Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

here would not have to work some ten years to knock down the trees and burn them; the same day he arrives, he could put the plow in the field.”²⁷ It was a land of plenty: there were prairies that stretched out for twenty miles and Indians who were “honest … and obliging.”²⁸ To realize his plan, Jolliet proposed a harbor at the southern end of Lake Michigan, by which his colony would maintain easy communication with Michilimackinac. Further, if the continental divide meant that the rivers here flowed south, and away from New France, Jolliet envisioned conquering this inconvenient geographical circumstance. A canal joining the Chicago and the Illinois rivers, he asserted, would connect this Mississippi River Valley to the Great Lakes, integrating the newly discovered territory into New France in the north.

      Jolliet proposed building his canal in the area where he and Marquette had recently found the Kaskaskia, a prosperous village of Illinois-speakers. Jolliet did not mention them as part of his plan, but clearly he singled out their homeland as the prime place for French colonization. Containing a growing population of Indians eager for trade, this was the village to which Marquette had promised to return the following year to establish a permanent mission. It could become the heart of a new French colonial region.

      But when Jolliet made his proposal for a colony in Illinois, the official answer was, simply, no: “His Majesty does not want to give to Sieur Jolliet the permission which he has asked to establish himself with 20 men in the Country of Illinois. It is necessary to multiply the habitants of Canada before thinking of other lands, and [the governor of New France] should hold this as your maxim in regard to new discoveries which are made.”²⁹

      Meanwhile, however, Marquette did not even wait for permission. Returning to the precise area that Jolliet described at the top of the Illinois Valley, in 1674 he established the mission of the Immaculate Conception in the village of the Kaskaskia. Having shared a number of interactions with the Illinois at various mission outposts in the Great Lakes in the 1660s, Marquette and his partner, Claude Allouez, now would have a home base right in the center of Illinois Country. This is where Marquette intended to create a flourishing mission among these Indians whom he already knew to be enthusiastic about and receptive to Christianity. However, having disapproved Jolliet’s plan for a colony in Illinois, New France officials opposed the Jesuits’ earliest efforts in Illinois as well.

      A specific logic underlay official opposition to Jesuit activity in the West. In addition to centralized settlement, Colbert’s reforms in the 1660s also included an idealistic goal of assimilating Indians into the French colonial population. As Colbert saw it, the role of religious missionaries was to work to settle Indians in the St. Lawrence and integrate them, adding them to the productive and military strength of the colony. Formalizing a policy known as Frenchification, Colbert wrote to intendant Jean Talon: “To increase the colony … the most useful way to achieve it would be to try to civilize the Algonquins, the Hurons, and the other Savages … and to persuade them to come to settle in a commune with the French, to live with them, and educate their children in our mores and our customs.”³⁰ A key component of this assimilation program clearly rested on proximity: Indians had to be settled in what were known as “reserves” or “réductions” near the French population centers where they could gradually acquire the habits of Frenchmen.

      Over several generations of missionary work in New France, the Jesuits had developed a strategy almost completely opposite to these principles.³¹ In the 1630s, they had begun going with the Indians into their villages and translating Christianity to a Native context. This was in keeping with Loyola’s charge to teach and live “in a way that is accommodated to those people, [and their] understanding.”³² In their famous Relations, Jesuits narrated their heroic efforts in “following [the Indians] into the deep forest” and “reducing the principles of their own language.”³³ The point was not to teach Indians to live as Frenchmen but rather for the priests to adapt themselves to Indian ways of living. As one Jesuit in this early period wrote, “A great step is gained when one has learned to know those with whom he has to deal; has penetrated their thoughts; has adapted himself to their language, their customs, and their manner of living; and, when necessary, has been a Barbarian with them, in order to win them over to Jesus Christ.”³⁴ Far from Frenchifying Indians, Jesuits actually aimed to keep Indians apart from Frenchmen, whom they thought only corrupted the Natives. As one Jesuit summed it up in later years, “The best mode of Christianizing them was to avoid Frenchifying them.”³⁵

      Although many of the Jesuits’ early “flying missions” in the Great Lakes were destroyed in the 1640s by Iroquois attacks, peace between the Iroquois and New France beginning in 1667 had allowed for new activity.³⁶ Over the next ten years, the Jesuits extended their missions to ever more remote sites, weeks away from Quebec. In 1666, Allouez traveled to Chequamegon Bay, where he established the mission of St. Esprit. In 1668, Marquette left Trois-Rivières to found a mission at Sault-Ste. Marie. After Claude Dablon joined Allouez and Marquette in the West in 1669, the priests pushed even farther into the interior. While Marquette took over St. Esprit, Allouez went to establish the mission of St. Francis Xavier in Green Bay in December 1669. Two years later, Allouez pressed on to a Mascouten village on the Fox River.³⁷ These were the places where the Jesuits first encountered the Illinois Indians.

      Throughout this period, Colbert disapproved. He wrote to condemn the Jesuits’ new distant missions and their method of “keeping the converted Indians’ ordinary lifestyle [rather than] bringing them among the French.” From his perspective, he wrote, “it is only too obvious how such a course is harmful both to Religion and to the State.”³⁸ The king himself urged the Jesuits to change their ways, to “attract [the Indians] into a civil society and to quit their form of living, with which they will never be able to become good Christians.”³⁹ In 1672, the new governor Frontenac criticized the Jesuits’ distant missions as “pure mockeries.” As he told the minister, “I don’t think that [the Jesuits] should be permitted to extend them any further than they already have until we see in one of these places a church of Indians better formed.”⁴⁰

      But the Jesuits remained convinced that distant missions were the best way to convert Indians. Indeed, when Marquette founded the Immaculate Conception mission in 1674 it was not merely another distant mission, it was the most distant mission the Jesuits had ever established.⁴¹ Deep in the West, totally outside the priorities of the French empire and remote from the influence of French colonists, here the Jesuits could foster among the Natives an ideal “primitive Christianity,” “just like the First Christians.”⁴² Far from making the Indians live as Frenchmen, Marquette, setting out for the Illinois Country in the 1670s, predicted that he would soon be living on their terms: “After the fashion of the Savages, the Illinois wish for us in order that we may share their miseries with them, and suffer every imaginable hardship of barbarism. They are lost sheep, that must be sought for among the thickets and woods, since for the most part they cry so loudly that one hastens to rescue them from the jaws of the Wolf.”⁴³

      All this helps us understand why the Jesuits were so thrilled to report how Illinois Indians practiced a kind of idiosyncratic Christianity in their earliest encounters, “honor[ing] our Lord among themselves in this own way.”⁴⁴ As Jesuits saw it, the Illinois had spiritual traditions that echoed Christianity, which was why Marquette could boast that “we keep a little of the usage, and take from it all that is bad.”⁴⁵ Here was the realization of the Jesuit ideal. Isolated from the French colonial project, they made a new indigenous Christianity, “in their own fashion.”

      In some ways, the Jesuits must have been glad when the administration rejected Jolliet’s plan. They viewed Illinois as an opportunity to conduct a religious mission separate from other French colonial activity, and Jolliet’s project—canal and all—would only have attracted Frenchmen to corrupt the infant church. But of course the French government did not reject Jolliet in order to preserve the Jesuits’ isolated mission. French officials opposed the Jesuits, too. Taken together, the earliest Frenchmen in Illinois had incompatible visions and no support from the government. If this made prospects for empire