The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (review)

Targeting a nonspecialist audience, Skinner's The Upper Country is a broad and compelling synthesis of the history of New France. With the exception of an introductory passage about the period of Native American dominance and contact, the work provides a linear picture of French colonialism in the Great Lakes region, spanning the mid-seventeenth through mid-eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a vast reserve of secondary sources from both American and Canadian scholars, Skinner deftly cultivates the history of French empire building into a concise, readable volume that provides a general overview of political and military maneuvers, diplomatic actions, economic drive, and social interaction between the French and British nations, as well as between the French and Indian nations. The result is an account that chronicles the evolution of exploration for trade through an imperialistic colonization that concludes with the costly, wanton fight to maintain an ineffective colony against English conquest.

From a creative standpoint, Skinner weaves primary documents into his recapitulation in the form of first-person accounts. Rather than using these sources to reveal new information, he extracts direct quotations from them to punctuate the synthesis and to add a sense of personal interaction with the historical characters. This technique, coupled with a few moments of subtle, wry humor, humanizes what is all too often relegated to academic description. For instance, Skinner relates a humorous story about Richard Pilette, a French trader who, attempting to take advantage of the chaos created at Fort Saint Louis by Joseph Antonine Le Febvre de LaBarre—the outgoing inept governor—posed as the new post commander. Immediately recognizing him as an imposter, Henri Tonti, the actual commander at the time, settled the issue by knocking out the trader's front teeth with his famed iron fist. Pilette not only recovered; he also remained at the fort, marrying a Native American woman and propagating a large Indian family that reiterated the story for generations. Skinner uses this story to illustrate the survival of Indian alliances (in spite of LaBarre), giving credit, in part, to the "larger than life" actions of commanders such as Tonti, who were able immediately to re-gain the requisite command and respect of leadership (64–65).

Though this book certainly provides a good overview of French colonial history in the Great Lakes Region, it loses some of its efficacy to its brevity. Skinner introduces a vast amount of information in the first few chapters. Those unfamiliar with the regional history will have trouble keeping track of event locations and an ever-changing cast of characters. Similarly, Skinner's emphasis on military actions comes at the expense of the social and diplomatic nuances of French and Indian relations, which receive only cursory consideration. Understandably, an in-depth analysis of these subjects are not his intent, but given the significance of diplomacy and mutual benefit, the lack of discourse either supporting or opposing the ideals of a middle ground, particularly in the Pays de Haute, is lamentable. Moreover, brevity leads to occasional all-encompassing language that can be misrepresentative. For instance, Skinner makes a broad, generalizing statement assigning excessive use of alcohol to all of the Great Lakes Indians. According to the author, because of the induction of hallucination "to communicate with the supernatural . . . Indians drank hard, and would give all that they owned for liquor" (20). Such misleading generalizations occur sporadically in the text.