FRENCH-INDIAN INTERMARRIAGE AND THE CREATION OF MÉTIS SOCIETY

by

Dr. Patrick J. Jung

Marquette University

I. Introduction

There is a joke in Canada that asks "How long after the first Frenchman arrived in Canada was the first Métis person born?" The answer "Nine months."

Within every joke there is a bit of truth, and it is no different with this one. Very soon after Frenchmen arrived in New France, they began to intermarry with local Indian women. In the process, a new society was created that blended elements of both French and Indian cultures.

It would be wrong to think of Métis culture as monolithic. There were in fact many Métis societies throughout North America, some of which took their European antecedents from the Roman Catholic French such as that in the Great Lakes region, and others, particularly in the Hudson's Bay area, that descended from Presbyterian Scots.

Most Métis societies revolved around the fur trade, for it was in this economic system that Europeans and Indians had the closest contacts. Few white women went west with the European men who traded for furs, so these men took Indian women as their wives. Over the course of time, the progeny of these unions carved out a unique society that took elements from both cultures but stood quite apart from them as well.

This essay focuses upon the Métis society that emerged in the Great Lakes region. It also focuses upon intermarriage between the two societies and the customs and motivations that underlay this institution.

II. The French Come to Wisconsin

It is not known for certain when the first Frenchman arrived in the land we today call Wisconsin. The French colony of New France was founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, who wanted to establish a prosperous colony that had close political, economic, and military ties to the Indian tribes of the region.

Champlain sent out many young Frenchmen into the Great Lakes region to learn the customs and languages of the Indians and to explore and map the new country. Étienne Brûlé was one of these men, and his explorations of Lake Superior may have taken him into northern Wisconsin in the 1620s.

There is more solid evidence to show that another of Champlain's men, Jean Nicolet, arrived at Green Bay in 1634 to make peace between the Huron of Lake Huron and the Ho-chunk (also known as the Winnebagos). Nicolet only stayed for a short time before returning to New France, and it was twenty years before any other Frenchmen arrived.

The next two Frenchmen to visit Wisconsin were two traders, most likely Médart Chouart, Sieur Des Groselliers and his brother-in-law, Pierre-Esprit Radisson, in 1656. At this time, the Ottawa were the principal middlemen in the fur trade, and they took vast numbers of furs from Wisconsin to Montreal every year where they exchanged them for goods of European manufacture such as guns, cloth, and knives.

By the 1660s, however, hordes of young Frenchmen began to enter into the region to trade with the Indians. The Indians preferred this because they could trade in their villages rather than paying higher prices by going through Ottawa middlemen. Many of the French traders were called voyageurs. They had licenses and were sanctioned by the government of New France. However, many others went into the pays d'en haut, or the "upper country" (as the region west of Montreal was called) illegally in order to trade, and these men were outlaws known as coureur de bois, or "wood runners."

From about the 1670s onward, the forests of the upper country were filled with illegal coureur de bois, and it is easy to see why. There was a great demand in Europe for furs, and even a single canoe load of beaver skins could make a man wealthy. Moreover, many young Frenchmen found farm life in the agricultural settlements of New France a dry, stifling existence, and life in the upper country offered adventure.

By the 1700s, the French presence in the Great Lakes region was well established, and even after Great Britain took control of Canada and the upper country in 1763 at the conclusion of the French and Indian War, young French-Canadian men continued to dominate the fur trade and live among the Indian tribes of the Great Lakes. It was their presence that established the foundation for the Métis culture that emerged there.

III. French, Indian, and Métis Marriage Customs

In examining the nature of marriage between the French and Indians, it is important to understand the motives that brought people into such unions.

A. Frenchmen - Frenchmen married Indian women for two principal reasons:

1) Availability of Indian Women - Almost no French women went west of Montreal. The few who did were army officers' wives. Thus, if a French fur trader wanted to marry, he had very few choices except to take an Indian bride.

2) Economic Reasons - Because they were fur traders, Frenchmen needed women to perform necessary tasks that were incumbent upon the trade such as preparing and packaging furs. Indian women were already very familiar with these tasks.

B. Indian Women - Indian women generally had more choices than Frenchmen because they lived in their native societies and could take either a French or Indian man for a husband. There were many cultural differences between the various tribes of North American Indians, but all the tribes of the Great Lakes region shared many common cultural characteristics that are generally labeled "Woodland" by anthropologists. Thus, there were common denominators among Indian women from Woodland societies who took French husbands. It should be noted that most Indian women married Indian men, but those who married Frenchmen had a variety of reasons for doing so:

1) Dream Quest - In many Indian societies, young boys and girls fasted for days at a time to induce dreams during their sleep and would be visited by "Dream Visitors," or spirits who would guide them in making decisions in their lives. In most Indian societies, girls underwent their dream quest at menarche (or first menstruation). After this, she was considered ready for marriage, and if her dream quest indicated that she should take a French husband, that advice was to be seriously considered.

2) Family Wishes - Women in many Indian societies also had to take into consideration the wishes of their parents, for marriage also united families socially and economically. Women had some say in the process and could resist the suitors suggested by their families, but they had to take these wishes into account. Often times, families found marriages to French traders desirable in order to secure lucrative trade alliances.

3) Christianity - Fur traders were not the only Frenchmen west of Montreal. Roman Catholic missionaries also went west, and although they did not gain a tremendous number of converts, they did enjoy some success among the Indians. Many Indian women were drawn to the rituals of the faith, especially by the image of the Virgin Mary. Indian women who converted to catholicism often desired to marry French Catholic husbands.

4) Availability - In many Great Lakes tribes, there were badly skewed sex ratios due to the large number of men that were often killed in intertribal warfare. This made for a surplus of women in many tribes, and although some tribes practiced polygamy as a way to fix this problem, many women did not want to live in such a household, especially if they were a junior wife to an older woman. Frenchmen were always monogamous, and this appealed to many Indian women.

5) Sexual Gratification - In many Indian societies, manliness was not exhibited by having sex but by abstaining from it. Indian men believed that it demonstrated self-control and strength to be able to abstain from sexual intercourse rather than to engage in it. This was reinforced by the fact that sex led to children and more mouths to feed. In some Indian societies, it was common for a man to abstain from sex with his wife for two years after a child was born. Although definite conclusions about Indian women and sexual intercourse cannot be made since there is a paucity of evidence, they appear to have been the more passionate of the two sexes. Frenchmen, despite Western and Judeo-Christian mores against premarital sex and sexual indulgence, generally abandoned these restrictive moral codes when they went west, much to the irritation of the Jesuit missionaries. Indian women may have been drawn to the seemingly permissive nature of French sexuality and chose French husbands for this reason.

7) Material Gain - French traders at the top of the fur trade were often quite wealthy and possessed many luxury items that were prized in Indian societies. Marriage to a trader would have given them easy access to such material items.

C. Merging of Customs - Once a Frenchman and an Indian woman decided to marry, the nature of the union became a cultural hybrid that mixed both Indian and French customs.

1) French-Canadian Customs - The marriage customs of France had definite impact upon French-Indian unions, but marriage customs changed somewhat in New France. These changes also influenced French-Indian unions.

a. French influences - Marriage in France was much the same as it is in the western world today with men and women marrying exogamously into different family groups with an emphasis upon creating monogamous nuclear families that are patrilineal, or focused upon the man's family, especially in regards to taking family names. Their were strict prohibitions from marrying first, second, and even third cousins. Divorce was strictly forbidden. The key difference in early modern France in the 1600s and 1700s and today was that both a man and woman had to receive parental permission to marry their partners because unions were seen as both sexual and economic relationships. The church and state both enforced parental consent in France, but this changed when French people arrived in the New World.

b. French-Canadian influences - All French persons in New France were Roman Catholic because Protestants were banned from going to the colony. French immigrants were still devoted to the church, but the church lacked the clergy or ecclesiastical institutions that it had in France and was therefore unable to enforce strict conformity to French marriage laws. The principal change was that mutual consent by both parties replaced parental consent in New France, where clerical and state control over marriages became much more lax.

2) Indian Customs - Although marriage customs differed from tribe to tribe, there were commonalities.

a. Family Lineages - Nuclear families were not as important as in French culture. In Indian societies, extended family groups, particularly clans, were very important and formed a basis for marriage customs. Clans were generally exogamous, thus, an Indian had to marry someone from a clan other than their own. Most Great Lakes Indian societies were patrilineal, and a child received the clan identity of their father. They could not marry cousins from the father's line, but they could marry cousins from their mother's line. This was called cross-cousin marriage.

b. Arranged Marriage - As mentioned above, a woman's family had much say in who she married, but women retained some control over the choice of their mates.

c. Divorce - Unlike European marriages, Indians did not consider divorce to be taboo, and it was frequent and easily accomplished. When a couple divorced, the children went with the mother. The clan system insured that the children would be provided for because the clan considered all members to be part of their extended family.

3. French-Indian and Métis Marriage Customs - There were generally two types of French-Indian marriages, and these laid the groundwork for later marriage customs in the upper country. The exigencies of the fur trade and the introduction of both French-Canadian and Indian customs were the key ingredients to the formation of these customs.

a. Clerical Sanction - Most Frenchmen were committed to the idea of having marriages that they considered to be valid by their own customs, and those who could afford to make the trip to a local priest generally had their marriages consecrated within the church. However, they could only receive clerical sanction of they married Indian women who had converted to Catholicism and received the sacraments. This and the continual shortage of clergy in the upper country made this type of marriage uncommon.

b. Mutual Consent Marriage - This was by far the most common type of marriage in the world of the fur trade. Both French and Indian partners consented to be married, and they lived together afterward. Often they would get the marriage consecrated by a priest later, but this still required that the Indian wife be converted to Catholicism. The baptismal register for Mackinac Island indicates that this was the exception rather than the rule as most children listed on the register in the 1700s were technically illegitimate in the eyes as the church.

c. Country Marriage - The mutual consent marriages were the basis for what became known as la façon du pays, or "the custom of the country." For short, these were called "country marriages." They were made by the mutual consent of both partners (from French-Canadian customs), and they could be dissolved anytime by the agreement of both partners (from Indian custom). This soon became the predominant form of marriage among Frenchmen and Indians and, as these unions produced a growing Métis society throughout the Great Lakes, it became the predominant form of marriage among Métis couples as well.

4) Abuses of the Country Marriage Customs - While most men who entered into these unions acted responsibly and in accordance with its established forms, abuses were not uncommon.

a. Abandonment - Many Frenchmen abandoned their Indian wives and went to other regions to engage in the fur trade. They would then take new wives in their new locales.

1. Indian women - If an Indian woman were abandoned, she could return to her tribe, where her extended family would help rear the children. Widows were common in Indian societies, so they had established familial networks to aid unwed women who had children to raise. Moreover, Indians in the Great Lakes did not use race as the basis for inclusion or exclusion from their societies, so the biracial children from French-Indian unions were not treated any differently than full-blooded Indian children. However, the available evidence indicates that Indian women who divorced their French or Métis husbands usually did not return to their tribes but remarried another French or Métis man.

2. Métis Women - Métis women had a different set of circumstances if they found themselves abandoned because they did not have immediate family within an Indian tribe. Like abandoned Indian women, they kept the children from their country marriages, but they generally had to find another Frenchman or Métis man to marry in order to provide for themselves or their children. They did not have the "safety net" of extended families or clans as Indian women did.

b. Concubinage - This was particularly common among Americans who came into the Great Lakes region after the War of 1812. Americans generally corrupted the practice of country marriage by entering into short-term unions with Indian and Métis women that were made only for sexual purposes.

IV. Métis Society in the Great Lakes

The children of French-Indian marriages were the Métis, and by the end of the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s they began to live in numerous settlements throughout the Great Lakes region at places such as Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, Chicago, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Sault Ste. Marie, Detroit, Mackinac Island, and Milwaukee. Almost of all these sites were Indian settlements as well, and the fur trade was the most important business at these locations.

A. Types of Métis Settlements - Métis settlements varied in both size and function.

1) Commercial-Military Center - The two most important sites in the Great Lakes region were Detroit and Mackinac Island. These were at strategic locations where the French and later the British and Americans established military posts. These military posts meant that the local affairs tended to be regulated to a large degree by far-away colonial governments. The military also meant that the economy was more diversified, for while many people at Detroit and Mackinac Island engaged in the fur trade, some Métis settlers instead grew food to sell to the garrisons or to fur traders. These were some of the largest of the Métis settlements and had over one thousand persons (including the military).

2) Corporate Trading Town - Included in this category were River Raisin (near Detroit), Green Bay, and Prairie du Chien. They tended to be self-regulating, unlike commercial-military sites like Detroit and Mackinac. Corporate trading towns were almost entirely dependent upon the fur trade, and they depended upon the commercial-military centers to send them food and new people to work in the trade. Populations of corporate trading towns usually numbered less than five hundred people. The 1820 censuses for Green Bay and Prairie du Chien listed 337 and 361 persons respectively, not including the American troops that had recently been stationed at both locations.

3) Jack-knife Posts - These constituted the most numerous type of Métis settlements but they were also the smallest. These almost always consisted of fewer than one hundred people and usually fewer than fifty. Milwaukee, Portage, Butte des Morts, and La Pointe were all jack-knife posts. Usually only one to five different families lived at such places, which were dependent upon corporate towns and commercial-military centers for trade goods and markets for their furs. Many towns were "patriarchical fiefdoms" controlled by one family. The Vieaus, for instance, controlled the trade at Milwaukee, and the Cadottes were the principal family at Sault Ste. Marie.

B. Social Classes - Métis society was not completely homogenous or egalitarian, and there were definite social classes based upon a person's station and occupation in the fur trade.

1) Bourgeois - These were the men at the top of the fur trade. They were the traders with the money and capital who bought the trade goods, sold the furs, and hired the men who worked in the trade.

2) Commis - Below the bourgeois were the clerks of the trade called the commis. They gained their positions because they could read and write, and they kept the books and wrote the correspondence of the trade. Often, they became bourgeois if they managed to save up enough money.

3) Voyageurs - These men were the backbone of the trade, and they plied the waters of the Great Lakes in canoes and moved furs and trade goods. Although this word originally was used to designate a licensed trader during the French regime, by about the 1780s it came to designate a boatman. Their work was hard and their pay was low. They were at the bottom of fur trade society, and the majority were illiterate and therefore unable to become bourgeois or commis. Indeed, by the 1800s, the voyageurs had become almost a caste. Although creole or full-blooded French Canadians were recruited from Quebec to fill these positions during the 1700s and even into the 1830s, as time went on voyageurs increasingly were recruited from the Métis settlements of the Great Lakes region. Among the voyageurs, there were certain distinctions.

a. Hivernants - These were "seasoned" voyageurs who wintered over at least one winter in the Indian country.

b. Mangeur du lard - This meant "pork-eaters", and these were "rookie" voyageurs in the trade, the majority of whom were creole French Canadians. The food of the voyageurs was a simple fare of corn mixed with grease, but because new men often found it difficult to subsist on this, they were given pork to eat until they could stomach the food of the seasoned voyageurs.

V. Births and Marriages in Great Lakes Métis Society

A. Births - Between 1765 and about 1830, the majority of children born in Great Lakes fur-trading towns were Métis born either of French-Indian marriages, Métis-Indian marriages, or Métis-Métis marriages. This, of course, led to many gradations in how much French or Indian blood a person had, but the majority of people were of biracial descent. Also, after about 1763, some people were of English or Scottish descent. The British gained control of New France and the French possessions in the present-day Midwest, and this inaugurated a westward push of Britannic traders into the Great Lakes region. The ranks of the fur trade continued to be dominated by French Canadians after 1760, but some men of English and Scottish heritage went west. There is a persistent myth in history that British men did not marry as frequently with the Indians as the French Canadians, but this was only because their numbers were smaller. Those English and Scottish men who went into the Great Lakes region generally practiced the same marriage customs as their French-Canadian counterparts.

1. Mackinac - The best source to show the increased incidence of Métis births is the Mackinac baptismal register. The following births were recorded in the Mackinac baptismal register between 1689 and 1765:

Mackinac Births, 1689-1765

The births of Métis rose considerably in the thirty years after this between 1765 and 1797:

Mackinac Births, 1765-1797

The register also shows marriages at Mackinac between 1765 and 1818. The register indicates that as time went on, at least one partner in a marriage had at least some Indian ancestry:

Mackinac Marriages, 1765-1818

2. Green Bay - No source exists for Green Bay that provides the same type of information as the Mackinac baptismal register, but information from other sources reveals that the same kinds of unions were taking place and that a predominantly Métis society became established.

Green Bay Households, 1750-1829

Years	Heads of Households	Est. Pop.	Métis Heads of Households	Métis Households	% Métis
1740-1796	27	171	4	22	81.48
1796-1816	84	533	22	73	86.90
1816-1829	142	897	40-60	85	59.86

(NOTE: All information from these tables is taken from Jacqueline Peterson, "Ethnogenesis: The Settlement of a 'New People' in the Great Lakes Region, 1702-1815," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 6:2 (1982): 23-64.)

a. Green Bay Marriages - Marriages were recorded at Green Bay after about 1820 when the United States began to establish civil institutions such as county government. The marriage records must be used with care because they record only the names of the couples. It is not possible to find out in most cases whether someone with a French or other European name had any Indian blood, although most of them undoubtedly did. It is possible to see the rate of intermarriage between those with French, English, and other European names with Indian women. Many of the non-French Euro-Americans were Anglo-Canadians, but some of them were Americans who had recently arrived in the region to enter the fur trade. In all cases, marriages with Indian women generally became less common among men with French and other European names, and these groups all began to marry more frequently among themselves. It should be noted that the records used to compile this table are incomplete, and, given the somewhat cavalier attitude toward record keeping in the early nineteenth century, there were many that probably were not recorded. Nevertheless, certain patterns do emerge.

In this section, only marriages between persons with French and Indian names are considered. The data indicates that from 1824 to 1842, there was a definite shift away from marriages with Indian women by men with French names. It became more common for them to marry women with French names. The data do not firmly support any other conclusions, but it may be safely implied that persons of Métis heritage became more likely to marry one another than Indians. Other data not presented in this table also shows that men and women with French names also began to marry persons of the other ethnic backgrounds, particularly the incoming Irish. This is not surprising since both groups came from Roman Catholic backgrounds.

Green Bay Marriages, 1824-1842

(NOTE: The information used to compile this information has been taken from The Early Marriage Record Book, 1823-1844, Records of the Brown County Register of Deeds, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Area Research Center, Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Original Marriage Records, Brown Series 50, Records of the Brown County Register of Deeds, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Area Research Center, Green Bay, Wisconsin.)

VI. The End of Métis Society in the Great Lakes Region

Métis society was born out of the North American fur trade, and as this institution began to fade after about 1830, so did the society that it created. The Métis came from a biracial and bicultural background, but their sense of identity did not originate in the unique racial or cultural heritage. It came instead from their participation in the fur trade, and when this activity began to fade, so did the communities of the Métis. There were actually a collusion of three forces that led to the dissolution of Métis communities.

A. Decline of the Fur Trade, 1830s and 1840s - The export of furs from the Great Lakes region actually increased during the 1830s and 1840s, but the persons harvesting furs tended to be newly-arrived farmers who hunted around their farms and used furs as a way to supplement their incomes. Thus, voyageurs and bourgeois were no longer needed to trade for the furs and transport them. Also, merchants from the eastern seaboard appeared in the Great Lakes region and bought furs directly from these farmers and the Indians. They usually paid cash, and this ended the earlier credit system that traders used with the Indians.

1) New Occupations - The Métis were forced during this period to find new employment as the fur trade declined. The bourgeois usually had the education and resources needed to do well in these changed circumstances. Andrew Vieau, for example, moved into lumbering in order to sell timber to settlers who had to build barns and homes. Solomon Juneau, on the other hand, began to speculate in land in the booming town site of Milwaukee. The voyageurs usually had to settle for less-glamorous but steady work as lumberjacks, transportation workers, and other jobs in the laboring professions.

B. The End of Country Marriage as an Institution, 1820s - One reason that marriages to Indians began to die away was that from the 1820s onward, the United States began to make its political and legal presence in the Great Lakes more firm. Country marriages were seen as a form of "fornication," and American judges fined men who engaged in such unions. Even during the height of this institution in the late 1700s, it was not uncommon for a Métis man to separate from his Indian wife in order to form a more lucrative union with a Métis woman who came from a good family. As the institution of country marriages ended in the Great Lakes and were replaced by permanent unions. Métis men were more likely to seek favorable unions right away. While marriage to an Indian woman could bring important ties to tribal societies, the decline of the fur trade made marriages of this kind less important, and Métis men instead sought Métis women. As the immigration of other Catholic ethnic groups increased in the 1830s, Métis men and women also married Irish, German, and Dutch partners as well.

C. Anglo-American Racial Attitudes - Anglo-Americans from the eastern seaboard spilled into the Great Lakes region during the 1830s and 1840s, and they held very negative ideas toward racial miscegenation and mixed marriages. The Métis were increasingly labeled either "white" if they had only a little Indian blood and "Indian" if they had a large amount of it. Not surprisingly, many Métis joined their kin among the Indians rather than assimilating into Anglo-American society.

VII. The Legacy of the Great Lakes Métis

The dissolution of Métis societies did not end their legacy in the Great Lakes region. Indeed, many place names such as Marinette, Prairie du Chien, Detroit, Eau Claire, and Vincennes still grace the map of the Midwest. Moreover, the large prevalence of French names among the present-day Indian tribes of the Great Lakes attests to the frequent intermarriage of the two groups. The height of Great Lakes Métis society came in the late 1700s, but the changes that occurred with the large influx of Anglo-Americans and Euro-Americans overwhelmed the Métis. It has been estimated that about 15,000 Métis lived in the Great Lakes region by the late 1820s. The Métis may be gone, but their spirit lives on in the Great Lakes region today.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Following works were consulted in the writing of this essay. These should be consulted for further reading on the Great Lakes Métis.

Brown, Jennifer S. H. "Métis, Halfbreeds, and Other Real People: Challenging Cultures and Categories." History Teacher 27 (November 1993): 19-26

Dickason, Olive P. "From 'One Nation' in the Northeast to 'New Nation' in the Northwest: A Look at the Emergence of the Métis. "In The New Peoples: and Becoming Métis in North America, ed. Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, 19-36. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Jung, Patrick J. "Forge, Destroy, and Preserve the Bonds of Empire: Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and Métis on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1634-1856." Ph.D. dissertation, Marquette University, 1997.

Peterson, Jacqueline. "Ethnogenesis: The Settlement of a 'New People' in the Great Lakes Region, 1702-1815." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 6:2 (1982): 23-64.

Peterson, Jacqueline. "Many Roads to Red River: Métis Genesis in the Great Lakes Region, 1680-1815." In The New Peoples: and Becoming Métis in North America, ed. Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, 37-71. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Peterson, Jacqueline. "The People in Between: Indian-White Marriage and the Genesis of a Métis Society and Culture in the Great Lakes Region, 1680-1830." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, 1981.

Peterson, Jacqueline. "Prelude to Red River: A Social Portrait of the Great Lakes Métis." Ethnohistory 25 (Winter 1978): 41-67.

Trask, Kerry A. "Settlement in a Half Savage Land: Life and Loss in the Métis Community of La Baye." Michigan Historical Review 15 (Spring 1989): 1-27.

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