French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815

“Gascon Exaggerations”: The Rise of Antoine Laumet dit de Lamothe, Sieur de Cadillac, the Foundation of Colonial Detroit, and the Origins of the Fox Wars

77 “Gascon Exaggerations” The Rise of Antoine Laumet dit de Lamothe, Sieur de Cadillac, the Foundation of Colonial Detroit, and the Origins of the Fox Wars RICHARD WEYHING In , French colonial authorities embarked upon an ambitious , though ill-fated, quest to create a center of empire deep in the Great Lakes region, or the Pays d’en Haut, along the waterways joining Lakes Erie and Huron—a vital crossroads of the early American West known simply as “the straits,” or le détroit. As envisioned by its founder, Antoine Laumet dit de Lamothe, Sieur de Cadillac, and endorsed at Versailles by Louis XIV and the Minister of the Marine, the Comte de Pontchartrain , Detroit was intended to serve as a linchpin of French dominance in North America, where an array of native groups from the surrounding regions—often referred to collectively by colonial officials as the nations des lacs—could be gathered to assist in the Crown’s impending imperial wars against England.1 Though Cadillac succeeded in convincing the minister that Detroit would “cause the certain ruin of the English colonies,” he was a seemingly unlikely figure to lead such an important enterprise. He had arrived in the colonies less than two decades earlier as a mysterious immigrant from rural Gascony and spent five years roaming the eastern seaboard as a vagabond smuggler before assuming a false noble title and entering the service of the state during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Citing this shadowy past, Cadillac’s many detractors warned Versailles of his ulterior designs to 78| Richard Weyhing master the contraband fur trade in the Great Lakes region, and insisted that the Indian alliances that he proposed to consolidate at Detroit were far too fragile to be relied upon for such grand imperial plans. In previous decades, colonial governors had only been able to enlist broad support among the diverse, and historically antagonistic, nations des lacs due to the existence of a common, though recently subdued, enemy: the Five Nations of the Iroquois who, after gaining access to muskets, powder, and shot from Dutch, and later English, trading operations in the Hudson River valley in the 1640s, emerged as the single greatest fighting force in North America. Simultaneously reeling from epidemics that accompanied these European traders into the interior, the Iroquois launched concerted attacks upon New France and the villages of the nations des lacs throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, attempting to replenish their populations with scores of captive slaves and dominate the fur-trading routes of the continental interior that could ensure their continued access to European arms. While the Iroquois specter loomed over the Great Lakes region, French colonial governors had been able to sustain the illusion that they could act as proper Indian “fathers” to their diverse “children” in the region, championing Indian diplomatic rituals to preserve peace between them, providing them with arms through their own networks of trade in the Pays d’en Haut, and then leading combined war parties against the Five Nations. Such rhetoric of fictive kinship, however, had always masked what was a highly contingent set of relationships between traditional rivals—hardly the ready instrument of state power that officials at Versailles might have imagined.2 When Cadillac arrived at court in the winter of 1698 promising to mobilize thousands of Indian warriors at Detroit, the circumstances that had once allowed the alliance to survive in previous years had largely ceased to prevail. Following years of combined French and Indian assaults, Iroquois power had finally been broken, and their chiefs began arriving in Montreal suing for much-needed peace. Moreover, saturated French markets for North American furs had recently prompted the minister to order the closure of the western trading posts where, for decades, French officials had struggled to maintain the loose allegiance of the nations des lacs. Already, the old alliance was disintegrating into cycles of violence between its erstwhile members, who were no longer bound together by a shared Iroquois threat and the continual mediation of French agents in their midst. Gathering the diverse peoples of the Pays d’en Haut at Detroit under these conditions, Cadillac’s critics asserted, would likely lead to conflict. Because deadly European diseases continued to travel along the waterways of the Great Lakes sustaining the demand for captive slaves to replace the dead within Indian Laumet, Colonial Detroit, and the Fox Wars| 79 communities, competition...