54 Chapter 2 American Society in the Making
although the government tried to discourage the
practice. Fur traders in the northern hinterlands also
married Indians, whose knowledge of Indian lan-
guages, cultural practices, and tribal relations proved
helpful for business and essential for survival.
Interracial children were common.
As beaver and other game became scarce, traders
ventured farther west. Eventually they came upon tribes
that had been driven from Pennsylvania and New York
by the mighty Iroquois confederation. These Indians,
fearful of the Iroquois, sought guns and ammunition.
The traders complied, though not without misgivings.
This escalation in armaments ensured that warfare
would be more deadly, and that the isolated outposts of
New France would be more vulnerable.Society in New Mexico, Texas, and California
Once the Indians of the upper Mississippi acquired
guns from French traders, the new weaponry quickly
spread to the Indians of the Great Plains. Far earlier,
the Apache and Comanche had become experts at
riding European horses, which proliferated on the
vast grasslands in the heart of the continent. Now
armed with light muskets, the Plains Indians became
formidable foes; the Comanche were nearly invinci-
ble. Spanish raiders who had formerly seized Plains
Indians for the slave trade now preyed upon less fear-
some nomadic tribes, such as the Ute, who lived in
the foothills of the Rockies.
The Comanche, always adept buffalo hunters,
were even better with guns. As the number and size ofcumulative impact did not at first produce anything
like a uniform society. The “Americans” who evolved
in what is now the United States were in many ways
as different from each other as they were from their
foreign cousins. The process by which these identities
merged into an American nation remained incom-
plete. It was—and is—ongoing.■
Settlement of New France
After 1700 France’s colonial enterprise in North
America stagnated. The main problem, as before, was
the difficulty in persuading French people to occupy
isolated settlements in remote American frontiers.
But some did come. The French government built
and occupied forts along the shores of the Great
Lakes and at strategic positions overlooking the
Mississippi, Illinois, and other rivers. Solitary French
traders, paddling canoes laden with metal tools,
cloth, and alcohol, ventured deep into the wilderness
in search of increasingly scarce animal pelts. Jesuit
missionaries endeavored to plant Christianity among
the Indians. Missionaries founded Detroit in 1701,
Kaskaskia (south of Cahokia) in 1703, and Fort de
Chartres in 1720.
Attempts to anchor New France with a colony at
the mouth of the Mississippi were frustrated by the
region’s maze of swamps, marshes, and meandering
waterways which, though ideal for pirates, discour-
aged settlement. One French missionary, unable to
locate the mouth of the Mississippi, complained that
the “coast changes shape at every moment.” In 1712
France chartered a private company to build a colony
in the region. It laid out a town called New Orleans at
the site of a short portage between the Mississippi
River and Lake Pontchartrain. The company granted
tracts of land to settlers and transported several thou-
sand of them to Louisiana. Some established farms,
planting indigo, tobacco, rice, and cotton; others
acquired forest products, such as lumber, tar, and
resin; and still others traded for furs. The company
established more settlements in the region, including
one at Natchez, on a bluff above the Mississippi. But
in 1729 the Natchez Indians wiped out the settle-
ment. The company went bankrupt.
In 1731 the French government took control of
Louisiana, with New Orleans as its administrative capi-
tal. Settlement lagged. The region was unsuited for
farming, bemoaned one French official: “Now there is
too much drought, now too much rain.” By 1750 no
more than 10,000 Europeans had colonized the region.
Few European women were among the immi-
grants to New France. In Louisiana, Frenchmen often
married Indian women in Christian ceremonies,
In 1718, to strengthen its claim to Illinois, the French government
removed the region from Canadian supervision and put it under the
jurisdiction of the Company of the Indies. Later that year the
company sent a military expedition from New Orleans to Illinois. It
soon completed Fort de Chartres on the Mississippi River north of
Kaskaskia. The log structure did not last long; in 1760 a stone
structure, partially reconstructed as shown, was completed.