The straits of empire: French colonial Detroit and the origins of the Fox Wars

In 1701 French colonial authorities embarked upon an ambitious, though ill-fated, quest to create a center of imperial power deep in the North American interior along the waterways joining Lakes Erie and Huron --- a vital crossroads of the early American west known simply as "the straits," or le detroit . As envisioned by its founder, the Sieur de Cadillac, and endorsed at Versailles, Detroit was intended to serve as a linchpin of French dominance in North America, where an array of native groups from the surrounding regions could be gathered as fur trading partners and military allies. Though Cadillac succeeded in convincing the crown that Detroit would one day become the "Paris of North America," he was a seemingly unlikely figure to lead such an elaborate enterprise. He had arrived in the colonies just a decade earlier as an immigrant from rural Gascony and spent five years roaming the eastern seaboard as a vagabond smuggler, or coureur de bois, before assuming a false noble title and entering the service of the state during the Nine Years' War (1688-1697). His underlying objective in establishing Detroit was to monopolize the supply of Great Lakes furs and unsurprisingly the results of his dubious colonial project were no more lustrous than his shadowy past. Cadillac's efforts to concentrate the peoples of the Great Lakes at this new post produced a dangerous forum for struggles between villages seeking primacy in the trade. In June of 1712 they culminated in the slaughter of nearly one thousand Fox, Mascouten, and Kickapoo peoples, initiating three decades of conflicts -- often glossed by historians as "the Fox Wars" -- throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Valley.;"The Straits of Empire" brings a transatlantic lens to these events. I attempt to tell a broader story, showing how two complex and changeable systems --- the patron client networks of the French state and the diverse Indian villages of the Great Lakes --- became violently enmeshed at Detroit he turn of the eighteenth century.;Based upon research in French, Canadian, and American archives, the larger narrative arc of the dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first of these explores the history of French and Indian alliances in the Great Lakes throughout the seventeenth century, highlighting their persistent fragility, and explaining how these relationships could be thrown into confusion by the ambitions of transatlantic "military entrepreneurs" such as Cadillac who attempted to manipulate both the "village politics" of the region and the "imperial politics" of Versailles. Chapter Two then focuses specifically upon Cadillac's rise to power. Drawing upon literatures surveying the political cultures of the Ancien Regime as well as the expanding information networks of the Atlantic world, I explain how such figures were able to climb from veritable anonymity to prominent positions as military liaisons with Versailles by crafting often disingenuous reputations as "experts" in distant colonial affairs. Though often dismissed as an anomalous charlatan by previous scholars, Cadillac's career, I argue, allows us to better appreciate how political power could be crafted, exercised, and indeed abused, in the French Atlantic with important consequences for the crown's Indian allies in the Great Lakes.;In the second half of the dissertation I then explore how auspiciously presented colonial plans such as those for Detroit found uneasy application in the contested American interior. Chapter Three draws attention to the factionalism of the French colonial enterprise itself, and questions broad anthropological and historiographic dichotomies between "centralized" European polities and the politically "decentralized" Indian societies they sought to control. Much like the labyrinthine river systems that patterned their entry into the continent, I argue, Cadillac and his rivals in the Great Lakes represented increasingly complex tributaries of state power that defied any shared political headwaters at Versailles. Seeking personal aggrandizement in the ongoing fur trade, these men recklessly integrated themselves into networks of exchange and diplomacy that offset the balance of power in the region, exacerbating tensions between the very Indian peoples that Versailles had hoped to galvanize as allies.;In the final chapter I then explore the precise conditions under which inter-village violence finally exploded outside Detroit. Elaborating upon discussions in previous chapters, I show how increasing regional instability --- in effect, a power vacuum created by the fractured intrusion of the French state into the Great Lakes---- fostered a politics of fear within Indian villages, rendering long-standing diplomatic rituals incapable of preventing violence, or limiting its scale. This chapter culminates in a close examination of the "Fox Massacre" of 1712 --- as I present it, a transformative event whose legacy sustained generations of conflict throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...