Indians and Empires in the Early Midwest

Indians and Empires in the Early Midwest John Faragher (bio) In the first number of Middle West Review, John E. Miller offered an informal list of the "major and sometimes decisive roles" that the region played in the American past. Half his items—including the Seven Years' War, the frontier phase of the American Revolution, the reproduction of republican state government, and the seizure of Indian homelands by the "empire of liberty"—preceded the ratification of the Constitution. Fifty years ago, when I was beginning my career as a historian, colonial American history was confined to the Atlantic coast, the early history of the midcontinent was largely unwritten, and Indian history barely existed. Two generations of scholarship have changed all that.1 Consider Midwestern archaeology, which has transformed our understanding of the three centuries preceding the arrival of Europeans by uncovering a human landscape in a nearly constant state of flux. The era commences, circa 1350 A.D., with the collapse of Cahokia, the Mississippian urban complex on the American Bottom of Illinois. In 1980, Harvard archaeologist and native Midwesterner Stephen Williams suggested that a similar pattern of decline and abandonment had occurred at Mississippian sites throughout the midcontinent at approximately the same time, resulting in what he called "a 'Vacant Quarter' devoid of major Indian occupation." Archaeological investigation in the decades since have not only confirmed his hunch but broadened the affected area to include much of the lower Midwest. The evidence suggests that after decades of drought, environmental degradation, and destructive warfare, people left the river valleys and dispersed themselves across the uplands, exploiting a wider base of resources with a variety of subsistence strategies. They kept their settlements small and widely spaced, often surrounding them with defensive earthworks or palisades, signs of troubled times.2 [End Page 59] Groups jostled for position but also exchanged ideas. Historian Alan Shackelford proposes we think of the era as a "pre-Columbian frontier" that "served to unite as much as divide." Sites on the periphery of the Vacant Quarter suggest an ongoing process of ethnogenesis. The Fort Ancient cultural tradition of the upper Ohio Valley gave birth to Central Algonquian peoples like the Shawnees and perhaps the Miamis. The Oneota tradition of the upper Mississippi Valley shares stylistic continuity with historic Siouanspeakers such as the Ho-Chunks (or Winnebagos) and Ioways. Palisaded village sites astride the lower Great Lakes mark the presence of nascent Iroquoian groups including the Wyandots (or Hurons) and the Eries. The remains of camp sites in the northern Great Lakes indicate the presence of Anishinaabeg hunters and fishers.3 Paying more attention to archaeology and its findings, writes archaeologist and historian Bruce Trigger, would enable historians to remove the wall separating "prehistory" from "history." A recent investigation of the American Bottom finds the local population beginning to rebound in the sixteenth century. Employing this and other archaeological evidence, as well as archival sources, enables historian Robert Morrissey to reconstruct a through line for that group, known to the French as the Illinois, a Central Algonquian people who became pedestrian bison hunters to exploit a drought-driven bovine migration from the Great Plains.4 _______ "Late prehistoric times were dark indeed," concludes University of Michigan archaeologist David S. Brose. But "the coming dawn of colonization would be darker." European trade beads and metal objects appear in midcontinent assemblages carbon dated to the mid-sixteenth century, but more than a hundred years elapsed before the first direct confrontations with colonialism. It came in the form of destructive intertribal warfare. In the 1640s, the Iroquois Confederacy attacked and defeated the Wyandots, trading partners of the French, driving them from their homeland north of Lake Ontario. Supplied with firearms, by the Dutch then the English, the Iroquois waged war on virtually all the Indian peoples of the midcontinent for the next half-century. Once known as the "Beaver Wars," historians now interpret these violent conflicts as "mourning wars," massive episodes of captive-taking to replace the multitudes lost to pandemics of European infectious diseases. The Iroquois captured and killed thousands, forcing survivors into desperate flight. The combination of economic competition, [End Page 60] epidemic disease, and mourning war, writes Richard...

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