The American West Read online

  It was easier to dream about reenacting the medieval past than to live as lords and peasants along the Saint Lawrence, however. Habitants struggled with short growing seasons and low productivity. Feudal dues went unpaid and uncollected. The company had trouble attracting its quota of colonists and eventually surrendered its charter, leaving the care of New France to the crown. The economy picked up in the 1660s under the leadership of the royal governor Jean Talon, doubling the French population with an influx of immigrants. Still, by 1700 New France had only fifteen thousand colonists. Quebec City, the administrative capital, paled next to Spanish colonial cities, and Montreal remained little more than a frontier outpost.

  . . .

  The French built their North American empire on furs, rivers, and relationships. Furs drew traders into the continent’s interior; rivers carried them there; and relationships with Native Americans determined profits and kept the French afloat as a colonial power. Without native suppliers, customers, and military assistance, New France would have drifted into bankruptcy or been sunk by its European rivals. Instead, the French kept paddling and strung a series of colonies along the waterways connecting the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Like the Spanish Indian frontier, the French established a frontier of inclusion, but it developed a unique character based on the small size of the French colonial population and the power of the interior tribes.

  To supplement their incomes, habitants sent their sons into the interior to work as agents for fur companies or as independent traders. Most eventually returned to their farms, but some remained in Indian villages, where they married and raised families. The fur trade mixed material possessions and gene pools. Indians absorbed European technology and material culture while French traders—the coureurs de bois, or runners of the woods—adopted many of the Indians’ lifeways.

  Native cultures accorded young women the freedom to choose their sexual partners. The presence of young, unattached European traders led to an outburst of erotic activity. One Frenchman interpreted the rules of engagement: “A young woman is allowed to do what she pleases, let her conduct be what it will, neither father nor mother, brother nor sister, can pretend to control her. A young woman, say they, is master of her own body, and by her natural right to liberty is free to do as she pleases.” French youths embraced this liberty with such enthusiasm that one experienced trader wrote in his journal: “Our young Canadians who come here are often seen everywhere running at full speed like escaped horses into Venus’s country.” Their amorousness led one western chief to wonder “whether you white people have any women amongst you?”8

  The outcome of frontier liaisons was far less predictable than the arousal that sparked them. Prostitution, unknown among the Indians before the colonial era, soon became a prominent feature at every fur trade post and fort. Many colonists entered the fur trade, took Indian women as lovers, and then abandoned them, along with their offspring. Indians exploited the situation as well. Women targeted lovers as an investment. Sex brought valuable trade connections to their families, their clans, or themselves. Many native women came from matrilineal societies and expected rather weak marital connections. Divorce was common, as were multiple wives, or polygamy.

  Because neither partner could force the other to adopt their mores or traditions, most men and women married for mutual benefit. “When a Frenchman trades with them,” wrote one observer, “he takes into his services one of their Daughters, the one, presumably, who is the most his taste; he asks the Father for her, and under certain conditions, it is arranged; he promises to give the Father some blankets, a few shirts, a Musket, Powder and Shot, Tobacco and Tools; they come to an agreement at last, and the exchange is made. The Girl, who is familiar with the country, undertakes, on her part, to serve the Frenchman in every way, to dress his pelts, to sell his Merchandise for a specific length of time; the bargain is faithfully carried out on both sides.” Most of the connections between traders and Indian women seem to have been stable, permanent, and constant, lasting for years, with a great deal of commitment on the part of the men to their children. But, as the above passage suggests, marrying across cultures was as much about work as about sex. Indian women labored for their husbands, cooking, scraping pelts, and hauling trade goods and households on their backs. Traders reciprocated with material wealth and familial devotion. On the frontier, romance came with a set of responsibilities and a lot of heavy lifting.9

  The French and Indians learned from one another, and together they created new languages, customs, and children that borrowed from both cultures. The fur trade spawned a special language—a pidgin, as linguists call it—that combined French and native tongues. “There is a certain jargon between the French and Savages,” wrote a priest, “which is neither French nor Savage; and yet, when the French use it they think they are using the Savage tongue, and the Indians using it, think they are using good French.” This was another of the fictions that kept the system of cultural relations running smoothly.10

  In the segment of their riverine empire the French called the Illinois Country (in reference to their Algonquian allies living between the Great Lakes and Louisiana), young native women immersed themselves in European material culture. Nearly two dozen Illinois women married French men, and instead of bringing their husbands back to live in their villages, the women resided in French colonial towns, surrounded by imported clothing, furniture, and housewares. Their possessions marked the women as Frenchified, and they encouraged the French to contemplate the possibility of Indians becoming more like them instead of the other way around. The French went back and forth on Indian acculturation. Some thought that the future of their North American empire depended on Indians becoming French subjects, thereby enlarging the ranks of the colonial population. Others argued against it. The natives proved far more adept at converting the French to their habits and beliefs, and the slow rise of racism in the eighteenth century caused some philosophes and policy makers to reject the very notion of darker-skinned people becoming French.

  While the pundits hemmed and hawed, a group of Illinois women acted. In 1693 Marie Rouensa married Michel Accault. She was seventeen, he closer to fifty and “famous in all this Illinois country for all his debaucheries.” Rouensa’s father, a prominent Illinois chief, forced the marriage. Accault ranked high in the fur trade, and the chief wanted to cement ties with him through his daughter. This typical arrangement, however, was thrown off track by Marie’s faith. A devout Catholic convert, she wanted “to consecrate her virginity to God,” not surrender it to a middle-aged rogue. She agreed to the match only after a showdown with her parents. She would marry Accault in a church ceremony and live with him. This went against both her father’s and Accault’s wishes. They had hoped for a marriage à la façon du pays, a union that conformed to Illinois practices and expectations. Rouensa would hear none of this. Her new mate would give her a French home filled with French things; he would give her a French wardrobe, from undergarments to overcoats; and he would give her the respect of a French wife, including rights to inheritance. And, finally, her parents would give God their souls. She demanded that they convert publicly to Christianity.11

  Rouensa pioneered a relationship model that others would emulate. Fifty-seven Indian women legally married French suitors in the Illinois Country in the decades following Rouensa’s nuptials. Not many, it may seem, but the French excelled at colonizing with scant numbers. Their body counts never amounted to much, which meant that those fifty-seven accounted for a fifth of all the legal marriages in the Illinois Country between 1693 and 1763. Dressed in their French finery, the Illinois brides symbolized how some Indian women found room to maneuver in the overlap of geographic and social margins. Marie Rouensa lived in a world dominated by men who sometimes used women as bargaining chips. She didn’t get everything she wanted—a convent seemed her dream—yet she successfully played one patriarch off another to secure some autonomy and property ri
ghts that she could pass along to her children. Marie had two children with Accault and at least seven more with Michel Philippe, a Frenchman she married after Accault’s death in 1702.

  Rouensa’s offspring followed her lead, for the most part. Many of her children became Catholics, wore French clothes, and counted as French in the colony’s census. Further north, in the Great Lakes region, other children of French and native unions blended their parents’ cultures more thoroughly. The French called this genetic and cultural mélange métissage and the new population that emerged the métis. In the Great Lakes region and to the west many of these people of mixed ancestry gradually formed a separate grouping, a people in between. Often bilingual, sometimes trilingual—speaking their mother’s, their father’s, and sometimes their own métis language as well—with highly developed skills of moving across the cultural boundaries, these people became guides, interpreters, and often traders in their own right.

  THREE NORTH AMERICAN EMPIRES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  The French rolled west and south on the river currents and intimate relationships. The coureurs de bois, some of them métis, reached the Great Lakes and found homes in Indian villages as early as the 1620s. Fifty years later they were on the upper Mississippi River. Governor Louis de Bouade, Comte de Frontenac, added official sanction to this French Canadian wanderlust. More than a century after Coronado marched northward into the Mississippi basin, Frontenac authorized expeditions into regions nominally Spanish. In 1673 Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, and Louis Jolliet traveled down the Mississippi to the Arkansas River. Then in 1682 René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, leading a bickering but audacious expedition, floated all the way to the river’s mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. There in the swampy delta, he planted a cross, turned a spade of earth, and claimed all land drained by those waters for King Louis XIV.

  By the eighteenth century New France formed a giant crescent, embracing the two immense river systems of the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi joined by the five Great Lakes. Its dimensions were nearly as breathtaking as the sweep of New Spain, whose northeastern borders it touched. The boundaries of the two empires overlapped. The French founded settlements along the Gulf coast—at Biloxi (in 1699, seventeen years after La Salle stood at the mouth of the Mississippi) and New Orleans (in 1718). Except for these ports, however, the French turned inward to the land they named for King Louis XIV, Louisiana.

  . . .

  Commerce motivated French colonialists, just as it motivated their imperial counterparts, the Spanish and the English. Yet global finance drove early modern Europeans only so hard. Money roused them, but religion kicked them into full froth. Both the French and the Spanish wished to see Indians converted to the Catholic faith, and the men put in charge of these missions gave their fingers, toes, noses, and lives to harvest the souls of the New World. In 1611, three years after Champlain founded Quebec, the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in New France, bearing from the king an exclusive jurisdiction to convert the Indians. They replaced the Recollects, the order first given the royal mandate to keep the colony resolutely Catholic (the crown forbade Protestants and Jews from settling there) and the initial job of spreading the gospel to the natives. The Recollects built churches and invited Indians to plant villages next to them. They sought to remake the natives’ language and appearance, their work habits, and their incessant roaming, as well as their spiritual beliefs. The Recollects suffered for their high expectations; few Indians took them up on their offers.

  The Jesuits planned a different approach. Instead of encouraging Indians to come in close and stay put, they flew to them. The Jesuits studied native languages and cultures in order to know their target population better, and they accepted conversion without any sign of acculturation. The Indians didn’t have to adopt the markers of French civilization—monogamy, shirts, and farms—before they accepted Christianity. The Jesuits baptized early and often, hoping that the spirit would carry the savages toward French country living.

  At first, the Indians looked upon these Black Robes as culturally inferior. They wore inappropriate apparel that made them look unmanly, they hid their faces behind obnoxious beards, and they displayed little interest in women as sexual partners, a huge surprise given the one-track minds of most European men the Indians had met. And the Jesuits lacked the most basic survival skills. Bumbling, sexually confusing, and adamant, the fathers died by the fistfuls in the seventeenth century, martyrs in the quest to save the aboriginals from eternal damnation.

  The Jesuits fumbled taboos, promoted outlandish ideas, and lost philosophical debates. One Micmac chief in present-day Nova Scotia questioned a Jesuit’s logic. “Thou sayest of us that we are the most miserable and most unhappy of all men,” he told a missionary, “living without religion, without any rules, like the beasts in our woods, and our forests, lacking bread, wine, and a thousand other comforts.” Yet, he went on, “we are very content with the little that we have.” Then he concluded, “Thou deceivest thyself greatly if thou thinkest to persuade us that thy country is better than ours. For if France, as thou sayest, is a little terrestrial paradise, are thou sensible to leave it?”12

  The “thous” and “deceivests” in the exchange indicate that the Jesuit, not the Micmac chief, preserved this exchange. He reported it in a letter to his superiors back home to show what he was up against. He may have lost control of his own narrative, revealing his ignorance while trying to display the Indians’ naïveté, but his willingness to engage the chief and record his point of view hinted at the Jesuit’s patience and flexibility. They studied their adversaries closely and were willing to appear foolish in order to find pressure points in Indian thinking. “One must be very careful before condemning a thousand things among their customs, which greatly offend minds brought up and nourished in another world,” a Jesuit wrote in 1647. “It is easy to call irreligion what is merely stupidity, and to take for diabolical working something that is nothing more than human; and then, one thinks he is obliged to forbid as impious certain things that are done in all innocence.” Unlike the Spanish Franciscans, who linked conversion to the acceptance of European cultural norms, the Jesuits eventually succeeded because they introduced Christianity as a supplement to the Indian way of life.13

  Many Indians came to respect the bravery of these priests and their apparent ability, like shamans, to command powers of healing and communion with the spirit world. The enormous social and cultural dislocation that often accompanied the arrival of Europeans and their contagious diseases also prompted natives to accept Christianity. Both the Jesuits and the Indians scrambled to adopt new ideas to meet rapid change. During the 1630s, for instance, the Hurons were struck with a horrible smallpox epidemic. In a few years as many as half the Hurons perished, their population falling from thirty thousand to fewer than fifteen thousand. At first, many Hurons blamed the Jesuits for these plagues. To them, the missionaries were sorcerers who corrupted the spiritual power of communities and introduced disease by practicing their strange rites. Priests rushed to baptize the dying, connecting Christianity and disease in many Indians’ opinions. Other Hurons, however, looked to the spiritual power of the Jesuits to save them. Smallpox defeated traditional healing rituals. The treatments proscribed by native experts backfired—sweat lodges and collective nursing merely spread the disease. As the pox ran rampant and the healers struggled, the Jesuits picked up desperate converts.

  Huron women, Catholic converts. Detail from the map, Novae Franciae accurata delineatio (Paris, 1657). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The missionaries seemed particularly successful among Huron women. Free to choose their lovers and husbands, the women could also choose to follow the Jesuits if that was their desire. The Jesuits targeted native women through appeals to the cult of the Virgin Mary, the veneration of female saints, and the sisterhood of nuns. They criticized the abuse of women by both natives and Europeans, organized special women’s groups, and encouraged adolesc
ent girls to swear lifetime vows of celibacy. The special attention the Jesuits paid to female conversion and the protection of women paid off. By the 1640s they had converted two-fifths of the Huron nation. Native women brought their fathers and brothers with them.

  As a rule, the French Jesuits lived and worked with the natives on their own ground, whereas the Spanish Franciscans attempted to concentrate them at their missions. Both empires exploited Indians for commercial profit and to fulfill their evangelical goals, but both also considered them human beings with souls worth saving. By no means would all subsequent inheritors of the North American continent agree.

  . . .

  In the mid-sixteenth century, the English emerged briefly from the political turmoil—spurred by King Henry VIII’s decision to take his country and leave the Catholic Church—to sample the riches of the New World. Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, sanctioned privateers, the so-called sea dogs, to raid Spanish galleons carrying Indian treasure home across the seas. One of the biggest dogs, Francis Drake, returned from one voyage with booty valued in the millions for him and his investors, which included Elizabeth herself. The English thus began their American adventure by looting the Spaniards, who had looted the Indians. They were parasites on parasites.