Dawn's Light Woman and Nicolas Franchomme: Marriage and Law in the Illinois Country

Readers of this outstanding monograph can only hope that this second collaboration between historians Carl Ekberg and Sharon Person is not their last. As with St. Louis Rising, their previous book, the authors make brilliant use of primary sources to provide the reader with insights into the colonial world of the Mississippi Valley while also adding to contemporary historiographical debates about colonial North America's economy, racial diversity, and social organization.In this book, the focus is on eighteenth-century marriages between Native American women and French men. The central character is Marguerite 8assecam8c8e, “Dawn's Light Woman,” who married in succession three French men, the first born in Canada and the other two born in France. Through an examination of Kaskaskia, the town Marguerite lived in during her marriages, and of the issues raised by the disposition of property following the deaths of her first two husbands, Ekberg and Person describe a society where the status of a Native American woman could change from that of an aubain (a person not assimilated into French society) to a régnicole (a lawful citizen of the realm). The implications of this idea are profound not only for our understanding of the Illinois Country in the eighteenth century but also for our broader understanding of the history of colonial North America. In short, Marguerite's status in Kaskaskia defies common assumptions about both gender and race in the process of what has become commonly referred to as settler colonialism.The key documents the authors rely on are the wills left by Marguerite's husbands, a petition challenging one of those wills, an inventory of one husband's estate, and the 1726 census of the Illinois Country. In a succinct, matter-of-fact style, Ekberg and Person tease out the implications of the actions taken by Marguerite's husbands, by other heirs of the deceased men, and by the provincial councils in Kaskaskia and New Orleans that adjudicated the various claims swirling around the deceased men's estates. Because Marguerite had no children with any of these men, the crucial point of contention was whether she could rightfully inherit their property in the absence of a child who was half French. Ultimately, the decisions of the councils served to bring the system of French law of this period, the Coutume de Paris, into use in North America while also establishing that the Native American wives of French men, assuming they were also baptized into the Catholic Church, could acquire the status of a régnicole and have access to the legal systems operating in New France.It is important to add that the authors directly characterize the idea of settler colonialism as a “patently useless” (p. 13) model for understanding colonial Kaskaskia and its environs. Rather than seeing the French as wishing to displace Native Americans in the region, Ekberg and Person see instead a symbiotic relationship and a decline of the Illinois Nation driven by “impersonal global forces” (p. 14)—not the desires of French settlers. This challenge to recent historiography extends to the book's analysis of the Fox Wars of the first third of the eighteenth century. Contrary to those who argue that the French were motivated by a desire to acquire slaves, the authors here neatly distinguish between French Canadians, for whom the Fox Wars might have been fought for that purpose, and the French of the Illinois Country and their Native American allies who “did not die as slave catchers but rather as defenders of the Illinois Nation of Indians and of the French settlements in the Illinois Country” (p. 96). This point underscores one of the book's strengths. While telling a specific story about a relative handful of people in a small village along the Mississippi River, Ekberg and Person deftly engage in larger arguments about the region and about the entire way we think about colonial North America.The authors also use the life and death of Marguerite's second husband, Nicolas Franchomme, a victim of the Fox Wars, to personalize in an evocative and persuasive way their argument against settler colonialism in the Illinois Country. “Seventeen years old, arriving in the small harbor at the east end of Dauphin Island . . . he was not a violent, grasping invader, but rather a young, inquisitive, big-hearted knight errant. Begun brightly, Franchomme's Louisiana venture ended darkly eight years later, with an early death . . . and an anonymous grave somewhere on the northern Illinois prairie” (p. 100).By including an exhaustively annotated version of the 1726 Illinois Country census—the first ever compiled in what become the American Midwest—the authors provide another service to their readers: the ability to learn something about literally every person living in Kaskaskia and its environs in the moment when the Illinois Country was transitioning from a self-contained collection of French and Indian villages to a key component of the French colonial project in North America, the link between Canada and Louisiana.Relatively brief and accessible to professionals and casual readers alike, this is a book that deserves a wide readership. Ekberg and Person rely on a small number of primary documents to tell a big story about a time and place in North American history—one that most certainly stands outside the prevailing standard narrative framework.

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