McDonnell - Great Lakes Region;Great Lakes Region (North America);Große Seen;Region;Huron;Lake (Mich. and

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In memory of Bob, Yvonne, and Robbie Thomas

THE VIEW FROM MICHILIMACKINAC

In the early hours of a June morning in 1752, the Ohio Valley erupted in violence. At Pickawillanya Miami Indian village and fortified trading post located at the confluence of several rivers250 Odawa and Ojibwe warriors burst from the edge of the woods and attacked. In the initial skirmish, they killed 13 of the defenders and captured several more, along with a number of British traders who were residing with the Miami. The remainder of the villagers found refuge in a stockade. They had to watch in horror as the attackers seized one of their captives, a British blacksmith, and stabbed him. As he lay dying, his assailants ripped his heart out and ate it. Next, the raiders killed, boiled, and ate the village chief, Memeskia, in front of his own family. Hurling insults and taunting the defenders, the enemy warriors then melted back into the forest in the direction of a French post at Detroit with at least four English traders in tow.

This attack, far from an insignificant skirmish in the woods, set off a chain reaction of events that culminated in George Washingtons attack on French forces at the Battle of Jumonville Glen in the Ohio Valley in May 1754. Pickawillany was thus arguably the opening salvo in the Seven Years War in America between the two great imperial powers of the eighteenth century, England and France. The war quickly spread to Europe and Asia and ultimately transformed the imperial and global landscape of the early modern world.

The reputed leader of this deadly raid was Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade. Langlade was what we have come to call mtis the son of an Indian woman and a French man. He was baptized in 1729 at Michilimackinac (now Mackinaw City, Michigan), a small but thriving Algonquian-French fur-trading community located at the straits that connected Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. Stories about the part played by Langlade in the violence at Pickawillany are relatively well known. But his exploits did not end there. Indeed, Langlade seems to have participated in most of the imperial conflicts of the latter half of the eighteenth century in North America. He was, for example, alleged to be the leader of the ambush that cut down British general Edward Braddocks expedition against Fort Duquesne in 1755an event depicted in a celebrated 1903 painting by Edwin Willard Deming that now graces the corridors of the Wisconsin Historical Society (see illustration

Surprisingly, given this history of fighting for the French, when New France fell to the British, Langlade forged relations with the incoming conquerors. When a group of hostile Indians seized the newly arrived British garrison at Michilimackinac, during Pontiacs War in 1763 (one of the greatest pan-Indian uprisings in North American history), Langlade and his kin rescued the soldiers and officers and returned them safely to Montreal. Later, during the American Revolution, Langlade joined General Burgoyne on his ill-fated campaign that ended with the Battle of Saratoga, mobilized warriors to fight George Rogers Clark and the Continental Army in the Mississippi Valley, and raised Indian allies against the American general Anthony Wayne in 1794 during the Northwest Indian War. But perhaps most surprising, Langlade, who also had extensive trading interests throughout the Great Lakes, eventually settled in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he and his father, the first permanent white settlers in the state, became known as the Fathers of Wisconsin.

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In our era of best-selling biographies of founding fathers, telling Langlades story was an attractive proposition. But as I began to piece together Langlades complex biography in more detail, a different story emerged. It quickly became apparent that Langlades Indian family from the Great Lakes was crucial in facilitating and enabling his movements. Almost everywhere Langlade went, including Pickawillany, warriors from among his Indian kin accompanied him. Indeed, Langlades actions were explicable only in light of a complex set of Indian politics that lay behind attacks such as that at Pickawillany. Moreover, there were also eventssuch as Braddocks defeatat which Langlade was almost certainly not present, regardless of what he and his descendants later claimed. But warriors from Michilimackinac were there, and their involvement in these early battles had a significant impact on the course of the Seven Years War in America. As I traced Langlade and his familys story back in time across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I realized, too, that the Indian community from which he emerged was crucial to the region for centuries. When Europeans arrived on the scene, Langlades kin continued to play a powerful part. They were the Anishinaabe Odawa of Michilimackinacand Langlades story quickly became their story.

For too long now, the history of the Anishinaabeg of the Great Lakes has been largely hidden behind Euro-American storiesperhaps typified by the image of Langlade himself as a white settler. Even the name Anishinaabegthe term that these Native peoples use to refer to themselves, meaning the real, or original, peoplesis unfamiliar to most modern readers. Instead, we know them only, if at all, through the names Europeans began to call them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the Ottawa, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Algonquin, Nipissing, and Mississauga. We have often lumped them under the more general category of Algonquian speakers, and not recognized that they all spoke Anishinaabemowina distinct subset of Algonquian. And we have failed to appreciate their significance in the history of the continent. Despite their central location in what the French called the pays den haut literally, the high country, or the vast territory stretching west from Montreal to the Mississippi River and encompassing most of the Great Lakes and their tributary riversthe Anishinaabeg have appeared only at the edges of European and American histories, shadowy figures on the frontier, as it were. They have remained largely invisible to Euro-American observers.

In this reading, the communities in which Langlade moved come to attention only when Europeans noticed them and wrote about them. Yet while many newcomers passed through the Great Lakes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, few stayed and settled. The resulting snippets of correspondence and reports from transient Euro-American visitors have given us a fragmented history of the place, the era, and the peoples who lived there. And while historians have of late begun to take more note of the importance of some Indian groups at particular moments in time, Native Americansespecially in the pays den haut have almost invariably appeared and disappeared at a correspondents whim, apparently a volatile, fleeting, and ephemeral presence throughout the colonial period. They have been noticed by historians only when called onstage by imperial officials and scribes. They are often described as being led, and led astray, by Europeans or go-betweens such as Langlade. They have been effectively dependent on early Europeans for their history. And we share the legacy of these Europeans, struggling to comprehend a people with an autonomous history because we rely on fragmented accounts. When we look at the Anishinaabeg from the perspective of successive waves of newly arrived Europeans, little makes sense.