Indian women, and became part of the kinship net- 

 work. 



Yet, Indians never received Europeans in their 

 midst with total enthusiasm, and periodically tried to 

 halt the increase in foreign influence within Indian 

 country. Resistance was most forcefully demonstrated 

 in a series of armed conflicts protesting trade control 

 and pricing, military actions, and takeover of Indian 

 hunting grounds for agricultural settlement. In defense 

 of their own families, homes, and country, Indian war- 

 riors fought French, British, and American armies as 

 well as local militia units. 



Ironically, the armies all had Indian contingents, 

 so the fighting also involved intertribal and native civil 

 war. After Indian people were forced to surrender their 

 lands to the American government in the curious 

 procedure of land-cession treaties, the confrontation 

 continued as cultural conflict with the policies of the 

 federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Indian people were 

 reluctant, even under government pressure, to 

 change their language, religion, values, family life, and 

 the way they raised their children. 



The first major opponents of foreign intrusion 

 into the western Great Lakes were the Mesquakies liv- 

 ing along the Fox River above the entrance to Green 

 Bay. By blocking the Fox River, the Mesquakies pre- 

 vented the French from using the important water 

 route from Green Bay to the Mississippi River by way of 

 the Fox and Wisconsin rivers with a portage at present 

 Portage, Wisconsin. In a series of campaigns from 1712 

 to 1737 known as the "Fox Wars," the French fought 

 the Mesquakies, who received aid from sympathetic 

 neighboring tribes, the Sauks, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, 

 and Dakotas. This combination carried aggressive war- 

 fare against the Illinois, strong supporters of the 

 French, as a consequence of Christianization and inter- 

 marriage. In their ultimate determination to annihilate 

 the Mesquakies, the French with Indian assistance 

 including Christian Iroquois, drove the Mesquakies 

 from their villages on the Fox River and marshalled 

 1 ,400 fighting men to carry out a devastating attack on 

 their refugee stronghold in present McLean County, 

 Illinois. French officials transported some of the Mes- 

 quakie prisoners to Martinique to he sold as slaves, but 

 Caribbean plantation owners heard of the warriors' 

 ferocity and refused to accept them as gifts. The last of 

 these Mesquakies were taken to the coast of South 

 America. 



When warfare ended, the Kickapoos and Mas- 



coutins left southern Wisconsin, accepting the invita- 



10 tion of the Miami to settle on the Wabash River in 



Indiana. The remaining Mesquakies moved west to the 

 Mississippi Valley and became closely associated with 

 the Sauks. By 1737, the new center for the Sauk was 

 Saukenuk, at present Rock Island, Illinois. Twelve 

 years later, one other group of Mesquakie left the west- 

 em Great Lakes to relocate at a Delaware village in 

 northwestern Pennsylvania. 



In 1747, other tribes in the Great Lakes region 

 demonstrated their dissatisfaction with French intru- 

 sion. One faction of Hurons who had moved perman- 

 ently to northern Ohio plotted unsuccessfully to seize 

 the fort at Detroit. In other incidents the same year, 

 French traders were killed near Lake Erie, in the Sagi- 

 naw Valley of eastern Michigan, and in the Illinois 

 country. 



But the Miamis, Hurons, and Shawnees who had 

 recently regathered in southern Ohio presented a more 

 serious challenge to French authorities by accepting 

 British traders from Pennsylvania in their towns. 

 French soldiers and Ottawa allies from Michillimack- 

 inac swept down to the Ohio country and restored 

 French control over the Indian trade before the begin- 

 ning of the next hostilities in the zone contested by 

 rival colonial empires — ^hostilities known as the French 

 and Indian War ( 1 753-60). Indian leaders protested in 

 vain against European use of Indian lands for fighting 

 their imperial battles. Nevertheless, many Iroquois 

 from New York joined the British, and most western 

 Great Lakes Indians sided with the French, taking 

 prisoners and booty in hostilities along the Pennsyl- 

 vania frontier. Hurons and Potawatomis, according to 

 their own tradition, brought back to their villages the 

 first horses owned by these tribes. In 1757, 850 Great 

 Lakes Indians joined French forces in the expedition 

 across northern New York to seize Fort William Henry 

 at Lake George. Menominees from Green Bay and 

 Potawatomis from the St. Joseph River of southwestern 

 Michigan unfortunately entered the smallpox ward of 

 the military hospital and carried the infection back to 

 their home communities. The war ended in this 

 theatre after the British victories at Pittsburgh in 1758 

 and Montreal in 1 760. 



The arrogance of the British officers sent to take 

 over the French military posts, and the curtailing of 

 expected gifts — a vital part of amicable Indian transac- 

 tions — aroused general dissatisfaction among Indian 

 communities throughout the Great Lakes and upper 

 Ohio Valley. Under the leadership of Pontiac, an Otta- 

 wa leader living near Detroit, warbelts were secretly 

 circulated to coordinate attacks on the new British 

 military units. In May and June 1763, Great Lakes In- 



