Peoples of the Inland Sea

Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600–1870

David Andrew Nichols

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780821446331
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Diverse in their languages and customs, the Native American peoples of the Great Lakes region—the Miamis, Ho-Chunks, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, and many others—shared a tumultuous history. In the colonial era their rich homeland became a target of imperial ambition and an invasion zone for European diseases, technologies, beliefs, and colonists. Yet in the face of these challenges, their nations' strong bonds of trade, intermarriage, and association grew and extended throughout their watery domain, and strategic relationships and choices allowed them to survive in an era of war, epidemic, and invasion.

In Peoples of the Inland Sea, David Andrew Nichols offers a fresh and boundary-crossing history of the Lakes peoples over nearly three centuries of rapid change, from pre-Columbian times through the era of Andrew Jackson's Removal program. As the people themselves persisted, so did their customs, religions, and control over their destinies, even in the Removal era. In Nichols's hands, Native, French, American, and English sources combine to tell this important story in a way as imaginative as it is bold. Accessible and creative, Peoples of the Inland Sea is destined to become a classroom staple and a classic in Native American history.

1

Once and Future Civilizations

BEFORE EUROPEANS BEGAN KEEPING WRITTEN ACCOUNTS OF THE region’s history, the millennia of human experience in the Great Lakes country resided in the stories told by early modern Native Americans and the monuments their predecessors left behind. British and American travelers refused to integrate Indians’ stories into their own Judeo-Christian chronology, and they drew entirely misleading conclusions from the thousands of mounds, fortifications, and earthworks that dotted the landscape. A sophisticated civilization, they believed, had once controlled the heart of North America, but barbarian peoples, the ancestors of the early modern Lakes Indians, had wiped it out. Civilization had given way to primitivism, and it remained to the European colonists to rebuild an advanced society.

Modern anthropologists have determined that this self-serving interpretation of precontact history is almost entirely inaccurate. The “civilization” that existed in mid-America was actually several different societies, which flourished at different times in different places. These societies “declined” not when outside invaders overthrew them, but when large-scale settlements like Cahokia exhausted local resources, or when population growth became locally unsustainable, or when political elites lost legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects. Finally, the societies that built the great mounds and earthworks of the past were Indians, whom one could in some cases link to Native peoples (like the Ho-Chunks and Shawnees) who still lived in the region when the first French explorers arrived. The post-Columbian Lakes Indians all retained, moreover, the means if not the inclination to rebuild the monuments and cities of their past: they still practiced high-yield agriculture, built large and durable towns, and conducted long-distance trade for exotic goods. That they did not create a new mound-builder culture after 1600 one may blame on the actual foreign barbarians who entered and disrupted the region: the Europeans.

Lakes Indian history before 1600 was longer and more complicated than European invaders understood. Monumental societies like the Hopewell culture and the Mississippian settlements rose and fell, but beneath this highly visible superstructure of cyclical change, pre-Columbian Indians had children, built trading networks, adopted new forms of production like maize agriculture, and told stories that made sense of their people’s place in the world. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europeans did not understand this underlying history, but fortunately modern scholars and Native peoples have been able to explain much of it.

* * *

The Indians of the Great Lakes region traditionally did not assign a specific date to their peoples’ arrival in America. Instead, their storytellers asserted that their ancestors had come to their contact-era homelands sometime in the distant past, usually from an otherworldly place of origin, often just as those homelands were coming into physical existence. The Hurons and Iroquois traced their descent from the Sky Woman (known to the Hurons as Aataentsic), who after falling from heaven birthed the first members of the human race on an island supported by a totemic Turtle. The Anishinaabeg told a similar story: angry manitous (spirits) destroyed their ancestors in a great flood, and the sole human survivor built an island refuge on the back of a great turtle. The Odawas identified the manitous in this tale as panther-like water spirits from an aqueous underworld who had flooded the world while chasing the trickster-hero Nanabush (who had killed their chief). The Ho-Chunks, a Siouan-speaking people from Wisconsin, focused their creation account on persistent links between the celestial and terrestrial: after creating the “island earth,” Earth Maker fashioned four humans, named Hagaga, Henuga, Kunuga, and Nangiga, from dust and “a part of himself.” He sent the four brothers to live on the world below but gifted them with fire and tobacco, which served as “mediator[s] between you and us” in the spirit realm. All of these stories conveyed similar lessons: human beings had both divine and earthly natures, and they lived in a world crowded with spiritual beings, some helpful and some dangerous.¹

Modern archaeologists cannot affirm an otherworldly origin for Native Americans, but they do think that the first human beings arrived in the Western Hemisphere a very long time ago—approximately fifteen thousand years before the present day. These ancestors of the modern Lakes Indians reached their homelands just as the region was becoming inhabitable. The first people to migrate to America, the Paleo-Indians, probably crossed the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age. At the time, much of the world’s water was locked up in the greatly expanded polar ice caps, and sea levels were lower, so low that the Bering Strait was not open water but a marshy, one-thousand-mile-wide land corridor connecting Siberia with Alaska. The Paleo-Indian migrants crossed this isthmus on foot or used small boats to follow the coastline. Whichever route they followed, they and their descendants gradually made their way down the Pacific coast, past the frozen, ice-covered lands of present-day Canada and the northern United States, and then spread east and south to people the hemisphere.²

During the time of this migration, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a glacial mass larger than the present-day Antarctic ice sheet, covered the lands around the Great Lakes, as far south as central Illinois. As this ice melted in the late Pleistocene, the runoff flooded the region’s rivers. Some rivers, like the older Mississippi and Ohio, carved deeper valleys that gradually filled with fertile silt. Others, like the Wabash and Wisconsin, took their modern courses when glacial lakes ruptured, discharging millions of cubic feet of water to the southwest. In the warming and now well-watered lands around the Great Lakes, many varieties of trees took root, first willow and birch, then conifers like spruce and pine, and (by 6000 BCE) maple, oak, beech, and other nut-bearing deciduous species. Browsing animals soon followed, living on the rich plant resources that the postglacial forests provided.³

Human beings began exploiting this new environment before the glaciers fully retreated. Archaeologists have located an eleven-thousand-year-old site in Calhoun County, Michigan, where hunters may have cached mastodon meat in a pond, whose cold water would have preserved their kill. Around the same time, caribou hunters left behind a campsite near present-day Holcombe, Michigan, and another Paleo-Indian party left fluted spear points near future Madison, Wisconsin. Paleo-Indian bands probably hunted large mammals, or megafauna, throughout the region during the late Pleistocene epoch.⁴

At the end of the last Ice Age, however, the human population of the Americas rose above the level where it could sustain itself through big-game hunting, while many of North America’s large mammals (such as mammoths) went extinct from overhunting and climate change. Faced with a subsistence crisis, the Paleo-Indians began to develop new survival strategies and more sophisticated toolkits. They initiated what archaeologists now call the Archaic era of North American Indian history.

Native Americans of the Archaic period (8000–1000 BCE) learned to subsist on a smaller territory than did the hunters of the Paleo-Indian era. They made fishing hooks and gaffs, which allowed them to harvest the rich fish populations of North America’s rivers and lakes: pike, bass, and catfish in the Mississippi River; sturgeon, perch, and mussels in the Great Lakes. They hunted smaller and faster animals, like birds and deer, using longer-range projectile weapons like the atlatl, a spear-thrower that increased the effective length of the hunter’s throwing arm and thus his effective range. They learned to make wild plant foods (like acorns) edible by leaching out tannin and other bitter or toxic compounds. They domesticated dogs to serve as hunting assistants (and occasionally as food), a process that began early in the Archaic era—in fact, some of the oldest domestic canine remains in North America, dated to 6500 BCE, were found near the Illinois River. They learned to make pottery, which provided them with rigid, leak-proof storage containers. Pottery making also indicated that the Archaic Indians had become less nomadic, since ceramics are heavy and easy to drop and break, and it probably also elevated the economic status of women, since women usually produced ceramics.⁵

Some Indians learned to mine copper from ore-bearing rocks, which the glaciers had deposited close to the surface in the upper Great Lakes region, and to anneal (strengthen) the metal by heating it and plunging it into cold water. Archaic Indians in Wisconsin were mining copper and turning it into spear points, fishhooks, and awls by 4,000 BCE. They apparently halted production sometime after 500 BCE, though Indians continued to mine and work copper north of the Great Lakes for many centuries thereafter.⁶

In the late Archaic era, around 1500 BCE, Indians in the Ohio valley began cultivating squash and several other North American plants that produced oil-rich seeds, such as sunflowers and sump weed. During the same period (ca. 2450–1000 BCE), they and their northern neighbors engaged in silviculture, promoting the growth of desirable trees by girdling rival tree species and burning undergrowth. The arboreal species that Archaic Indians favored, like oak and hickory, produced acorns, hickory nuts, and other “mast” that game animals could eat, attracting large populations of deer and turning some forests into de facto hunting parks.⁷ All of these Archaic-era innovations in food production took several thousand years to unfold, but they allowed Native Americans to continue increasing their numbers after their old nomadic hunting economy became unsustainable. By 1000 BCE there were probably around one million people living in North America north of the Rio Grande. If the human population in the Great Lakes region maintained its proportion to the overall Native North American population, then it reached approximately fifty thousand people by the end of the Archaic era.⁸

The Archaic era ended with the rise of several sophisticated cultures in the upper Ohio River valley: the Adena culture (1000–100 BCE), the Hopewell cultural system (200 BCE–500 CE), the Mississippians (900–1500 CE), and the Fort Ancient culture (1000–1500 CE). The Adena people, named for the “type site” in Ohio where archaeologists first discovered their artifacts, had a social or religious elite whom they interred in wooden tombs covered by conical earthen mounds. With their former leaders they buried ceremonial goods like carved stone pipes and figurines of people or animals. The culture occupied a region extending from southern Indiana to West Virginia and from central Ohio to central Kentucky. Most of its people lived near the Ohio River and its tributaries, where large populations of fish, game, and wild plants provided enough food to support dense human populations—more than ten times as many people per square mile than in the uplands.⁹

The Adena people’s successors, the Hopewellians, covered a much larger geographical area; they were a network of societies bound together by trade and some common cultural forms. The main Hopewell peoples resided in central Ohio and northern Kentucky, while their cultural relations and trading partners dwelt in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The Hopewell people lived in widely separated homesteads in river valleys and, like their Adena predecessors, spent part of their labor building large burial mounds for their elite. Hopewell mounds usually formed geometric shapes, and their builders sited them near other earthen buildings in ceremonial complexes, some of which covered several square miles. At the edge of these complexes, the Hopewellians built temporary dwellings where commoners lived part of the year, while they were constructing earthworks or attending religious ceremonies, before they returned home to hunt and plant.¹⁰

In their mounds, the Hopewellians interred not only their leaders but also hundreds of grave goods, many of which they fashioned from exotic materials: obsidian blades, copper jewelry, mica cutouts of human hands, and artifacts made of marine shells and grizzly-bear teeth. The trade network that provided these materials extended south to the Gulf of Mexico and west to the Rockies. The goods themselves were most likely “prestige goods,” indicators of status that circulated in a different economic sphere from ordinary goods like food or animal skins.¹¹

It is not easy to draw conclusions about the nonmaterial lives of Hopewell peoples from the remains they left, but the anthropologist Matthew Coon has made some thought-provoking suggestions. The orientation of human remains at one Hopewell-era site in Ohio, he argues, indicates that the Indians there may have organized themselves into social “halves” (or “moieties”). Such large binary groups would have helped draw potentially rival families and clans together. Coon also believes that some of the Ohio Hopewellians’ engravings show human beings wearing animal masks, and he notes that masks would have improved social harmony by allowing lower-ranking people to disguise themselves while they publicly criticized their ruling elite. His hypotheses help answer one of the most fundamental questions facing any large society with a governing class: why do the governed give their allegiance to the governors? In the case of some of the Hopewell communities, the answer may lie in the formation of large groups that increased social solidarity and in the development of mechanisms for criticizing rulers.¹²

The Hopewell era coincided with the spread of a new crop, Mesoamerican maize (Indian corn), through the Ohio valley. It is likely that maize agriculture led to population growth in the region. A carbohydrate-rich diet lowers the risk that pregnant women will have miscarriages, and the development in the fifth century CE of thinner pottery that one could use to heat food more efficiently allowed women to turn maize into gruel, which they could use to wean their children at an earlier age. Women who stopped lactating would then resume their menses and their fertility. Population growth, which provided the labor force for the Hopewellians’ mounds and earthworks, may have eventually produced social conflicts and stresses that the Hopewell culture’s institutions could not contain. Perhaps this helps explain that culture’s disappearance after 500 CE. Only a few centuries would pass, however, before new “mound-builder” cultures would take Hopewell’s place.¹³

One of these cultures, the effigy mound builders of modern Wisconsin, emerged during the Late Woodland period (500–1200 CE) and began building their distinctive mounds around 700 CE. The Wisconsin mound builders lived in an ecologically diverse region rich in food resources: forests harboring game animals, marshes full of fish and birds, and flat prairies suitable for raising corn, which local Indians adopted around 900. They constructed their mounds, numbering over three thousand by 1200 CE, at places where large numbers of people gathered to hunt, fish, and hold religious ceremonies. The mounds themselves apparently formed a vast symbolic map of the effigy builders’ cosmology. Some of the effigies, concentrated in southeastern Wisconsin, represented long-tailed water spirits from the builders’ watery underworld, similar to the manitous in the Odawas’ creation and flood story. Some, concentrated in southwestern Wisconsin, represented bird spirits from the builders’ Upper World, akin to the thunderbirds from Ojibwa mythology. Some, located in a band across the present southern border of Wisconsin, represented bear and other animal spirits from the Middle World (that is, the physical world). A few represent a horned human who may have been a precursor of Red Horn, a culture hero of the Ho-Chunks, whose cosmology resembled that of the effigy builders. The finished mounds were probably ceremonial centers—some contain concentrations of stones that archaeologists believe are the remains of altars—and they certainly served as burial mounds, though the sparseness of grave goods suggests that the effigy builders had an egalitarian society, certainly more so than their Mississippian neighbors.¹⁴

The Mississippians would become the most famous of the post-Hopewell mound-building cultures. Their society arose around 900 CE and flourished in the greater Mississippi valley and the southeast until 1500 CE. The Mississippian people practiced intensive agriculture, lived in large towns or cities, built large temple mounds, and organized themselves into a hierarchy of social classes. Of the urban centers that the Mississippians constructed, the largest was Cahokia, a city built on the bottom lands near present-day Saint Louis. Cahokia’s establishment was more a revolutionary than an evolutionary event: its builders erected much of the city in a single surge of construction that began around 1050 CE. Archaeologist Timothy Pauketat speculates that the Cahokians may have drawn inspiration from the Crab Nebula supernova of 1054, which produced a bright new star visible everywhere in the world. Cahokia was centered on a massive, terraced platform mound, known today as Monk’s Mound, which stands over o...