Slavery and Romance in the Illinois Country: Élisabeth Chonicoué and Martial Bardoux

THE ILLINOIS WAS THE DOMINANT TRIBE IN THE ILLINOIS RIVER VALLEY during the second half of the seventeenth century. As the century progressed, Frenchmen from Canada—as traders, missionaries, and finally settlers—were increasingly present in the region and became deeply involved with various branches of that nation, most importantly for us the Kaskaskia. In their policy of war-making, the Illinois traditionally enslaved captors from other tribes, and slavery was thoroughly woven into the fabric of their social and economic systems.1 As Brett Rushforth has succinctly summed it up: “Slavery in the Pays d'en Haut [including Illinois] was thus indigenous not only because it was practiced by native peoples but because the peoples that practiced it were indigenous to the slave system: they resided in the region where reciprocal slave raiding, trading, and negotiating took place.”2When the French arrived in the region, they became enmeshed in this traditional system of human bondage, not burdening themselves by thinking very deeply about it. At Sault Ste. Marie in 1670, Father Jacques Marquette attended an ill Ottawa man who entertained suspicions about the local medicine man (“jongleur”) and rejected treatment by him. The Ottawa man had been “instructed” in the Christian faith but had not yet been baptized. Marquette's ministrations “disposed” him to be baptized, and the man's resulting spiritual rapture helped him recover from his physical maladies. Gratefully informing Marquette that he had saved his life, the man expressed his gratitude by giving the priest an enslaved Native American who had been “brought up from Illinois.”3 The good father could hardly have scorned such a gift, more symbolic than practical, without alienating the Indians whom he wished to cultivate and convert, ad majorem Dei gloriam. Moreover, the Society of Jesus found nothing inherently objectionable in the enslavement of either Native Americans or Africans, at least in the New World; while the legal issue of slavery was viewed very differently within Europe.4 Later, in the same missive, Marquette remarked that the Illinois “take many slaves whom they trade to the Ottawa for guns, powder, kettles, axes, and knives.” In other words, tribes of the Illinois nation had the best access to slaves who had been captured far west beyond the Mississippi River, whereas the Ottawa had the best access to trade goods coming from France via the St. Lawrence Valley. In circumstances, both geographic and commercial, so conducive to the flowering of the entrepreneurial spirit, a trade network involving enslaved Native Americans developed, quite irresistibly, in the Pays d'en Haut (Great Lakes region) and the Illinois Country.5In the summer of 1683, Robert Cavelier de La Salle wrote from Fort St. Louis on the upper Illinois River to the governor general of Canada, Joseph-Antoine le Febvre de La Barre, informing him that he had received a gift of a Native American, of fourteen or fifteen years. This lad had been captured by the Panimaha (the Skidi, the Wolf Pani), next taken by the Osage, then conveyed to the Emissourites (the Missouri), who had sold him to the Michigamea of the Illinois, from whom La Salle finally received him.6 This particular slave-trading network, stretching from the Mississippi River far up the Missouri River Valley, remained active well into the eighteenth century and eventually involved the French villages of the Illinois Country.7 The Kaskaskia branch of the Illinois leapfrogged down the Illinois River and into the Mississippi Valley between 1691 and 1703—moving from the Grand Village near Starved Rock on the Illinois River, to Pimiteoui at the lower end of Lake Peoria, to the Rivière des Pères across the Mississippi from Cahokia, and ultimately to Kaskaskia on the right bank of the lower Kaskaskia River; enslaved Native Americans were an integral part of the tatterdemalion crowd of humanity that participated in this formative migration.8 When French Canadian traders married important Illinois women, the wives brought enslaved Indians into the marital community (see below, Bourdon). French administrators debated the pros and cons of Native American slavery—it might well alienate some groups of Native Americans, but it would also serve to foster alliances with stronger nations, those who were themselves engaged trading in enslaved members of other tribes.9Domitile Ch8ping8eta (“Long Visaged”),10 a Kaskaskia woman of the Illinois nation and Jacques Bourdon, an impoverished but resourceful French Canadian, were married in about 1705. They were likely two of the original inhabitants of the settlement (at first just a campsite) on the lower Kaskaskia River, which, over time, evolved into the village of Kaskaskia.11 At the time of the settlement's founding in 1703, the Jesuit missionary priest, Father Pierre-Gabriel Marest, led the community, but no official secular government existed, and no notaire was present to inscribe and maintain civil records.12 Precious few records concerning Ch8ping8eta written during her life (ca. 1680 to ca. 1715) have survived (see illustration), but we know from later records that she was a formidable figure, not only among her fellow Native Americans but also within the community of French Canadian traders who were a constant presence in early Kaskaskia.13 Moreover, Ch8ping8eta was, like her contemporary Marie Rouensa, a serious convert to Roman Catholicism and a favorite of the Jesuit missionaries in Kaskaskia.14 Ch8ping8eta was also an enslaver of Native American women, the possession of whom added status and prestige to the household she managed with her husband Bourdon.The relative importance of Native American slavery in the French Illinois Country during the first half of the eighteenth century may be seen in censuses, which though not without errors are helpful in portraying the general lineaments of the population.A glance at these census figures reveals that while the number of enslaved Native Americans in the Illinois villages grew in the quarter century between 1726 and 1752, the enslaved Black population increased much more rapidly. As arable agriculture became an increasingly important part in the region's economy, Black slavery became commensurately more important. Black people were highly valued as agricultural laborers, and enslaved Africans were consistently worth about twice the value of Native Americans;15 the latter, especially women, were more often employed as household servants. Nevertheless, enslaved Native Americans continued to constitute an important component of the population in the Illinois villages, with females being more numerous than males, consistently.Étienne-Martin Vaugine de Nuisement, an officer in the royal troupes de la marine, traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans to the Illinois Country during the early 1750s and kept a journal of his experiences. The mixed-racial quality of society in Illinois captured his attention, and he analyzed its origins, claiming (correctly) that it had been positively promoted by Jesuit missionaries. The black-robed fathers, according to Vaugine, encouraged French Canadian men to marry “barbarian women” (femmes barbares) for three reasons: to prevent libertinage, to keep Native American women attached to Christianity, and finally, to convey by this means the true Christian faith to the entire tribe. Vaugine's use of “barbares” is unusual, for barbare appears seldom in Illinois Country documents. Coming from the Greek barbaros, barbares is a tad more literary than sauvages and perhaps represents Vaugine's pursuit of style. In any case, Vaugine's brief history of métissage in the Illinois Country, and the role of Jesuits in promoting it for their own particular reasons, is cursory but grossly accurate.16French commentators sometimes targeted the Illinois Country as a morass of immorality and miscegenation. In 1732 an anonymous memorialist wrote that Frenchmen were “weak and slack enough to marry Illinois women, which often creates disorders among both nations that are very difficult to avoid unless missionaries are forbidden to perform such marriages. This would diminish the number of mixed-blooded people, whose hearts are corrupt, living there. They are more dangerous than the pure Illinois, as experience has demonstrated since time out of mind.”17 All French colonizers were not of the same mind, however, and Jennifer M. Spear has rightly emphasized that the clergy in French Louisiana were generally more tolerant of racial mixing than French civil administrators, especially those back in France.18From the Jesuit mission at Kaskaskia, Father René Tartarin reacted to official complaints about mixed-race unions in Illinois, disputing in some detail claims of their ill effects.19 Tartarin argued that French-Native American marriages were necessary to prevent the “disorders” associated with concubinage, and that it was preferable to have a society of legitimate, racially mixed peoples than one of bastards of any color. The former, he noted, tended to settle down and adopt French culture, whereas the latter were as nomadic and savage as Native Americans themselves.20 This argument introduced into the discourse of colonial Louisiana the issue of “mission civilisatrice,” the notion that French colonizers had a responsibility to extend the range of their superior (manifestly, in the French view) civilization by bringing Indigenous peoples into the fold; color of skin was less important than promotion of French manners, morals, customs, and religion. Kaskaskia, some two decades after its founding in 1703, was the largest community in Upper Louisiana, and in that community sexual relations between French men and Native American women were utterly routine, so routine that the line between “Frenchness” and “Indianness” was very fuzzy indeed. In Richard White's nicely chosen words, the French and Indian “worlds melted at the edges and merged” in the middle-ground melting pot of frontier North America.21 This meant that racial relations were rather relaxed; there was no hysteria about race. Sometimes intimate relations between races occurred within the framework of marriage and sometimes not, and when not, the Native American women involved were often slaves.22Françoise Chonicoué came from a universe far removed from Kaskaskia, further west in North America than any European had penetrated at the turn of the eighteenth century. She, possibly a Shoshone, had been captured, probably as a child, in the vast slave trading network that encompassed the Great Plains at the turn of the eighteenth century.23 This trade involved numerous Native American nations, both as enslavers and enslaved, as well as French traders, and it carried its products and profits down the Missouri River and across the Mississippi to Kaskaskia. Chonicoué would have been baptized and given her Christian name shortly after arriving in Kaskaskia. Her first appearance in written records came on December 21, 1720, when the Jesuit priest Jean-Baptiste Beaubois baptized her son Thomas, who had been born the day before of an unknown father.24As an enslaved person, Chonicoué was owned by Jacques Bourdon in 1720, but her original owner in Kaskaskia was almost certainly Bourdon's first wife, Domitile Ch8ping8eta. Ch8ping8eta had remarkable entreprenurial skills, dealt with White traders as an equal, and accumulated a fortune in material goods, real estate, and slaves.25 Bourdon, a French Canadian trader who had arrived in Kaskaskia with only his capot to cover his body, became wealthy through his marriage to Ch8ping8eta.26 Such fortune-making mixed marriages were not unusual in the Pays d'en Haut, and Gilles Havard has written persuasively about how Native American wives were fundamental to the successful operations of French fur traders in the region.27 Spear's work on colonial Louisiana demonstrates that métisssage relationships were not necessarily one-way streets, with white males initiating, exploiting and dominating these relationships, while women remained passive and powerless.28 Ch8ping8eta's marriage to Bourdon nicely underscores Spear's point.In any case, following Ch8ping8eta's death ca. 1715, Bourdon inherited her wealth, including her slaves, and married Marguerite 8assecam8c8e (“Dawn's Light”),29 a much younger Illinois woman.30 Bourdon thrived in Kaskaskia's fluid, tolerant society, and his expansive household was a multiracial mélange, composed of French, African, Native American, and Métis elements. Jean Sanguinouara, born of a Native American mother and a French father, was a member of Bourdon's household, and through events and happenstances of which we are ignorant, Sanguinouara in effect became the adopted child of Bourdon and his second wife, Marguerite 8assecam8c8e.31When Sanguinouara was ten years old, Bourdon died on June 29, 1723, in his bed, in his large vertical-log house, in Kaskaskia. Four days before his death, Bourdon, “ill, but nevertheless clear in mind,” had dictated a final will and testament to Father de Beaubois, and Saguinouara appears as one of the legatées.32 Saguinouara was to receive from Bourdon's estate 300 livres “when he leaves home [lorsqu'il sortera de chez luy].” This short clause in Bourdon's will set in motion a series of decisions and events that would shape the lives of many denizens, both free and slave, of Kaskaskia over the course of two life as a Métis has a for “Frenchness” and “Indianness” in the colonial Illinois When Bourdon's married a French officer in 1723, Saguinouara her into her Native no of their 8assecam8c8e and Saguinouara as a This is in the to the in his will and which he in the of shortly before being by the (the in is it was with death that at took up his life as a in Kaskaskia in his household when he was not out the in a in of Bourdon and was in than of and she her 8assecam8c8e had the of when it came to her and there was no that for either her second or marriages she would that in an Illinois man for a Illinois women who married French men with their and status in and have emphasized how to increased the economic and as well as Illinois as the successful husband when they married in was born and on the in best for its and just he up in a so from his may have been just for the who had about la in the at La not far from his he may have about the Mississippi Valley in Louis de la de la la la de des which through three by three between and René Tartarin of French-Native American and the civil marriage for and Marguerite were of importance in the Illinois Country for they brought and of the to with concerning and life and Tartarin the in the of the of the in Kaskaskia about on the of of Illinois Country were present to the of the marriage at Fort de came down to Kaskaskia for the and the French Canadian de as a for was at the of on the River and married a at Kaskaskia in he was at the of Jean-Baptiste de the a marriage for was married to an Illinois Domitile who attended the with her two Illinois women a good of “Indianness” into that and this marriage Tartarin with that his on mixed marriages were being of the marriage that and of de as well as of the Marie have themselves to their in with the they have their The royal of during the of in that when and not their a had to be in this case, the was could The with this however, is that numerous other of in this case, perhaps this was that the his that of his was important for a quality of a of between 1732 of the Illinois Country a of the household managed by Marguerite and Marguerite had received Bourdon's in Kaskaskia in the Bourdon which a vertical-log house, a and a Marguerite and were this at the time of the 1732 with three ten and the large number of the that Marguerite and were in the of and to other in Kaskaskia. They also owned three enslaved Black people and three enslaved Native Americans, the census the as one of the more in Kaskaskia. The racially mixed marriage of Marguerite and was a and the Jean Sanguinouara not as a member of the household in the 1732 of Kaskaskia, but he was certainly one of the men in a by a on the are many coming and to about three enslaved Native Americans within the household of 1732 are of most to especially the two of was almost certainly Chonicoué whom 8assecam8c8e had received in the of the Bourdon in there is no that either or Marguerite had an enslaved Native American in any other that the second was a born to Chonicoué in the This would have been second child, the first been Thomas, born and baptized in as of Bourdon and as Jean had the responsibility of to it that Saguinouara received was him from the Bourdon and she that responsibility by to her this of because Saguinouara was only a in the remained in because Saguinouara became a by as a his enslaved likely remained in household she was in in an unusual civil (see is also that had had an intimate with Chonicoué during the exploiting her as an enslaved Native American, and that he was the father of born at that on this baptized appears in but only one by but these are so important for the that be out of concerning society in early Kaskaskia that they be in they are best in with a marriage by Father René have received for after of the other between native of of son of and Marie his father and as one and Native American native of this who has been by her The has received from his In the presence of the the and the being to their with and of whom their Tartarin the the could the but in the colonial Illinois Country this not necessarily have much to with of the and Jean on the 1732 census as a Native American slave and of two of the in Illinois Country and Louis were both in and his their slaves, and her son though it is not these enslaved were most likely Native with a name for a French marine, was to to marry from Illinois Country Jean-Baptiste de St. had also in effect given his for the marriage by her for the in an of and this of marriage also as a de civil of for who was not an official to the was to his status as a free French of Louis and to a legal of French is much than that of her but it is to Her marriage us that she was born and baptized in Kaskaskia, but no for her has The to out her is a civil from in which Jean Saguinouara from an enslaved Native American woman in for a one whom Saguinouara had conveyed to woman was in this the that the woman whom Saguinouara was trading to was the he had from the of Jacques Chonicoué as part of that though she was born after the estate had been in 1723, she was the of and had been to Marguerite 8assecam8c8e in the Bourdon Saguinouara had received his of that of 300 in the of an enslaved whom Saguinouara conveyed to in in for enslaved Native American a the two women involved in this were almost certainly living in the same household, that of 8assecam8c8e and for of as a in Kaskaskia was that was in the thus to through a of human and that was born in the there was at that time only one Indian slave woman of living in the Marguerite household with who had been conveyed to 8assecam8c8e in the Bourdon of When had born a Thomas, in 1720, the was while living in the household ca. had born a likely as for in the Illinois Country were often of the after not to the that the enslaved Native American woman whom Saguinouara conveyed to in was very likely of the enslaved Native American woman by Marguerite in the of the Bourdon estate in how about is that before his of and marriage to Marguerite 8assecam8c8e in had engaged in an intimate with slave, and that also was a of that was exploiting but it would be to with thus these two This is to that given how we know about these people and their circumstances, three years removed from Moreover, to would diminish for her with may have been an involving various In any case, to the of enslaved women in and his to free and her marriage to a French in that she was his The of his him to her in with her marriage to three years out the of this us to the very of society in French colonial and life, and and The physical and by enslaved Native American women giving to with is in the the have as a village with a Chonicoué was and married a French marine, thus de a French was for the and to French women by French de a who would be a in the racially mixed and rather tolerant of Illinois Country his marry a French marine, her status in and Father Tartarin at a mixed-race marriage of a for which he had been an was likely no to experience the good fortune of her and in probably of their as a French marine, or his good fortune in Nevertheless, the marriage of this unusual and serve to the across racial and of human society in the colonial Illinois