Kaskaskia Under the French Regime (review)

This work stands as a welcome addition to Southern Illinois University Press’s Shawnee Classics, an imprint which has gone far in recent years to ensure that venerable old books concerning the history of the American Midwest will remain available to readers for years to come. Completed in 1940 (but not published until 1948), Belting’s Kaskaskia Under the French Regime has long been regarded as one of the most readable accounts of the French colonial experience in the Illinois country. It warrants attention also as the first to emphasize the social and economic aspects of the time rather than focusing solely on political, military, and administrative topics.

Clearly influenced by the Progressive historians of her day and-as Carl Ekberg points out in the Foreword to this new edition-unwilling to compete directly with Clarence Alvord’s politically-oriented The Illinois Country (1920), Belting approached her subject “from the bottom-up” and tried to capture the essence of daily life in an often overlooked part of France’s New World empire. Though her presentation often seems flippant and overly informal, the research that drives her description is thorough, meticulous, and nearly flawless by any standard. Belting consulted French sources from archives in Montreal and Paris as well as census data, official reports, and personal papers held in various American repositories. She translated many of these documents herself-making them available for the first time to an English-speaking audience and quoted from them extensively throughout her work. Belting also made extremely effective use of the still under-utilized “Kaskaskia Manuscripts”, a collection of over 3000 documents-including marriage contracts, records of property transactions (including the sale of African and Native American slaves), and estate inventories dating from the period between 1723 and 1780-discovered in an Illinois county courthouse in 1905. By reproducing many of these documents-in her text and in a 46-page appendix containing parish records of baptisms and marriages and a sizable abstract of the detailed 1752 census of the Illinois country-Belting not only adds weight, potency and “zest” to her statements, she also lays bare the methodology of the historian’s craft, making it accessible to an audience to whom it might be unfamiliar.

While there is much about this book worthy of praise, there are also points upon which one can direct a certain level of criticism. Two issues strike me as especially problematic.

The first of these is Belting’s failure to devote more attention to relationship between Kaskaskia’s French residents and their Indian neighbors. The village of Kaskaskia was, after all, named for a sub-tribe of the so-called Illinois Confederacy. Moreover, Belting’s own documents demonstrate that virtually every French habitant in Kaskaskia was involved-at least on a small scale-in the Indian trade. Many of the village’s residents were transient voyageurs who maintained a residence (and sometimes a family) in Kaskaskia but spent much of the year elsewhere-trading with various Native groups or delivering their goods downriver to market at New Orleans.

But the relationship between the French and the Illinois Indians was considerably closer than that. In describing the situation during the first half of the eighteenth century, Susan Sleeper-Smith wrote, “Many histories…mistakenly identify Kaskaskia as a French settlement, even though during the first twenty years of its existence, only one Frenchwoman lived here. Of the twenty-one recorded baptisms, only one was the child of a Frenchwoman.” “The female French names that appear in marital and baptismal registers,” Sleeper-Smith continues, “testifies to the presence of Native women baptized by missionary priests.” While Belting does not ignore the role played by Native women altogether (She devotes a good deal of attention to Maria Rouensa, the daughter of a Kaskaskia chief who converted to Catholicism, married a Frenchmen, survived him and a second French husband, and accumulated a sizable estate. She also mentions the generally-ignored 1735 edict prohibiting French-Indian marriages without consent of the governor...