Abstract
Let me start where I have grown accustomed to start this story, at Pickawillany — a tiny place at the confluence of several rivers in what is now known as the Ohio Valley.1 There, on a June morning in 1752, a force of about 250 warriors from the powerful and influential Anishinaabe communities of Odawa, Potawatomi and Ojibwa Indians of the upper Great Lakes burst out of the woods and attacked a thinly inhabited Miami village. The raiders killed 13 of the defenders and captured several Indians and British traders who were residing with them before the remainder of the village found refuge in a stockade. From within the walls of the fort, the helpless villagers watched in horror as the attackers stabbed one of their captives to death, ripping out his heart and eating it. Next they killed, boiled and ate the Miami village chief, before melting back into the forest in the direction of Detroit. This attack, far from an insignificant skirmish in the woods, set off a chain reaction of events and became the opening salvo in the Seven Years’ War in America, a war that would quickly spread to Europe and the Pacific and ultimately transform the imperial and global landscape of the early modern world.2
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Notes
Alfred T. Goodman, ed. (1971), Journal of Captain William Trent… (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., for William Dodge, 1871; reprint Arno Press), pp. 87–89;
Charles A. Hannah (1911), The Wilderness Trail …. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons), vol. 2, p. 289;
Richard White (1991), The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 220–234;
R. David Edmunds (1975), Pickawillany: French Military Power versus British Economics’, Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 58, 169–184. Much of the material in this chapter is drawn from the manuscript for my forthcoming book on Langlade, the French and the Anishinaabe.
For Michilimackinac see White, Middle Ground, pp. 42–45; ‘Relation of Sieur de Lamothe Cadillac …’ (1718), Wisconsin Historical Society, Collections XVI (1902), 350 [WHC]; Helen Hornbeck Tanner (1987), Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman, Okla.), 31; Jesuit Relations 55, 135–167. For divisions among the Odawa at Michilimackinac see Heidi Bohaker (2006), ‘Nindoodemag: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701’, William and Mary Quarterly [WMQ 63, no. 1.
For contemporary names see James M. McClurken (1989), ‘Augustin Hamlin, Jr.: Ottawa Identity and the Politics of Persistence’, in James A. Clifton, ed., Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers (Chicago: Dorsey Press), p. 83, and the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians’ website www.victoriescasino.com/tribal_history.html.
For an indigenous perspective on the history of the Odawa in Michigan see Andrew J. Blackbird (1887), History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan; a Grammar of their Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti, MI: Ypsilantian Job Printing House).
See the biographical sketch by his grandson in WHC III (1857), pp. 195–295, an account by Joseph Tassé in VII (1876), pp. 123–188, another in XVIII (1908), pp. 130–132, and Benjamin Sulte, ‘Origines de Langlade’, Wisconsin State Historical Society. The best single source is the short account by Paul Trap in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography IV (1979), pp. 563–564; see also Michael A. McDonnell (2001), ‘Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade: Warrior, Soldier and Intercultural Window on the Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes’, in David C. Skaggs and Larry Nelson, eds, The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1816 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press), pp. 79–104.
See for example David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds (2002), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave MacMillan) and Journal of American History (1999), vol. 86, nos 2 and 3;
Michael A. McDonnell (2005), ‘Paths Not Yet Taken, Voices Not Yet Heard: Rethinking Atlantic History’, in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU Press), pp. 45–62.
Alan L. Karras and J.R. McNeill, ‘Introduction’, in Alan L. Karras and J.R. McNeill, eds (1992), Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492–1888 (London: Routledge);
David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in Armitage and Braddick (2002), British Atlantic World, pp. 11–27.
John Demos (1994), The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred Knopf);
Simon Schama (1991), Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Knopf);
Jon F. Sensbach (2005), Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);
Camilla Townsend (2005), Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang).
See David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson, eds (2001), The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press).
See Kathleen DuVal (2006), The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
See Daniel Richter (2001), Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). For a review of the ‘new Indian history’
see Philip J. Deloria (2004), ‘Historiography’, in Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury, eds, A Companion to American Indian History (Malden, MA: Blackwell), pp. 6–24.
For the problem of perspective in the new imperial history in the early modern era see Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds (2002), Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge).
D. Peter Macleod (1992), ‘The Anishinabeg Point of View: The History of the Great Lakes Region to 1800 in Nineteenth Century Mississauga, Odawa and Ojibwa Historiography’, Canadian Historical Review LXXIII (June), pp. 194–210.
Jacqueline Peterson, ‘The People in Between: Indian-White Marriage and the Genesis of a Métis Society and Culture in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1830’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, 1981), pp. 59–60.
On the ‘tender ties’ that helped sustain the fur trade see for instance Susan Sleeper-Smith (2001), Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press); Sylvia Van Kirk (1983), Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1679–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press);
Jennifer S.H. Brown (1996 [1980]), Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press).
Brett Rushforth (2006), ‘Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance’, WMQ 3rd series LXIII, 1, pp. 54–57.
See Susan Sleeper-Smith (1997), ‘English Governance in the Great Lakes, 1760–1780’, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Working Paper no. 97–117, Summer, 3.
See Jennifer S.H. Brown (1983), ‘Woman as Centre and Symbol in the Emergence of Métis Communities’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies III, pp. 39–46;
Theresa M. Schenck (1994), ‘The Cadottes: Five Generations of Fur Traders on Lake Superior’, in Jennifer S. H. Brown, W. J. Eccles and Donald P. Heldman, eds, The Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference, Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1991 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press), pp. 189–198;
Jacqueline Peterson (1978), ‘Prelude to Red River: A Social Portrait of the Great Lakes Métis’, Ethnohistory 25, 1.
Michael J. Witgen (2004), An Infinity of Nations: How Indians, Empires, and Western Migration Shaped National Identity in North America (PhD diss., University of Washington).
See Michael A. McDonnell (2008), ‘“Il a Epousé une Sauvagesse”: Indian and Métis Persistence Across Imperial and National Borders’, in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 149–171.
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McDonnell, M.A. (2010). Dancing with Shadows: Biography and the Making and Remaking of the Atlantic World. In: Deacon, D., Russell, P., Woollacott, A. (eds) Transnational Lives. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_5
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