4
Inland Empires
DRIVEN BY A DESIRE to monopolize trade with the Dutch and the French, the Iroquois fought the so-called Beaver Wars to control access to both the fur and the markets for it. By the end of the 1650s, however, war had severely disrupted the very trade for which it was being fought. Indian trade with the Dutch slowed, and that with the French came virtually to a halt. Into this climate of counterproductive violence stepped two French coureurs de bois—literally “forest runners”—Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1636–1710) and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers (1618–1696).
A teenager when he arrived in New France, Radisson was captured by Iroquois in 1652, at the height of the Beaver Wars, but instead of suffering torture and death, he was adopted into the tribe. This was not an unusual outcome in the instance of a young captive. The Iroquois concept of conquest was almost precisely the inverse of the European paradigm. Whereas the European conqueror invaded an area and occupied it, displacing, killing, or subjugating its original inhabitants, the Iroquois absorbed many of those they conquered. Radisson learned the woodcraft, language, and lifeways of his adoptive tribe, but while he was young enough (as the Indians judged) to merit adoption, he was old enough (in terms of his own sense of self) to stop short of fully relinquishing his Euro-American identity. Seeing a chance to escape, he took it, only to be recaptured. His former hosts did not welcome him back as the prodigal son but punished him with harsh torture. He survived, however, and, in all, lived a little more than two years with the Indians before he made good a second escape attempt, fleeing to Trois-Rivières, where he moved in with his sister and her husband, Groseilliers.
The older man had been a trader in the Jesuit Huron missionary towns during the 1640s, the towns that had now largely been abandoned under the Iroquois onslaught. During the worst of the Beaver Wars, he took off for what was then the Far Northwest, in search of fur-trading country as yet untouched by Iroquois depredation. Between 1654 and 1656, Groseilliers probed present-day northern Ontario, becoming one of the first Euro-Americans to lay eyes on Lake Superior. Here, Cree Indians told him of abundant beaver peltries north and west of this great inland sea, in the region of Hudson Bay. He did not venture on, however, but instead returned to Trois-Rivières. Then, in 1658 or 1659, he tapped young Radisson to accompany him to Lake Superior. Yet again, the Cree spoke of the great wealth of beaver in the region. The pair erected a trading post at Chequamegon Bay on Lake Superior, around which gathered members of several tribes, all eager to trade their beaver pelts.
Suddenly, the beaver trade was not only reborn but expanded, and with this expansion came a blossoming in the West of a new kind of relationship between the French and the Indians. Although traders had always outnumbered missionaries in the Jesuit Huron mission towns, life was centered nonetheless on the missions, and the Indians were never permitted to forget that the Black Robes would not rest until they had converted them to their religion. True, Father René Menard, the first missionary in the Northwest, would visit Chequamegon Bay in 1661, about three years after the trading post had begun operations, but it would be 1665 before Father Claude Allouez built a mission house at the southwest end of the bay. Effectively, therefore, the Chequamegon Bay community was entirely or mostly secular for its first seven years of existence, and this made all the difference. Instead of a mission culture colored by trade, a rich Euro-Native microcivilization developed, which nurtured a cultural attitude and orientation that would strongly flavor French-Indian relations and make them very different from those that had developed between the Indians and the Dutch and that would develop between the Indians and the English.
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Just about everyone who writes about the French and Indian Wars—that is, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars between the French and French-allied Indians on the one side and the English and their (significantly fewer) Indian allies on the other—describes how the French earned the friendship of more Indians than the English did because the French freely mixed with the Indians, extensively intermarrying with them, whereas the English treated them as racial inferiors, seemingly missing no opportunity to demean and otherwise give offense.
There is some truth to this view, thanks in no small part to what Groseilliers and Radisson started in the Far Northwest, but there is also much that is misleading. The civilization that emerged out of the long encounter between Euro-Americans and Native Americans was too complex to be defined simply by how one group of Euro-Americans related to Indians versus how another group did. As citizens of a nation long influenced by race and racial politics, we are quick to assume that racism dominated “white-red” relations from October 12, 1492, on. That is, while we acknowledge the obvious fact that the warring nations of Europe—all populated by “whites”—used North America as an extension of the Old World battlefield throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we also believe that even as English colonist fought French colonist, they both ultimately thought of themselves as “white” people menaced in common by “red.”
This interpretation of history is both anachronistic and simplistic. It is anachronistic (as just suggested) because it is founded on our own assumptions about racial perception and identification rather than on the beliefs and behavior actually manifested in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America. It is simplistic because it does not adequately account for all the motives and all the players of that same time and place.
Consider. Groseilliers and Radisson were fabulously successful. They returned to Trois-Rivières from Chequamegon Bay in 1659 with nearly a hundred canoes laden with thousands of pelts, gunwales scant inches above the waterline. If the powers that be in Trois-Rivières had been motivated chiefly by a desire for friendship and alliance with the Indians, the pair would have been feted on their return. Or if those same powers had been motivated chiefly by a desire to revive—and spectacularly at that—the dormant and sorely missed beaver trade, Groseilliers and Radisson would have been embraced as saviors of New France.
Instead, they were jailed and fined, their furs confiscated. Their crime was having failed to obtain a royal license to trade fur before they set out on their adventure.
Was this rude welcome an act of misplaced bureaucratic zeal or, perhaps, a product of the eternal rapacity of revenue agent and taxman? No. It was more than this, and what it was proves that the motives driving civilization in North America during the mid-seventeenth century were complicated.
Indian alliance was wanted. Trade was wanted. The independence Groseilliers and Radisson had demonstrated by their unlicensed trading in the Far Northwest was, however, not only unwanted, but feared.
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Because he was born on a Sunday, September 5, 1638, Louis XIV would be known as the “Sun King.” After his father died when he was only four, the Sun King reigned in the shadow of his regent, Jules Cardinal Mazarin (1602–61), whose acute focus on Europe left very little room for concern about New France. When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis XIV emerged from eclipse and, among many other things, discovered that he had a North American colony and took an interest in it. Unlike his father—or, more accurately, unlike his father’s powerful minister Cardinal Richelieu—the Sun King saw in New France more than a source of quick profit. He saw in it the makings of a genuine world empire. This, he believed, meant treating it as something more substantial than a hunting ground. In fact, the king believed that coureurs de bois—those “forest runners”—were inimical to empire and quite probably destructive to civilization itself. English objections to intermarriage between white and Indian were founded on a combination of racial, cultural, and religious concepts. The French entertained no such objections, but Louis XIV nevertheless believed that any lure to life in the forest, especially a peripatetic life out there, was destructive to the roots of the empire he intended to build. He wanted to populate New France with yeoman farmers, not trappers and traders.
Radisson and Grosseilliers knew nothing of this when, chastened by their harsh homecoming, they proposed to the king’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert—a man of such icily intellectual temperament that Madame de Sévigné, indefatigably acerbic chronicler of court life, dubbed him “Le Nord,” as in the Frozen North—a scheme to create a company to effectively monopolize the northern fur trade. To sweeten the proposal (for they unwittingly assumed that they were appealing to a man whose imagination was stocked with the customarily grandiose visions of limitless wealth), they also pledged to seek out the Northwest Passage, which (they said) would become an exclusively French route for the transportation of fur directly to Asia. In Japan and China, they explained, a little fur would buy a lot of spices.
The parsimonious Colbert and his often extravagant king were rarely of one mind, but they were agreed on this. Neither was interested in sending French subjects on such errands. As if in response to the proposal, the royal court instantly approved a plan by Jean Talon, comte d’Orsainville (1626–94), the intendant (colonial administrator) of New France, to import at least five hundred Frenchwomen from the mother country. Talon called them filles du roi, the king’s daughters, but despite the regal name, they were all commoners, poor girls mostly, many orphaned (or, at least, having only a single living parent), and their enticement to journey to New France was the costs of transport plus a royal dowry of fifty livres each and even more if a girl married an army officer. Between 1663 and 1673, as many as nine hundred filles du roi emigrated (nobody knows the precise number), of whom 737 were married in New France. Talon’s objective was simply to increase the population of New France as quickly as possible. The king, however, hoped not merely to populate the colony but to entice young “runners” like Radisson to settle down and till the earth—though he did authorize a handsome bounty for all men who sired large families in New France. Women and money, those were the honey. The vinegar? Louis urged his archbishop to excommunicate any men who abandoned their farms without the government’s permission.
That New France enjoyed a monopoly on the Canadian fur trade, and that the continuance of this monopoly required pushing ever farther northwest to fresh peltries, as Radisson and Groseilliers had done, meant virtually nothing to the king and his finance minister. The business did not fit their concept of empire, which was a European concept that had nothing to do with a blend of Indian and Euro-American identities motivated by commercial ends. For their part, Radisson and Groseilliers knew when a horse was just too dead to respond to further beating. Still, this did not mean they gave up. Life in the far wilderness had taught them what it had taught others of their kind. Being “French” was no more important than being “Indian” or “white”—or English. Look around. This was not the Old World but the New, a world not yet made but very much in the making, and Radisson and Groseilliers were men on the make.
They journeyed down from New France to New England, where they met with a group of investors in Boston. These Bostonians were as excited by the prospect of penetrating into new peltries as the French court had been indifferent. The so-called romantic historians of the nineteenth century, whose dean was Francis Parkman (1823–93), saw in this an English patriotism that, in reality, almost certainly played no role in the Bostonians’ enthusiasm. They were interested less in extending the English empire than in building one of their own, and that meant finding profitable territory free from what had already been carved up and apportioned by royal charters, letters patent, and proprietorships. Nevertheless, investors from the mother country as well as the royal court itself would have to get involved, and the Bostonians, agreeing on the merits of what the Frenchmen proposed, took ship with the men for England to raise money for an expedition.
That is how two French coureurs des bois came to serve as seconds in command of the English vessels Nonsuch and Eaglet, which set off from Deptford, England, on June 3, 1668, to scout the opportunities for trade around Hudson Bay. Groseilliers served directly under Captain Zachariah Gillam, master of the Nonsuch, and Radisson was second to the Eaglet’s Captain William Stannard. Not that this was a Franco-English expedition. It was, rather, a transnational business enterprise. The two ships had been chartered not by the crown but by Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine and Duke of Bavaria (1619–82), a son of the Palatinate elector Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart, which made him the nephew of King Charles I of England. That monarch created him both Duke of Cumberland and Earl of Holderness, even though he had been born in Prague and spent much of his childhood and youth in Dutch exile before his uncle commissioned him, aged twenty-three in 1642, to lead the Royalist cavalry in the English Civil War. Exiled during the Puritan Interregnum, Rupert commanded other English exiles in the French army during the Thirty Years’ War, fell out with fellow Royalists, and turned for a time to West Indian piracy, preying on English shipping in the Caribbean. After living in Germany and the Netherlands from 1654 to 1660, he returned to England upon the restoration of Charles II and undertook top naval commands during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1665–67 and 1672–74) while also diverting himself by copying master paintings as mezzotints, a technique in which he proved so fluent and innovative that the English letter writer John Evelyn mistakenly credited him with having invented the process.
A man of parts, a man of the world, not quite English but not quite anything else either, Rupert was more than ready to back the men of the New World in New World exploration and commercial exploitation. Yet while both ships left Deptford, only the Nonsuch made it across the Atlantic. Badly damaged by storms off the Irish coast, the Eaglet turned back. The Nonsuch sailed into the southern end of Hudson Bay and continued into James Bay, a vast body of water that borders present-day Quebec and Ontario. The ship anchored at the mouth of a river Groseilliers had the good sense to name after Rupert, and here he built Fort Rupert at the present-day Cree town of Waskaganish, Quebec. It is considered the first fur-trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
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The Nonsuch returned to England, its hold stuffed with furs collected over the winter of 1668–69. Duly impressed, King Charles II chartered his cousin Rupert and Rupert’s investors as “the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudsons Bay” on May 2, 1670, giving the Hudson’s Bay Company a monopoly on trade in what came to be known as Rupert’s Land, the territory whose rivers drained into the Hudson Bay. By modern calculation, this was a region of 1.5 million square miles, a lordly empire indeed, encompassing more than a third of modern Canada and extending into the north-central United States.
Of course, at the time, no one knew the extent of Rupert’s Land because no one had explored all the rivers draining into the Hudson. The charter Charles II had granted was hardly unique in being so vague. All royal charters and grants in the New World were vague. As late as 1803, the Louisiana Purchase presented legal problems in part because it did not (and could not) precisely define what was being sold and what was being purchased. This was the nature of the “ownership” of vast wilderness lands in the centuries before satellite imagery and GPS devices. Charles’s charter was not simply vague, however. Its definition of Rupert’s Land as encompassing whatever drained into Hudson’s Bay was both organic and commercial. It defined the land in terms of flowing waterways, thereby engaging the natural environment of the New World more realistically than any arbitrary land-based survey could. Not that Charles or Rupert or Radisson or Groseilliers were environmentalists. Rather, it was just that the nature of rivers, which is to flow, happened also to be of the essence in their commercial enterprise. The charter was based on the natural infrastructure of trade—primarily the trade in beaver fur. The king did not impose an empire on the land, but the hydrological realities of the land, coinciding with the plan for its commercial exploitation, dictated the extent of the empire he proposed.
Yet again, conditions in the New World had prompted unconventional political, cultural, and social alignments. France’s Louis XIV had visions of a New World empire based on sedentary agriculture. His conventional, Eurocentric concept of empire was incompatible with what had thus far actually been established in New France, namely the beginnings of a hegemony based not on royal assertion but on trade via alliances with certain Indians—alliances imperiled by other Indians who had trading alliances with other European powers. In the contest between the French king’s vision of empire and the rudiments of empire as it actually existed at the time, it was the rudiments that lost. As a result, Radisson and Groseilliers were thrown into jail and, on their release, turned their backs on king and country by approaching agents of Rupert, who might be described as at most half an Englishman, but who was more accurately a citizen of transnational Europe. In contrast to Louis XIV and his minister Colbert, Rupert and his partners, with the consent of a king newly restored to the English throne, were quite willing to take a New World empire on its own terms.
Although Fort Rupert at the mouth of the Rupert River was the first Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, the company’s first formal headquarters was built in 1682 on the western shore of Hudson Bay at the mouth of a river Sir Thomas Button, a Welsh explorer, had named the Nelson in 1612 after the captain of one of his ships, Robert Nelson, died there. The first building was dubbed Fort Nelson, but the site would soon become more famous as the York Factory. The word requires some explanation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a “factory” was not a place of manufacture but the headquarters of a “factor,” a company agent who has authority to deal on behalf of his firm.
At its inception, Fort Nelson was not much different from what Fort Orange had been in Dutch New Netherland. It was a trading post. The Hudson’s Bay Company, however, would refine the trading post concept into what historians call the “coastal factory model,” creating a network of factories around which Euro-American settlement grew up and at which raw pelts were not only acquired but put through the first stages of processing into usable furs. This was something that the French had never done and would never do. Their fur production model was based on a casual system of inland outposts, located on rivers, where traders lived among the Indians with whom they did business. Whereas the coastal factory model inherently segregated Euro-Americans from Native Americans, the French practice inherently integrated the two. This would have a profound effect on Anglo-Native civilization versus its Franco-Native counterpart, which, in turn, would do much to shape military alliances through the French and Indian War and the American Revolution.
* * *
Between the genocidal pressure the Iroquois were applying in the Beaver Wars and the policies of Louis XIV and Minister Colbert, there was very real doubt that New France would long continue to participate significantly in the beaver trade at all. The defection of Radisson and Groseilliers and the creation of the Hudson’s Bay Company instantly ended the French monopoly on the Canadian fur trade. If the French court wasn’t alarmed, the French intendant in Canada, Jean Talon, was panic-stricken and desperate to do something.
On May 25, 1961, after the Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space with Sputnik I in 1957 only to trump that achievement by orbiting the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that, because the United States had lost the first two laps of the space race, he wanted to sprint ahead, way ahead, by “achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Talon was desperate enough to be thinking much the same way in 1672. The English had taken the lead in exploiting the fur trade. Talon needed a way to sprint ahead of them.
A few years earlier, in 1669, Talon had approved a fateful expedition led by René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle (1643–87). Born to wealth in Rouen, he had come to New France dirt poor because he had renounced his father’s legacy when he took Jesuit vows in 1660, only to renounce the vows seven years later on account of what he himself called “moral weaknesses.” His release from the order did not restore his fortune, but the king did grant him a seigneury at the western tip of the island of Montreal. La Salle subdivided his newly acquired land and spent much time among the Indians who lived on parts of it. He learned Iroquoian and other languages, and he listened to their tales of a river—the Ohio—which, they said, flowed into the “Mesippi,” which they called the “father of waters.” La Salle assumed (correctly) that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico but further surmised (incorrectly) that the Gulf provided a through passage west to China. Talon and New France’s governor at the time, Daniel Courcelle, approved an expedition to find the Ohio, the Mississippi, and a passage to China. It set out on July 6, 1669.
With twenty-four men in canoes, La Salle glided up the St. Lawrence River and into Lake Ontario, reaching the mouth of the Seneca River on the lake’s south shore thirty-five days later. Here, Seneca warned him that he was unwelcome in the Ohio Country, and they turned down his request for a guide. Undaunted, La Salle pressed on toward the Niagara River. Encountering another party of Seneca, with a Potawatomi prisoner in tow, La Salle ransomed the captive, who agreed to lead him and his fellow explorers into the Ohio Country. On reaching Lake Erie, the party turned south and trekked overland to a branch of the Ohio, which took them to the great river’s main channel. At the Falls of the Ohio near what is today Louisville, Kentucky, La Salle’s men declared that they had had enough. Indignant, the voyageur released them and boldy probed farther on his own, but soon turned back. He could claim to be the first white man to have seen and navigated the Ohio River, but its connection with the “father of waters” and the gulf and “southern sea” that would take him to China remained undiscovered.
Now, in 1672, Talon was willing to gamble that La Salle might have been onto something. Find the Pacific passage, and the English foothold in the French fur trade would seem like nothing at all. Talon saw in young Louis Jolliet (1645–1700) just the man to follow up on what La Salle had begun. Louis was born in New France, and after his father died when the boy was just five, his mother married a prosperous merchant, who owned land on the Île d’Orléans in the St. Lawrence River. It was among the Indians who lived on this island that Louis Jolliet learned a variety of Native languages and became closely acquainted with Indian lifeways. He also heard a great many stories from the mixed-blood fur traders who passed in and out of Quebec. He was, however, no wild man himself. Educated at a Jesuit school, he was literate and even cultivated—a natural musician who mastered several instruments. Yet while Jolliet, comfortable in the world of the Indian and the Frenchman, was the ideal candidate for the expedition, Talon knew he could not simply pack him off on his own authority but would have to await the arrival of a new royal governor from France. He had every reason to believe that the man, dispatched by the king, knowing how the king felt about coureurs des bois, would summarily nip the expedition in the bud.
Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac et de Palluau (1622–98), arrived in New France on September 12, 1672. At fifty, he was a stocky bulldog presence, an army hero, wounded nobly many times, whose unhappy marriage to the ravishingly beautiful Anne de la Grange-Trianon had sent him in search of escape into an oblivion of high living at his estate on the Indre River. In short order, he was financially ruined, and his penurious state made the prospect of life in New France very inviting. Talon, who expected to find himself saddled with a king’s man through and through, discovered instead that Frontenac was a shrewdly pragmatic visionary. Without a word of protest, he approved the expedition, reasoning that even if Jolliet failed to find a passage to China, he would nevertheless succeed in pushing the claims of France westward, an end of great strategic importance in itself.
By the time Jolliet was ready to set off, a Jesuit priest by the name of Jacques Marquette (1637–75) had returned to New France after having founded missions at Sault Ste. Marie and at La Pointe, on Lake Superior (near modern Ashland, Wisconsin). At La Pointe, he heard from visiting Illinois Indians the kind of stories La Salle had heard from those closer to home, of a “father of waters,” the Mississippi River. The Illinois men even asked Marquette to come south and live among them, closer to the river, but when the Dakota, or Sioux, commenced a war against the Hurons and Ottawas throughout the western Great Lakes region, Marquette prudently withdrew to the Mackinac Straits, where he told his Jesuit superiors about the Mississippi and secured from them leave to search for it. Through Talon, Marquette and Jolliet were united at St. Ignace, from which place, on May 17, 1673, they set off in just two canoes with five voyageurs of mixed French and Indian blood.
The results of the expedition are very well known. The pair did not find a shortcut to the “southern sea” and thence to the Pacific and China, of course, but they did find the Mississippi River, thereby establishing France’s claim to a vast portion of what one day would be the United States. In honor of their monarch, they called the territory Louisiana, which they defined far more vaguely than the English had defined Rupert’s Land. There was no rationalization of lands drained by rivers, but blunt blanket assertion that “Louisiana” was whatever lay between the Appalachian and Rocky mountains.
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Not that Louis XIV really knew what to do with all that had been claimed in his name, even after another Frenchman, Daniel Greysolon, sieur Du Lhut (or Duluth) brought Louis’s name into the interior of Minnesota in 1679. Nothing, it seemed, could alter the king’s vision of an immense agricultural kingdom that would reflect in the New World the glories of the Old. Mere possession—or the even more tenuous assertion of possession—of a vast territory moved almost no one to settle in it, and by 1715, the year that ended the Sun King’s life and long reign, New France still consisted of nothing more than a scattering of precarious settlements in Nova Scotia, along the St. Lawrence, and one or two isolated outposts in Louisiana.
If the French crown did little except assert claims, however, coureurs de bois and voyageurs remained active trading furs as best they could in the overtrapped and depleted peltries of the East while doing business with the Hudson’s Bay Company in the West. For its part, the company (product, after all, of two French entrepreneurs scorned by their government and of Rupert’s transnational sponsorship) did very little to extend England’s claims beyond the original tract represented by Rupert’s Land. One way or another, the beaver of the richest peltries was tumbling into Bay Company factories, either directly from Indians or via coureurs de bois and voyageurs of French or mixed French-Native blood. With business highly profitable from the end of the seventeenth century until into the late 1740s, and in possession of a monopoly on the fur trade, Hudson’s Bay officials were well pleased with their coastal factory system. Let everyone come to them. Why not? There was no reason to go in search of new sources of fur. Why should they?
So the money rolled in, enriching investors in England and New England, yet doing very little to build an Anglo-Indian community beyond the immediate neighborhood of the factories. The flow of fur-trade money to investors in New France was diminished in proportion to the growth of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but those who actually practiced the trade, the likes of Radisson and Groseilliers, a type for whom the French king had professed no use, found in the Hudson’s Bay Company deep appreciation in the form of a fresh market. While New France stagnated and the English counted their cash, these men created an intersocietal Franco-Indian civilization based on a trading model that had them living among the Indians, not separating themselves from them. There would be war, both in Europe and America, between the French and the English. In the American theater of these wars, the French would find themselves bound to various tribes by ties political, social, and commericial as well as familial, whereas the English, whose trading model kept the Native Americans at arm’s length and more, reaped a mixture of enmity and resentment leavened by tentative alliances that were scarred by cultural animosity and strictly limited by the bounds of prudent business and military necessity. The impact of these essential differences on early American civilization was dramatic and profound, shaping the course of white-Indian warfare through the American Revolution and beyond.