native nations. With the arrival of larger numbers of French and later British settlers and traders, the establishment of large numbers of Native groups, and the constant movement west and east of goods and persons, Detroit’s status shifted from fort to city. In trade and imperial politics with Native groups, it sat squarely in the middle of spaces of concentrated European activity in the east and an almost exclusively Native-controlled interior to the west. Agents of government in Quebec and later New York threw their imperial voice as far as Detroit, and from there expected their local counterparts to throw it farther west. For their part, Native representatives threw their voices east with messages they expected would be heard in Montreal and New York.1
But the officially designated agents of state were not the only ones running relays for their empires east and west from Detroit. Those who did so most effectively were part of a highly mobile métis or creole network of mixed Native and European families that was centered at Detroit and conducted trade between Montreal and Kekionga, in what is today Fort Wayne, Indiana. Kekionga was the center of the Miami nation, and it in turn controlled traffic farther west and south.2 By 1730, French forts at Kekionga and Ouiatenon—located near a community of Wea, a Miami subtribe—were dependencies of Detroit, and by 1757, the fort at Vincennes—located among the Piankashaw, another Miami subtribe—was also dependent on the flow of goods and people from Detroit.3 The posts at Detroit and Michilimackinac represented the primary connecting links between the northwest and Montreal, but as the eighteenth century progressed, Detroit became the more important of these two locations. Its trading networks controlled lands of what are today northern Ohio and Indiana, southern Michigan, and the rivers flowing into Lakes Erie and Huron, as well as the system of waterways comprising the Cuyahoga, Sandusky, and the tributaries of the Miami and Scioto, Wabash, and Maumee. Centered at Detroit, merchants became wealthy dealing in furs, brandy, guns, ammunition, blankets, vermilion, and silverworks over this vast hinterland.4
As this chapter will demonstrate, members of the networks fashioned themselves into the standard bearers of a unique urban culture and determined economic and political affairs not only in Detroit but for the entire upper country. Their activities established Detroit as the nexus of a trading network that stretched from Montreal to the Mississippi River. Indeed, although many of them began life in New France as coureurs de bois, or “runners of the woods,” they quickly became coureurs de ville, or “runners of the city,” wealthy men and women who dominated the all-important fur trade throughout the eighteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, this network was so important to the flow of trade, its members’ activities became of increasing concern to imperial agents seeking to control resources. In Detroit, western and eastern-bound voices could be obscured, muted, or altered by the coureurs de ville.
In French, Detroit’s name, le détroit, translates to “the strait.” For both the French and the British, who fought over control of the vast continental interior, Detroit’s natural geographic feature of being the narrowest point or strait on the waterway between New York and Montreal in the east and the Mississippi River in the west made it both a boon and a threat to state security and economic development. Detroit also figured prominently in multiple Native conceptions of territory. In 1701, at the Great Peace of Montreal convened to officially end large-scale warfare between the Iroquois on the one hand and the French and their allied Algonquian nations on the other, representatives of the Iroquois imperial apparatus expressed their concern over Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac’s state-backed plan to build a fort at Detroit that year. There were unique challenges and anxieties around the idea of establishing a permanent physical French presence in an area that had hitherto been a place of transition. During the negotiations, the territory around Detroit was referred to as a “common bowl” because it was not an area of concentrated settlement, but a hunting territory, claimed by both Iroquois and Algonquian nations. In this transitional space, Iroquoian and Algonquian men risked encountering and making war with each other and shattering any lasting peace.5 It was war in the previous century that had created complex and overlapping claims to the same geography involving Iroquois, Algonquian, French, and English nations.
Figure 4.1. The Detroit-Kekionga corridor. Map by Craig Marrero.
There were also unique possibilities for economic development because French trade permits to travel to and from the pays d’en haut had been suspended since the last decade of the seventeenth century, when a glut of beaver furs had been discovered in the storehouses of Montreal and France. Detroit would become one of only a few state-sponsored locations where trade in furs would be allowed, which would attract a multitude of Native nations and French traders, bolster French presence in the upper country, and bring profits into French imperial coffers. The Iroquois reluctantly consented to the establishment of a fort at Detroit, despite concerns that it would lure western Algonquian nations east and bring them closer and into the orbit of the British traders at Albany, thereby cutting out the Iroquois as middlemen. But since they had suffered considerable losses in their war with the French and Algonquians previous to peace negotiations in 1701, the Iroquois were not in a position to make many demands.
The English also saw the benefits of establishing themselves at Detroit. The French preempted the English in establishing a fort, causing one English official to comment that the French intended to “secure a trade which our slothfulness and negligence hath given them the occasion of.” But the English schemed to control Detroit through their allies the Iroquois, who claimed ownership of the land around Detroit.6 Secretary of Indian Affairs Robert Livingston suggested Detroit as an ideal location at which to acquire beaver and a place that rightfully belonged to the English. He described “De Troett” as “the most pleasant and plentifull inland in America by all relation, where there is arable land for thousands of people, the only place for bever hunting, for which our Indians have fought so long.” Livingston envisioned that once established at Detroit, the English could travel farther west to secure an alliance with the western Native nations, while also inviting these groups to come to Albany. Once at Albany, these nations would “see the plenty and cheapness of goods at Albany,” and would be encouraged “to bring all their trade thither, and by that means augment our trade to ten tymes as much as it is now.”7 These numerous layered claims to Detroit insured its status as both a pivotal place of transition and an area of settlement in the center of competing European and Native imperial agendas and worlds.
As a designated imperial agent, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Detroit’s first French commandant, worked to advance the construction of a fort to simultaneously benefit the state and to further his own career and finances. The cloak of imperiality allowed him to at least temporarily divert vast resources to bolster his authority and reputation among Detroit’s French and Native population. His activities did not require profound knowledge of or involvement in the intricacies of local Native cultures, and in fact were predicated on the belief that he held a position of cultural and economic superiority over Native and French fellow inhabitants. Cadillac saw his thin veneer of stat-esanctioned authority crumble quickly and lead to his removal for illegal trading and gross mismanagement from Detroit within a decade. The coureurs de ville, on the other hand, developed networks that grew more dense and powerful over the course of the eighteenth century as they navigated at a very personal level the constantly shifting terrain of Detroit’s Native-European relations. The key to exploiting Detroit’s advantages lay in comprehending its position in a multitude of competing French, British, and Native imperial claims to its geography.
The coureurs de ville understood and capitalized on Detroit’s status as a bustling locale where the constant comings and goings of Native groups, whose numbers far outstripped those of the French, occupied the majority of inhabitants’ time and energy and was the driving force in maintaining a sense of community. The coureurs de ville hailed from polyglot communities in Europe, the Laurentian Valley, and the Great Lakes. Early French members migrated from Atlantic cities such as La Rochelle and bustling and cosmopolitan seaports of western France, where multiple religions and ethnicities existed in close quarters. Once in North America, many of these migrants established themselves in Montreal, where multi-ethnic and multilingual communities of Algonquians and Iroquoians continued to evolve, and where many different spiritual beliefs also co-existed. In the Great Lakes, nations such as the Miami had been accustomed to living in communities composed of individuals hailing from a multitude of groups that included, among many other collectives, Wea, Piankashaw, Mascouten, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mesquakie (Fox), Kickapoo, Sauk, Ojibwe, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Wabanaki, Huron-Petun-Wendat, Illinois, and Ho Chunk (Winnebago).
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac had envisioned such a Native urban space for Detroit. He built the fort at Detroit in July of 1701 at the narrowest point of the river, where any waterborne vehicle could be seen coming west from Lake Erie or east from Lake St. Clair and Lake Huron. He called it Fort Pontchartrain, in honor of the Minister of the French Navy who had backed his plan for the fort’s establishment. Cadillac immediately set about encouraging mass migrations of numerous Native groups to the area. As a result, large settlements of Huron-Petun-Wendat, Odawa, and eventually Potawatomi, and smaller initial settlements of Wabanaki, Miami, Ojibwe, and Fox located on either side of the Detroit River, in close proximity to the French. Each community built its own settlement and homes and grew its own crops.
Cadillac insisted that by inviting several Native nations to settle at Detroit and conduct trade, he would control their movements, eventually convert them all to Catholicism, and impress them with the imperial range of the French colonial government. He added that the Indians would be “civilized” by building permanent dwellings in close proximity to those of the French. In their turn, by establishing a permanent presence, the French would demonstrate to the Indians that they were invested in maintaining good relations, while also preventing the British from making their way via Detroit to the upper country to trade.8 But instead of aiding a polyglot Native community to take root at Detroit, Cadillac’s efforts instead encouraged inter-tribal hostilities. These conflicts, which at times boiled over into open warfare, made it the most volatile of what historian Richard White has identified as the five zones of Indian-French interaction in the upper country.9 Also, Cadillac’s attempts to reproduce a continental French class system at Detroit, atop which he presumed to rule as a seigneur, meant he could never realize the full potential of a joint Native-European center. Cadillac’s vision of a city was ultimately mired in European models, ill-equipped for the contingencies of life and trade in the upper country. The coureurs de ville conversely envisioned a Detroit at which they would operate unimpeded by seigneurs and the strictures of European socioeconomic policies, while using imperial resources to further develop Detroit as a commercial hub for the upper country.
Cadillac paid only lip service to the essential function of Native-French cross-cultural relations in the development of Detroit and the upper country. As an agent of empire, he misunderstood the efforts required to establish an imperial presence at Detroit. He advocated marriage between French men and Native women, but later abandoned this belief. He encouraged settlement of as many Native nations as possible in order to build up trade, but he seemed unwilling or unable to effectively understand and manage the complex and at times strained relations of these groups. He failed to understand—perhaps because he lacked any familial ties beyond his wife and children—that realizing commercial and political success would not come by making use of Detroit’s geographical benefits alone. French-Native kinship networks allowed the coureurs de ville to concentrate power at Detroit while also extending their influence and Detroit’s status outwards. Cadillac talked the metaphoric language of Native-European interaction, but his actions often contradicted his words.10
One such glaring disconnect occurred soon after the arrival of Cadillac’s wife. When Madame Cadillac and the wife of Cadillac’s second-in-command Alphonse Tonty made the decision to follow their husbands to Detroit in the fall of 1701, local Native groups were pleased at the symbolic importance of this action. French wives rarely accompanied their husbands to posts in the upper country, so their presence was evidence that the French intended to put down roots in the area.11 Cadillac remarked in his correspondence that the arrival of his wife and Madame Tonty had caused great celebration both among local Iroquois and the Algonquian groups allied to the French. According to Cadillac, the Iroquois saw the arrival of French women of superior rank as the ultimate proof that the peace that had been negotiated in 1701 by the French was sincere.12
But later that year, Madame Tonty gave birth to a child that died for lack of a wet nurse. As a member of the nobility, this mother seemed unwilling or unable to nurse her own child, nor could she bring herself to request this service from a Native woman, despite the fact that the Native villages adjoining the fort at Detroit would have provided a number of wet nurses for hire. By all appearances, she sacrificed her child to the rigid concepts of gentility and class that the Cadillacs and Tontys had carried with them from Quebec and France, and in so doing, refused to build familial networks with local Native nations. Cadillac wrote of the event to authorities in Quebec as the unfortunate but inevitable result of a lack of French families at Detroit, insisting: “It is not possible that our families could live in a place inhabited by natives only. Their distress would be extreme, for they would be without any relief, as happened to Madame Tonty, who saw her infant die for want of milk, which she had not anticipated.”13 Cadillac feared that his own wife, who was about to give birth, would lose their child for the same reason, and urged his superiors to send wet nurses and French families within a year.
French authorities at Montreal and Versailles were similarly blind to the possibilities of a frontier city. The state grappled with provisioning Detroit as either a center for trade in the pays d’en haut, or as the spoke emanating from another hub. Three months after Detroit’s formal establishment as a French post, the directors of the Compagnie de Colonie complained to Versailles of the steep expenses they were incurring in underwriting the fort. They suggested that other posts be established with the Miami on the Ouabache (Wabash) River, at the Ouisconsing (Wisconsin), and among the Sioux in order to prevent Frenchmen and Indians from going to trade with the English at Carolina and on the lower Mississippi. Detroit could then act as an entrepôt to which the Indians from all of these posts would carry furs.14 A few years later, however, the French imperial apparatus was considering relegating Detroit to the periphery through the establishment of a fort at Niagara that would act as a center for the trade at Detroit.15
For the first half of the eighteenth century, angry and anxious French imperial officials expressed constant concern that Detroit was failing as a thriving settlement and that the small number of inhabitants threatened the stability of a French presence. The military advisor to the Governor General of New France believed that Detroit’s establishment was the root cause of all the wars in the upper country, as this had created deep divisions within French and Native communities and had attracted a stampede of pernicious Frenchmen who conducted themselves with impunity.16 The French colonial government’s lack of faith in the profitability of Detroit led it to scrimp on its support of the fort. As early as 1710, Governor General Vaudreuil had favored withdrawing the garrison, a move he calculated would effectively lead to the abandonment of Detroit as a settlement. He offered an alternative plan for those residents who would be forced to leave once military protection was no longer available. They could be reestablished in Louisiana or on the Wabash and assist in efforts to work the recently discovered mines at the latter location.17 Despite Vaudreuil’s actions, the settlement of Detroit continued. Indeed, the coureurs de ville traveled to the Wabash and Louisiana not to work the mines for the French state, but to conduct business, establish partnerships, and further entrench Detroit’s status as a center of trade.
Whereas colonial officials in Montreal decried Detroit’s small and variable population and the seeming inability of its residents to support themselves and remain rooted according to a primarily agrarian model, the coureurs de ville recognized that Detroit’s status as city was determined by the mobility of its Native population. In effect, Detroit held a unique status as a center of indigenous urbanity. By the mid-eighteenth century, Detroit had become “a thoroughfare between north and south for Indians” and throughout the century, bands of various Native nations “were seen there, going and coming, the year round.”18 This meant that savvy traders followed Indians to their winter hunting grounds, rather than wait at Detroit to conduct business. At other times of the year, the coureurs de ville occupied homes inside the walls of the French fort on a system of streets, where they conducted trade. Those among the French who wished to engage in agricultural activity received lands outside the walls of the fort.
The sheer number of Native nations turned Detroit into both a political center, where agents of government, both European and Native, met to discuss and institute policy, and a commercial center, where European and Native goods arrived to grease the wheels of diplomacy. The coureurs de ville understood the inter-relatedness of these two trajectories, allowing them to control the flow of merchandise by parlaying ties of family into commercial opportunities, both in Native communities and as representatives of European imperial policy. This larger settlement composed of multiple self-sufficient and multi-ethnic communities created an emergent culture that was unique to Detroit, and a product of Cadillac’s initial efforts to create a city. They were adept at capitalizing on Detroit’s importance in multiple visions of urban space.
Other more enduring models of family took root at Detroit and filled the vacuum left by the state’s ineffectual or illusory concepts of cross-cultural kinship, while Cadillac and Tonty were slowly losing the trust of imperial authorities and local residents, both French and Native. These other familial models of the coureurs de ville crossed and recreated French and Native class boundaries, often by incorporating women of elite Native kin groups. They also spanned considerable geographical distances. One such family was that of Pierre Roy and Marguerite Ouabankikoué. Roy worked for the Jesuits as an engagé, or indentured servant, from the age of fifteen in the upper country in the last decade of the seventeenth century. In 1703 at Detroit, he married Marguerite, who was a member of the family of, and probably sister to, the influential Miami leader Wisekaukautshe, known to the French as Piedfroid, (Cold Foot,) and leader of the powerful Atchatchakangouen or Grue, (Crane) band.19
Pierre was from a large family and the son of a man, also named Pierre, who had amassed land and prestige in LaPrairie, a settlement just outside of Montreal that neighbored the Mohawk settlement of Kahnawake. Like his son, the senior Pierre had begun life in New France as an indentured servant. He had immigrated to Montreal from France, and married Catherine Ducharme, a fille du roi. or woman sponsored by the state and sent to help populate New France.20 Along with his significant land holdings, the senior Pierre became a pivotal player in the fur trade, together with several of his sons who became voyageurs, and with other merchants and officers based in Montreal. Through these connections, he acquired two young girl captives from the French and Native raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704.21 Pierre and Catherine were also able to place their eldest daughter, at the age of fifteen, in the prestigious convent, the Congregation of Notre-Dame in Montreal.22
Pierre Roy Jr. and his Miami wife Marguerite had children at Detroit and promptly began networking with other métis families. French members of the coureurs de ville ranged in socioeconomic class from engagés and voyageurs to merchants, and in some cases, decorated officers who occupied the position of nobility in New France.23 Native members hailed from the families of chiefs, whom Europeans sought out as the pivotal decision makers in intercultural negotiations. Pierre and Marguerite’s children had merchants and members of elite Native networks as godparents. One such person was Isabelle Couc, a métis woman who had family ties among the Algonquin and the Iroquois, and who would later be known to the English she lived among as Madame Montour.24
In the first two decades of settlement at Detroit, two of the junior Pierre Roy’s brothers came from LaPrairie to Detroit and stayed in the area for several years before continuing west. François established a trading partnership with Pierre at the Miami post of Kekionga.25 Their brother Étienne moved through Detroit as well, and headed west and then south to Louisiana, settling on Bienville’s land and acquiring capital through his marital connections to the powerful Neveu and Chauvin families there.26 Étienne traded north to Kekionga, and his brother François ran canoes of trade goods between Kekionga and Montreal, passing through Detroit.27 Two of Marguerite’s Miami kinswomen married into prominent French families at Kekionga and Kaskaskia. Such alliances had clear benefits for trade and imperial politics, so it was not surprising that at the birth of the son of one of these women at Kaskaskia, the director of Company of the Indies stood as godfather.28 These alliances formed a mobile network with an urbanized Detroit at its center, which stretched west to Kekionga, Ouiatenon, Vincennes, and the Illinois country and east to Montreal.
In May of 1728, Marie Magdelene, one of Pierre Roy and Marguerite Ouabankikoué’s daughters, married Pierre Chesne dit LaButte at the Miami post at Kekionga.29 The commandant at the Miami post, Nicolas-Joseph Noyelles de Fleurimont, signed the marriage record as one of many witnesses. The marriage took place one day after Noyelles de Fleurimont drew up papers at the Miami post to establish a partnership with Pierre and François Roy to control trade at that location.30 Following in such quick succession, the timing of the two events illustrates the integral relationship between matters of trade and matters of family. It is easy to imagine that wedding festivities held the day after the conduct of business cemented the partnership in good feelings and intentions. The marriage was a very advantageous match for LaButte. He also had at least one brother, Charles, who had already established himself in trade at Detroit during the first decade of the eighteenth century. By virtue of his family connections, Pierre LaButte would eventually become official interpreter for the Odawa at Detroit and play a pivotal role in talks and negotiations between the Odawa leader Pontiac and British imperial agents during Pontiac’s siege of the fort in 1763.
In short order, other Detroit families had married into the Chesne/LaButte and Roy network of coureurs de ville. Many of these members acquired trade connections to Kekionga through these marriages, including the Godefroy, Cuillerier dit Beaubien and Gouin families who would, as the century wore on, play greater roles in imperial efforts launched from Detroit into Miami territory. Members of the Roy and Godefroy families, for example, became Miami chiefs who wielded a great deal of political influence in French and later British efforts to maintain good relations with the Miami groups in the west. By mid-century, the lineages were tightly intertwined through marriage and godparentage and the fur trade they controlled was generating record profits for merchants and their families at Detroit.
French and British official correspondence consistently touted the unique benefits of Detroit’s geography. In the late 1740s, New France’s governor stressed Detroit’s strategic importance: “It is to (this) post that we must cling. If there were once a thousand farmer inhabitants in that region, it would feed and defend all the others. In all the whole interior of Canada, it is the fittest site for a city where all the commerce of the lakes would center, and which . . . would overawe all the Indians of the continent. To see its position on the map is enough to perceive its usefulness.”31 Just a decade later, as the British were contemplating the limits of their newly won colony of Canada, Colonel John Bradstreet had dreams of becoming governor at Detroit and controlling the vast North American interior. In a letter to his superiors in London, he described Detroit’s benefits: “This will secure the Frontier of our colonies, give us the whole of the Indian Trade in safety, effectually put a stop to the great and dangerous French plan of surrounding us with Inland Colonies and enable us to execute that Plan ourselves. . . .”32 Detroit’s location was its primary resource. Looked at through French and British eyes, it would become the launching point for an imperial apparatus that would, it was hoped again and again, organize the trade with western Indian nations, while regulating and controlling the people who operated it.
Detroit’s population had grown from 270 French men and women in 1707 to 483 in 1750. By 1765, the number would increase to over 900 and was augmented by English, Irish, and Scots. In that same year, estimates of the number of local Native individuals put the number at over 2,000, meaning half of Detroit’s population was Native. There were still settlements of Odawa and Huron, although the Huron had moved across the river from the French fort (in what is today Windsor, Ontario, Canada), and the Odawa had also relocated. French settlement had spread east and west outside the walls of the fort on either side. These plots had limited frontage on the water, in order for multiple landholders to have access to the river, but extended back for several miles. These ribbon farms resembled those established in the Laurentian Valley. With the large influx of new arrivals at mid-century, colonial officials thought it necessary to enlarge and further strengthen the fort. Growth outside of the walls of the fort had also greatly increased, especially due to the brisk deeding of land in the 1730s, encouraged by Governor General Beauharnois in order to make the settlement at Detroit self-sufficient in supplying its own needs for grain. Detroit possessed a sufficient number of people from various socioeconomic ranks to warrant a brisk trade in various and diverse consumer goods.33
Two main entrepôts, Detroit and Michilimackinac, served as interior headquarters and transshipment points for forts further west. These and other factors provided ideal circumstances for the métis family networks to consolidate their status as the richest inhabitants in Detroit. Between 1749 and 1750, a large wave of immigrants from the Laurentian Valley arrived at Detroit, settling across the river from the fort and next to the Huron-Petun community. These immigrants were mostly farmers, and they created a new French suburb with its own Jesuit-led church. Their arrival provided, at least initially, a more sedentary class of people who added a thick layer of agriculturalists to the class system that was solidifying at Detroit. With more farmers in the area, Detroit became a major supplier of agricultural produce for the western posts, which augmented its position as a center of trade.
In 1754, seven hundred canoes, a record number, came from Montreal, carrying merchandise to Detroit and returning to Montreal with furs from the interior. The largest concentration of Native Americans in the Great Lakes basin could be found at Detroit.34 In that year the French and Indian War had broken out between the French and British in North America, and there had been a steady increase in traffic of people and goods as skirmishes broke out further west in the few years before the war. The French had increased the size of the fort in 1752 in order to accommodate this burgeoning population, building a new and larger storehouse and bakery. In order to create more space within the stockaded fort, however, it was necessary to move the wooden walls, which in turn compromised the fort’s security and forced further changes for purposes of defense. The extended settlement boasted several buildings, including houses for the commandant and priest, guardhouse, barracks, church, cemetery, and king’s garden.35 The coureurs de ville profited by supplying the new arrivals and by absorbing them and their resources into existing family networks.36
Figure 4.2. The community at the Detroit River. Map by Craig Marrero.
One of the other mechanisms by which the coureurs de ville families achieved outstanding wealth was through their use of slaves. Because of their western kinship connections, members of the family networks acquired and traded a large number of Native slaves from other tribes west and south of Kekionga. Indeed, the largest concentration of slaves in the upper country was at Detroit. Detroit, together with Montreal, Quebec, and Trois-Rivières, three cities that far surpassed it in terms of size and population, held almost 80 percent of the population of slaves in New France.37 French historian Marcel Trudel also attributes this to the fact that Detroit had a permanent priest, unlike other posts in the west. The state required that slaves be baptized, which necessitated their movements through locations that provided priests for this purpose.38 Pierre LaButte, who had married into the métis network, was the largest slaveholder at Detroit at mid-century. With the help of his slaves, LaButte cultivated over eighty-five acres of land, five times greater than the average planted by non-slaveholders.39
With unprecedented wealth came cultural florescence. In 1754, Simple Bocquet, the priest at Detroit, began using the words “bourgeois” and “négociant” in church records to refer to LaButte and other generous members of the coureurs de ville. Use of the term négociant signaled Detroit’s firmly entrenched status as a hub controlling trade in the west. The eighteenth-century négociant was a wholesaler who was wealthier than the merchants and many nobles in the colony. Négociants worked at presenting themselves as nobility, as closely as possible, by obtaining commissions as officers in the militia. They also styled themselves as “metropolitan” and correspondingly evinced a “mode parisienne” that was meant to mimic the manners of French high society.40 Members of the coureurs de ville lineages used their wealth to buy various cultural markers that displayed their power. Pierre LaButte made many contributions to the church at Detroit, at one time giving one thousand French livres in goods. This sum was equal to six to ten years of salary for a member of the laboring class, and one year’s salary for military captains in the upper country.41
In 1755, Father Bocquet erected a memorial to a deceased member of his religious order. The priest had been killed by an Odawa man at Detroit half a century before, and his remains had been moved and reburied once when the original church had been rebuilt. But the second reburial in 1755 had a more pivotal significance to the community. A new and larger church had been recently built, likely funded entirely by coureurs de ville like Pierre LaButte, and an addition was added to house the remains of the slain priest. Father Bocquet noted in the church records that the deceased priest would have “a final resting place in keeping with his merits and with the Miracles that several persons worthy of belief have reported to us as having occurred through his intercession in favor of the whole parish.”42 With its own venerated and martyred priest performing miracles for leading members of the community, Detroit had developed a distinct spiritual identity that legitimized and was legitimized by its economic vitality. By the time the British had gained control of Canada, the métis family networks had fully entrenched themselves as Detroit’s wealthiest citizens. They lacked the state-sanctioned credentials that accorded the officers and the fort commandant the highest position on the socioeconomic scale in New France. Their role as power brokers in social and economic relations with Native groups, however, gave them local influence and massive wealth that outstripped that of the officers.43
In September of 1761, Sir William Johnson, British Superintendent of Northern Indian Affairs, traveled from his home in New York to Detroit for a pivotal meeting with the Indian nations of Detroit and further west. Johnson was intent on investigating the rumors of an impending uprising of western Native groups against the British and dispelling any misgivings the western Indians had about the new British imperial dominance. Johnson sent a request via wampum belts to Detroit to convene a grand council at the fort, and from there expected the belts to be circulated west to other nations. During his stay at Detroit, troops and provisions were organized and sent west from Detroit to the posts at Michilimackinac, Kekionga and Ouiatenon, while Indians from the west came east to Detroit in such large numbers that Johnson was forced to hold the official council outside. Johnson reassured the two largest Native groups at Detroit, the Odawa and Huron-Petun, of British friendship.
Johnson called constantly upon Pierre LaButte and Jacques DesButtes dit St. Martin, official interpreters of the Odawa and the Huron-Petun, to speak to and hear from those local groups. Attesting to their elite status as both interpreters and leading merchants, LaButte and St. Martin were invited on several occasions to dine with Johnson, together with British officers and the commandant at Detroit. Both men were paid handsomely by Johnson for their service as interpreters. Johnson also hosted several balls for the city’s well-heeled citizens that lasted through the night until seven the next morning. At one such occasion, he led Angelique Cuillerier in the first dance of the evening. Angelique was the daughter of Antoine Cuillerier dit Beaubien, Detroit’s second largest slaveholder, wealthy merchant, and pivotal member of the extensive coureurs de ville family network. Johnson was so taken with her, he promised her he would write her after he returned home.44
While at Detroit, Johnson had discovered that wampum belts advocating war against the British had circulated to Detroit. Johnson was able to confront the Seneca messengers who had sent them and to stop the belts from traveling any further. The same trade networks that extended west from Detroit could simultaneously be the means of spreading dissension and seriously undermining the British presence there. Because of the accessibility of Detroit by water routes leading west from Fort Pitt, Montreal, and Albany, “more business was transacted in Detroit than in any other area in the five years following 1760.”45 Detroit also became the headquarters for all the British army garrisons in the upper country. Traders from Pennsylvania and New York now had an opportunity to compete with the French traders in Detroit. But while British traders waited for their Indian customers to return from their winter hunting grounds in early spring to conduct business, members of the coureurs de ville traveled to or with Native groups to their hunting grounds and traded on the spot. As a result, the French consistently out-produced their English counterparts. British political control could not guarantee economic control because of the pre-existing family networks and the power of the coureurs de ville.
Efforts by British imperial agents to control the movements of the coureurs proved unsuccessful. James Sterling, an Irishman who had served with the British army in the French and Indian War, would prove an exception to this general state of affairs. Sterling came to Detroit in 1761 from a successful trading venture at Niagara, bringing the financial backing of his extensive business contacts in Oswego, Schenectady, and Niagara with him. Sterling’s accounts and letters provide a window into British efforts to assert economic claims to their newly won territories, while also highlighting the essential role local bourgeois coureurs de ville families with ties to the west continued to play in such efforts of the state.
Although Sterling had his own trade network in place that had allowed him considerable success in the east, he spent his first few years at Detroit attempting to gauge the tastes of his French and Native clientele. Sterling was well aware that his stiffest competition was with the coureurs de ville and their firmly established métis family networks. Despite British imperial and political control both before and after Pontiac’s Rebellion, members of the networks maintained their advantage in the fur trade, which regulated the movement of virtually every other product and in which fur itself was the dominant currency. British control of local French and Native populations was tenuous at best and required the full cooperation of these groups.
Sterling had to pay dearly for the basics that French métis families already possessed, a fact that may account for the consistent tone of contempt with which he referred to the French in his letters. At one point, he fumed at having to await the arrival of clerks from Oswego, whom he planned to send to the Miami post at Kekionga to fetch goods, because, he told his suppliers: “it is rare to get a Frenchman here that can be depended on or entrusted with goods.”46 Although he could speak and write French, Sterling was forced to budget for an Indian language interpreter, paying thirty pounds a year to a Mohawk man who spoke English, French, and other Indian languages.47 Sterling demanded an additional allowance per day for “living in exile.”48 Some of the extra monies were put toward clothing because, Sterling complained, he was “obliged to support in appearance the empty name of what the French call un gros marchand which has very much effect with the sort of cattle I have to deal with.”49 Sterling was not the only one who erroneously believed he was catering to the base tastes of the local French. On a few occasions, the wife of one of his largest trading partners back east sent down some of her own old clothes to sell at Detroit. Sterling reported back each time that most of the clothes could not be sold because they were perceived as unfashionable.
Keeping up appearances became even more costly when Sterling asked his partners back east for funds to buy a furnished house inside the fort that was located on a desirable street for trade. When purchasing the house proved too expensive, Sterling rented instead, the same house that had been previously rented by British Indian agent George Croghan. Both men thought the rental rate was exorbitant, but felt compelled to comply. The house was owned by a member of one of the coureurs de ville family networks living temporarily in Montreal, and was managed locally by Madame DesRuisseaux, a member of the powerful Godefroi family. It appears that although Sterling began to dress the part of the powerful merchant, his own aesthetic proclivities differed. Madame DesRuisseaux was surprised and angered when she discovered that Sterling had converted a bedroom into a storeroom and had mounted shelves on a wall, driving nails through an expensive tapestry.50 DesRuisseaux reported the damage to the owner, who sent word that he intended to come back to Detroit to occupy the house and that Sterling should cease making any further damages.
James Sterling’s fortunes and the anti-French tone of his letters shifted dramatically when he married a member of the local métis family network in 1765. This woman, Angelique Cuillerier, the niece of the last French commandant at Detroit, was the same person with whom William Johnson had become enamored during his visit four years before. In a letter to one of his trading partners, Sterling effusively described his new wife in terms of the trade advantages she and her family could provide:
She is a very prudent woman and a fine scholar; she has been raised to trade from her infancy and is generally allowed to be the best interpreter of the different Indian languages at this place. Her family is in great esteem amongst the Indians, so much that her father was suspected to have been chosen by the Indians to command here in case they had succeeded, which only arose from his being more in favor with them than the rest of the inhabitants. He has offered me to go with goods to some of the posts in case I should have more than I can dispose of here. He is pretty rich; he has given me with his daughter to the value of near a thousand pounds in houses, money, and peltry. He has already given me possession of the houses in the fort, has paid part of the money and peltry and is to pay the remainder in one or two years, as I may think proper to demand it. The Indians flock here daily since our marriage and lament our not having Indian goods, as they would trade nowhere else but here, if we could supply them. We shall carry on trade much better and with a great deal less expense than formerly, my wife serving as interpreter and she and I myself as clerks which I would much rather do than pay dear and be under obligations besides.51
Through his marriage, Sterling eliminated the costs of an interpreter, the rent on his house in the fort, the need to hire agents from the east to transport his goods west to the Miami, and the expense incurred in maintaining patronage networks. He had also gained a trade partner who was intimately knowledgeable with the local economy. Most importantly, the marriage acted as an immediate signal of Sterling’s credibility to Native groups, who promised him exclusive trading privileges as soon as he could provide them with goods. Sterling had been transformed from outsider to insider by being absorbed into the métis family network, and he could therefore travel west to trade in relative safety.
The crucial means of entrance to this world was through marriage to Angelique, just as it had been for Pierre Roy through marriage to Marguerite Ouabankikoué, and for their son-in-law Pierre LaButte through marriage to their daughter Marie Magdelene Roy. Angelique, Marguerite. and Magdelene were part of the same métis network of coureurs de ville that stretched from Detroit across time and the eighteenth-century landscape. The women of the coureurs de ville freely crossed class boundaries and exhibited essential traits and practices of both European and Native groups that insured their families’ economic survival at Detroit. James Sterling grew uneasy with the freedom with which his wife moved in the extended orbit of Detroit and its hinterlands. Writing to his eastern partner John Porteus on the subject of an interpreter he promised to send, Sterling assured Porteus that he could spare the man in question since “Mrs. Sterling will answer the end of an interpreter, tho’ not to ride after the Indians which is now the mode here.”52 Sterling’s statement reflects his view that it was not acceptable for the wife of an affluent British trader to travel to Native communities in order to conduct trade. His sentiments reflected those of the colonial British government, which became increasingly alarmed at their inability to control the French at Detroit.
It was the continued mobility of the coureurs de ville lineages that British imperial agents perceived as an increasing threat. In 1767, George Trumbull, the commander of Detroit, wrote to his superiors about the practice of French families selling their houses inside the fort to British newcomers. He explained that containing the French within the walls of the fort would prove beneficial in two ways: keeping them close would provide the British with a good source of intelligence about matters regarding the Indians, and, if fire broke out in the fort, it was better to sacrifice the French than the English.53 In 1770, British commandant at Detroit James Stevenson wrote to William Johnson, expressing his concern with the local French families, whom he described as having “slip’d away to the Miamis under a pretence to trade,” but who were actually, according to Stevenson “prevailing on the Indians to grant them lands [since] they propose to make a settlement there.” Stevenson ordered them to quit their movements west because of his fear that “our back settlements will feel the effects of it whenever we have a war with France.”54 At this moment of mounting tension between colonists and Native groups in the west, Stevenson viewed the traditional movement of the French coureurs de bois along the two hundred-mile route to and from Kekionga as a threat, rather than a boon to British interests. Indeed, it was the coureurs de ville with links between Detroit and the Miami territories who would mobilize in the interest of their trade and families against the British at Kekionga, and Forts Ouiatenon and Vincennes during the American Revolution.
Mobility was imperative to the conduct of good trade, and the French, who had developed shared kin networks between and within Native communities that stretched west from Detroit, continued to use these connections to insure safe passage to and from Detroit. The coureurs de ville maintained networks that could be reinvigorated on a wide scale at any time, just as easily as they could cling closely to one family or a single post or place. Irish, Scottish, and English merchants and soldiers who married into these families found themselves part of these lineages that wove in and out of the imperial apparatus. Detroit’s development was shaped by and in turn shaped these networks, providing state resources that allowed them to flourish, and, paradoxically, to subvert, handicap, and sometimes paralyze the very imperial projects that backed them in the first place. The networks allowed the coureurs de ville to acquire wealth and resources, and to become pivotal players in economic development.
Detroit’s urbanity—the shaping of a unique local culture complete with complex economic, political and spiritual dimensions that played themselves out in matters of gender, race, and class—was set in motion before the eighteenth century. At mid-century, Detroit fully owned its status as the Montreal of the West. It had become a city dominated by the fur trade which required the free flow of resources and good relations between Europeans and Native Americans. Through their commercial activities, the coureurs de ville were continuously reinvigorating these good relations and benefitting from the brisk trade that resulted. The growth and diversification of the citizenry of Detroit, together with the explosion of agricultural activity, the continued settlement outside the walls of the fort, and the constant threat of colonial war that made relations with Native groups even more essential, all contributed to make the coureurs de ville wealthy and influential. They in turn used their wealth to bring larger numbers of luxury items and consumer goods into Detroit, as well as property in the form of slaves from places farther west.
In the early eighteenth century, the French imperial effort had been to ensure that goods and furs flowed between Montreal and certain carefully maintained and strategic posts in the pays d’en haut. The state wished to maintain Montreal’s status as the spoke at the center of the imperial wheel that radiated westward into the vast territory controlled by Native nations. Places like Detroit were therefore meant to remain part of a provisioning hinterland that bolstered Montreal and Quebec. But, starting at the end of the second decade of the eighteenth century, the coureurs de ville networks actively thwarted these plans, launching their own careers as they transformed Detroit from peripheral zone to frontier city. Their commercial ventures linked Native communities and French forts across the upper country to Detroit, establishing it as the point through which all goods flowed and the place at which the value of these resources was determined. Antoine Cadillac and other imperial officials may have envisioned Detroit as a city, but they consistently undermined their own efforts. The coureurs de ville, however, were the ones who instituted a viable model for Detroit as an urban center.
Detroit was a center, a meeting place for political negotiation and the rituals of diplomacy, a spiritual way station through which enslaved individuals received the necessary rite of baptism that determined their viability as items of trade, and at mid-century, an agrarian breadbasket that allowed unprecedented growth in population. Its merchants and wholesalers, members of the coureurs de ville, provided the consumer goods and items that supplied forts and settlements further west. They acted as arbiters of urbanity by effectively exporting their methods of trade and aesthetic proclivities from Detroit.
The common thread throughout this period was the plethora of opportunities presented by movement between Detroit and its western hinterland at the Miami posts. Detroit was defined by the ease with which one could travel through it, either east or west. It was a space of concentrated activity, made important by the opportunities it presented for economic and spiritual development. It was a political hot point in imperial agendas because of the groups that moved through it and could threaten it. It was both a center and a hinterland. Its very name emphasized its status as a center of mobility: a political, economic and spiritual midpoint in European and Native imperial agendas.
