Odd Wisconsin

Odd Wisconsin Archive

Indian Women & French Men

March is Women’s History Month, so for the next few weeks Odd Wisconsin will occasionally feature the lives of Wisconsin women. Indian women, of course, have been making history in Wisconsin for the longest time. Although passing references to them occur in the 17th-c. Jesuit Relations, the first detailed accounts occur in a 1702 letter by outraged priest Etienne Carheil. He was writing from the head of Lake Michigan to protest wanton sex and drunkenness of Frenchmen out here on the western frontier.

The fur trade in Wisconsin was young at the time, but it had already begun to wreak havoc on traditional Indian ways of life. Fr. Carheil protests the practice of fur traders taking semi-permanent Indian partners during the time they were in the wilderness. In explaining the situation to the French governor, he gives the earliest descriptions of the work done by Indian women: “to pound corn for them, to carry wood for them, to wash their clothes, to make shoes for them, or, finally, to render them any other kind of honest service…” – and other services he did not consider so “honest”[pp. 231-237]. Like the fur traders, French soldiers traveling to the interior were more interested in accumulating beaver pelts than in anything else. Fr. Carheil was concerned that Indian women “have found out that their bodies might serve in lieu of merchandise and would be still better received than Beaver-skins; accordingly, that is now the most usual and most Continual Commerce, and that which is most extensively carried on.” [p. 197] Although he was writing from Mackinaw, missions and trading posts had been established in Wisconsin at modern Green Bay, Depere, LaPointe, and elsewhere, and these were presumably some of the locations Fr. Carheil was describing.

To be sure, most Indian women did not fall prey to such blatant exploitation by the white intruders. After all, Fr. Carheil was a strict moralist who was trying to emphasize what he saw as sinful behavior, not to describe the lives of all Indian women. Women who followed traditional tribal ways sometimes rose to positions of power and influence: in an upcoming Odd Wisconsin entry we’ll see the exploits of Glory of the Morning, a Ho-Chunk woman who became chief of the large Indian community at modern Neenah-Menasha only a few decades after Fr. Carheil’s report. And many permanent and lasting unions between French men and Indian women are also recorded during the fur trade era. But sexual exploitation and the fate of metis offspring dominate this first detailed account of Indian women in Wisconsin, and they remained important aspects of Wisconsin history for 150 years after Fr. Carheil. As a result, many of Wisconsin’s “founding fathers” were at least part Indian.