Native America-White Relations—French Colonial

Tribes affected: Pantribal

Significance: French colonial relations with Indian tribes displayed mutual interest in trading, useful political and military alliances, missionary schooling, and protection

France’s colonial claim on major portions of North America dates from the reign of the Valois king François I. It was François who protested the assumptions of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which claimed to divide the newly discovered Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal solely. Soon France would be engaged, well before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, in exploring North American lands that were inhabited only by Indian tribes. The French labeled this new territory Gallia Nova, or New France.

Early Contacts

Historians date the earliest trading contact between French explorers and American Indians to Jacques Cartier and his entry into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534. The French exchanged knives and trinkets for furs offered by the Micmac. The next year Cartier sailed farther up the St. Lawrence, first encountering Iroquois at the point where Quebec would later be established, and then penetrating as far as the Indian village of Hochelaga (later Montreal).

The sequel to these earliest encounters in the area that would become known as New France was not promising for future relations. After Cartier captured Indians and transported them to France (where they died from exposure to European diseases), returning French parties were not welcome in the St. Lawrence area. Attempts by Cartier’s successor, Sieur de Roberval, to found a colony failed after only three years.

The contributions made by Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec City in 1608, were more lasting. Champlain was very curious to know more about the origins of the St. Lawrence River, questioning Hurons who came to trade at Quebec concerning their homelands. The Hurons spoke of great interlocking expanses of water—the yet to be discovered Great Lakes. Champlain tried in vain in 1613 to journey to the Great Lakes by ascending the Ottawa River, the most direct path being blocked by hostile Iroquois tribesmen.

It was only several years later, after Champlain became a direct lieutenant of the French Viceroy and founder of what was known as Champlain’s Company (composed of traders from Normandie), that a real French colony would develop. Champlain’s Company was granted a monopoly of trade with the Indians of the St. Lawrence as far westward as they could succeed. Built into the organization of the chartered trading company was a mandate to support the work of French missionary friars called the Recollects, who represented a reformed branch of the Franciscan Order. The Recollects claimed that they were the first to hold a formal ceremony of the Mass in Canada in June, 1615. It was a Recollect missionary, not the explorer Champlain himself, who first set foot on the easternmost shores of the Great Lakes.

Not much success was registered by the French in the Great Lakes area in this early period, partially because a decision was made to choose Huron peace and trade offers rather than to struggle to win over Iroquois friendship. This meant that the Champlain Company based in Quebec carried on more trade in the rather bleak areas to the north, rather than penetrating the more fertile regions of what would become New York and Pennsylvania, eventually areas where British colonial claims, together with complex relations with the Iroquois, would expand.

During the second half of the sixteenth century a few other French expeditions came into contact with Indian groupings, but in general they decided not to insist on fixed colonization, which inevitably involved a need for military defense and possibly sustained warfare. French expeditions preferred to develop mobile trading networks instead. The lucrative attractions of the fur trade would leave a characteristic stamp on the actions of the coureurs de bois (“woods runners,” or trappers), who would cover vast inland areas and develop particular relations with several tribes. The nature of traders’ alliances with Indians would change significantly in the eighteenth century colonial period, when military considerations in dealing with British enemies in colonial North America came to the forefront.

From Exploration to Conquest

One of the most famous coureurs was Nicholas Perrot, who, after beginning but then abandoning training to enter the Jesuit Order and work among tribes as a missionary, began his career at twenty-six as the interpreter for the 1670 Daumont de St. Lusson (copper exploration) expedition into the Miami tribal area around Green Bay (now Wisconsin). Eventually Perrot mastered not only Algonquian but also a dozen other Indian dialects. The most far-seeing governors-general in Quebec, most notably Louis de Baude, count of Frontenac, tended to place great confidence in the judgment of coureurs such as Perrot and sometimes even countered instructions from Paris in favor of “commonsense” counsel offered to them by those who knew the Indians best.

When French colonial policy toward the Indians came under the influence of aggressive governors-general such as the Marquis de Denonville, however, relations could worsen overnight. By the mid-1680’s de Denonville was convinced that his British colonial neighbors in New York (then under the governorate of Thomas Dongan) were stirring up Iroquois hostility against the French. When clumsy efforts to deal with the problem through hostage-taking and physical duress failed, de Denonville resorted to massive armed action in 1687, mainly against the Senecas near the present site of Rochester, New York. His force of French soldiers, accompanied by Indian Christian converts and tribesmen who had more interest in fighting Seneca enemies than in Christianity, numbered almost three thousand—nearly ten times the size of any previous military expedition.

Although de Denonville’s battle tactics were not strikingly successful, his remarks revealed the psychological distance already growing between official colonizers of his ilk and the commonsense “forest runner” emissaries of New France who knew the manners and customs of the Indians and how to use them to obtain desired ends without violence. When his Indian allies fell ill from overeating (booty and animals taken from the Senecas), de Denonville observed with disgust that “it is a miserable business to command savages who, as soon as they have knocked the enemy on the head, ask for nothing but to go home and carry . . . scalps they have taken off like a skullcap” (quoted in Joseph Rutledge, Century of Conflict, New York, 1956, p. 58).

Contributions by French Christian Missionaries

The second main thrust of French influence into American Indian homelands before 1700 was religiously motivated. Among the earliest French Jesuit missions to establish relations with the broad tribal area they called Huronia was Father Francesco Giuseppe Bressani. The so-called Black Robes took on special status in dealing with the Hurons not with guns (and not even by formal conversion to Christianity) but by taking on the honorific function of tribal medicine men. Tensions mounted among various factions of Indians, however, when “converts” only, not those who rejected missionary overtures, received firearms from French suppliers (not from the missionaries themselves). By 1649, deteriorating conditions between Hurons and the Five Nations of the Iroquois led to defeat of the former by Seneca and Mohawk nations of the latter. Within five years of their Huron ally’s loss, however, the French Jesuits received a request from the Onondaga middle tribe of the Iroquois for the establishment of a trading and missionary post to teach converts in their midst. This new French-Indian alliance was accompanied by arms supplies to aid the Onondagas not only in their war with the Eries but also in defending themselves against hostile attacks from their fellow Iroquois, the Mohawks. The policy would prove a failure when Mohawks destroyed the Onondaga mission in 1658. This act brought a special military force from France under the Marquis de Tracy, who, after burning many villages, forced the Mohawks to accept the presence of missionaries in their midst.

Thereafter, Black Robe policy toward Indian converts in the region changed. To avoid intertribal warfare, the French sent individual converts away from their tribal homelands to mission reservations near the emergent French colonial center at Montreal. Descendants of these mixed Indian Christian communities, who came to form the most reliable allies of French colonists, were called Caughnawaga Mohawks (still identifiable in late twentieth century Canada as “Kahnawake” people, who live on a reservation bearing the same name).

Missionary-Explorers

Some seventeenth century French missionaries combined two callings—that of explorer and that of bearer of Christianity for people who were often considered outright savages—when they entered Indian territories beyond established colonies. One of the best-known French missionaries was Gabriel Sagard, a lay brother (not an ordained priest) in the Recollect Order. Sagard’s famous 1632 account of his journey into Huronia contained numerous suggestions that the “savage” life of the Indians contained many positive elements that could benefit European society, including simplicity of relations and rejection of selfish hoarding of material goods.

Sagard’s 1632 account of the minute details of Indian habits, including their modes of preparing various foods, their dress, and their recreations, became the first widely read popular treatise on Gallia Nova. It would be greatly expanded in a second printing only four years after it first appeared. A second widely read account of French and Indian missionary encounters would appear exactly fifty years after Sagard’s famous volume. The later work, by another Recollect, Louis Hennepin, was called “Description of Louisiana,” a title which suggests how far westward and southward the French had explored since Sagard’s experience among the Hurons.

Much credit for this wider exploration went to the Recollects’ missionary “rivals,” the French Jesuits. Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, for example, together with Louis Jolliet, a former seminarian turned fur trader, were among the first white people to explore the Mississippi River Valley in the 1670’s. It was they who opened the way for the extension of New France into the vast area that would be known as Louisiana (named for King Louis XIV). Jolliet’s initial interest in proceeding farther west and south of the territory under Quebec’s administrative control was to establish a settlement on the Illinois River. Unsuccessful in getting support for this, Jolliet took on the commissioned task of discovering the upper Mississippi itself. A wealth of information tracing Jolliet’s progress is preserved in Father Marquette’s journals, which begin when the party received aid from the Mascoutin Indian people, whose territory in the Fox River Valley and the Mes-kousing (later “Wisconsin”) River zone held the key to rapid canoe transit toward confluents of the Mississippi. One of these, then called the Pekitonoui River, passed through the territory of the Illinois tribes. There Marquette would later found, on his return north after their long journey down the Mississippi to the point where it is joined by the Arkansas River, the Mission of the Conception in the tiny Indian village of Kaskaskia. He died there in 1675, only to be succeeded by generations of French missionaries and fur traders who would open the Mississippi to extensive exploration and settlement far beyond the new “capital” of St. Louis. By 1700, when Father Jacques Gravier took charge of Marquette’s Indian mission program among the Kaskaskia of Illinois, he decided to establish a network of communications to link the Illinois mission to new French settlements as far south as Biloxi (the future state of Mississippi, settled from the New Orleans delta northward). Gravier’s 1700 contacts with the Akansa (Quapaw) Indians (who had seen Marquette in 1674) were already tinged with hints of possible hostile reactions by Mississippi Valley Indians to what they feared would be increased takeover of their lands by French settlements.

By 1711 and 1712, all the way back north in the Fox River Valley, where Marquette had begun among friends in the 1670’s, the hostilities later known as the Fox Wars began, and the safety of the French in a great number of previously peaceful areas would be placed in jeopardy.

The French fur traders, called voyageurs (“travelers”) as well as coureurs de bois, in order to survive in relative isolation among the Indians far from colonial military forts or missionary zones, consciously chose to develop close personal ties with the tribes. They often established networks of what amounted to political as well as trading relationships with different groups by marrying Indian women and adopting many aspects of the Indian way of life. Fur trader knowledge of Indian customs, as well as the configurations of tribal alliances, would serve the needs of more official political policies of administrative authorities of New France when the latter faced military challenges from their main colonial rivals, the British.

Relations During the Seven Years’ War

Historians often refer to the North American phase of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) as the “French and Indian War” because of the importance of English and French alliances with Indian tribes in Canada and several of the thirteen American colonies. For the French, many of these alliances predated the formal period of war by more than half a century. One of France’s long-established goals in what would become the United States was to hold the limit of British colonization to east of the Appalachian Mountains. Because so few actual French fighting units were present in the vast territories it wished to defend against British occupation, French emissaries in essence “recruited” Indian groups to fight for them against the British. The appointment in 1752 of Marquis Ange Duquesne de Menneville as France’s governor-general in Quebec came with instructions to block all British attempts to penetrate the Ohio Territory, a move that could cut off north-south contact between France’s Canadian and “Louisianan” colonies. As the much more serious declaration of war in Europe approached, Duquesne soon followed the example of one of his agents, Charles Langlade, who had led Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwa Indian allies in attacks against other Indians who had joined the Iroquois Covenant Chain (including the Delawares) and were being courted as potential allies of the British cause. When it came to struggles over control of the famous Fort Duquesne, the French attempted to rely on support from so-called Three Fires Indians, who came from points far to the west, where Indian sensitivity to threats of seizure of their lands was not yet as highly developed as it was in the Ohio Territory.

As the terms of war became even more serious, the French strategy of allying with Indians who thought they might regain lands lost to British colonizers seemed to be succeeding. Not only the Lenni Lenapes (Delawares) but also the Shawnees and even some Iroquois broke away from British support to help the French in their attempts to expel English colonizers from Iroquoia (New York). British General John Forbes and a Quaker colonist leader named Israel Pemberton finally succeeded in turning the tide of French and Indian superiority in 1758, when a treaty with the Delawares signed at Easton, Pennsylvania, promised to establish a firm boundary between British and Indian territory after the war. When the struggle finally ended in 1763, the French essentially lost their entire Canadian and Northeast North American colonial empire. For many of their former Indian allies, this defeat meant an unclear future. At Fort Niagara, for example, Seneca Indians were expelled from a stronghold they had held for the French. British control, although it would last only another twenty years in the thirteen colonies, rapidly brought quite different conditions for the Indian people of North America.

Bibliography

Douville, Raymond, and Jacques Casanova. Daily Life in Early Canada. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Although this carefully documented study concentrates on various conditions affecting French colonial life in Gallia Nova (transportation, religious life, trapping, and trading), each chapter includes useful information on relations with Indian populations.

Hamilton, Raphael N. Marquette’s Explorations: The Narratives Reexamined. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. This scholarly monograph not only describes the experiences of Father Marquette before and during his famous exploration of the 1670’s but also provides a critical analysis of the authenticity of manuscript sources ascribed to Marquette.

Jennings, Francis. The Founders of America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. An excellent general history of the Indian population of all regions of North America from precolonial to contemporary times. The colonial section contains essential facts of French and Indian relations.

Rutledge, Joseph Lister. Century of Conflict. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. A comprehensive account of American Indian relations with both French and British colonial regimes from the early to the late eighteenth century, including the key Seven Years’ War period.

Sagard, Gabriel. The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons. Translated by Hugh H. Langton. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1939. This is a translation of the French explorer’s original travel logs, published in 1632.