Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

crucial Indian groups of the West. Ironically, La Salle’s installation in Illinois, envisioned as a separate colonial project and formerly opposed by New France officials and merchants, was now indispensable to New France as officials sought to prosecute the war. Collaborating, officials and colonial schemers worked together for mutual goals. Now the Illinois outpost was becoming an unplanned, even unintentional, part of the empire. But an even more unintentional reality was this: the French were supporting an Indian world on the rise.

      As they came to support the Illinois, the French misunderstood the Illinois’s power. For instance, as Indians gathered around the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, La Salle boasted that they were there to be with the French and that they were “dependent” on him.⁸⁷ In fact, Illinois motives in this period went well beyond what the French understood. Rather than meekly seeking protection, the Illinois were continuing a decades-old rise to power and following a course that was aggressive, not defensive. Even moments that the French perceived as signs of weakness—such as the attack they suffered in 1680—can actually be read as a sign of the Illinois’s power and ambition in this period. The Illinois were building strength, and French support only added to an ongoing bid for power.

      Although La Salle thought that the Illinois’s arrival at the Grand Village was a response to his presence, the Illinois were actually coming together well before the French arrived in Illinois. Frenchmen often badly misinterpreted what was happening as Illinois migrants moved to the Grand Village in a massive consolidation that had begun years earlier. Father Claude Allouez is a good example. As he wrote in 1666, “[The Illinois] used to be a populous nation, divided into ten large Villages; but now they are reduced to two.”⁸⁸

Figure 8. Marquette map of 1673, detail. Although most Illinois villages were located to the west of the Mississippi River in the 1670s, they moved east in the 1680s to unite at the top of the Illinois River Valley.

      Courtesy of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

      Allouez said “reduced,” but the villages he visited at the top of the Illinois Valley were much larger than previous Illinois settlements. Moreover, additional Illinois-speakers were arriving here from the West all the time. As Allouez himself confirmed in the 1670s, Kaskaskia had grown huge. “I found this Village largely increased,” he wrote of Kaskaskia, as the village increased from seventy-five to about three hundred cabins in 1675.⁸⁹ After the attack by the Iroquois in 1680, the Illinois-speakers immediately gathered even more people together at Kaskaskia, right in the center of the violence. They simply continued a consolidation that was already underway. In some respects, they were not weakened but strengthened.

      It is important to note that when the Iroquois attacks began, many of the Illinois were located to west of the Mississippi River, where they had built power on bison and slaving. Surely when violence began in the Illinois Valley, they could have stayed to the west, out of the way and aloof from the Iroquois Wars. Instead they began to move east, back to the Algonquian world, to the top of the Illinois River Valley, and into the heart of the violence. As Allouez said, they were collecting at Great Kaskaskia in a huge melting pot: “Formerly, it was Composed of but one nation, that of the Kachkachkia; at the present time, there are 8 tribes in it, the first having summoned the others, who inhabited the neighborhood of the river Mississippi.”⁹⁰ Allouez acknowledged that the Illinois were moving eastward in this violent time. By 1681, as La Salle reported, the Grand Village was even more mixed up, containing “some of the tribes composing the nation of the Illinois [including] the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaroa, Coiracoentanon, Chinko, Cahokia, Chepoussa, Amonokoa, Cahokia, Quapaw, and many others.” Together they “form[ed] the village of the Illinois made up of about 400 huts.”⁹¹ Three years later, the village included the same lineup, including now the Tapouero and Maroa as well.⁹² In the concept of historian Michael Witgen, the Illinois were “shapeshifting,” adopting the unified identity of “Illinois” even as they preserved their “microlevel” identities as members of what La Salle called their “familles” or, perhaps, doodemag.⁹³ Significantly, it was kinship, the common ancestry dating back before the contact era began, that helped make this shapeshifting possible. La Salle made the point that “all of these nations are comprised beneath the name Illinois because they are related and because there are a few families of each within the village of Kaskaskia.”⁹⁴

      In addition to shapeshifting, this consolidation was facilitated by an inclusivist political strategy.⁹⁵ In the Grand Village, outsiders were welcomed. Chickasaw and Shawnees, who spoke a totally foreign language, were welcomed to the area of the Grand Village in the 1680s, as were Miami after 1681.⁹⁶ A short distance away, other groups settled as well, adding to the population center with possibly five to ten thousand more people.⁹⁷ And of course the Illinois welcomed Frenchmen like La Salle. The Illinois incorporated these “strangers” into their community and built strength. By 1683, they were in the largest population center on the continent north of Mexico—twenty thousand people within walking distance of one another.

      The massive size of the Grand Village gave the Illinois safety, allowing them to redouble their efforts in slaving. Throughout the 1680s, La Salle and Hennepin frequently noted how the Illinois brought slaves up the Illinois River after their raids in the West.⁹⁸ Many of these captives were probably assimilated into the patrilineal households of the Illinois as second and third wives. Put to work as farmers and especially as meat and hide processors in the bison economy, they became slaves “who they force to labor for them,” according to La Salle. Many others were traded to other Algonquian groups in the Great Lakes who were in need of replacement kin. These were, again in the words of La Salle, the “slaves which they are accustomed to traffic.”⁹⁹ In the context of continued Iroquois violence, the captives became a key to Illinois strength.

Figure 9. Detail of Franquelin’s map of 1684, with the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia. Many of the groups in this massive settlement at the top of the Illinois Valley were Illinois-speakers who had moved from the West, making the Grand Village and surrounding settlements North America’s largest population center in the 1680s.

      Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

      As they consolidated, the Illinois continued their violent trajectory from the pre-contact era. Each year, the annual cycle would feature agriculture, a winter hunt, and sometimes a summer or a fall expedition. Frequently in the 1680s, they would go to the east, supported by the French, and make war on the Iroquois, as they did in 1687.¹⁰⁰ But their more typical annual routine was to go west for slaves. In 1689, the Illinois brought back 130 captives from a raid on the Osage.¹⁰¹ In the 1690s, they organized an expedition with 1,200 warriors against the Osage and Arkansas.¹⁰² Indeed, by the 1690s, French observers noted that “almost all the village marches, and even many women accompany them.”¹⁰³ The results were impressive. In one march, they “carried away captive [all] the people of a village.”¹⁰⁴ And this wasn’t an isolated incident. The general reputation of the Illinois in this period was that “they carry off entire villages.”¹⁰⁵ In 1690, slaves brought through the Illinois Country included Siouans and Caddoans from the distant West, like the Kadohadacho, as well as Pawnee, Osage, and Missouria.¹⁰⁶

      As the Illinois expanded their reach into the Southwest, Siouan-speakers treated the Illinois as regional hegemons. The Illinois were so powerful that Indians like the Osage appeared each year at the Grand Village, as Liette noted, “to recognize some of their people [the Illinois] as chiefs.”¹⁰⁷ New France intendant and Indian expert Antoine Denis Raudot echoed Liette: “This honor that they receive makes them believe that all the ground should tremble under them.”¹⁰⁸ These were the wages of a hundred years of expansion in the borderlands.

      French support helped the Illinois