Colonialism Transforms Indian Life

European microbes probably reached Wisconsin's Indians before European explorers. In the fifty years following Hernando de Soto's invasion of the lower Mississippi in 1539-1540, disease wiped out 90 percent of Indian villages in the middle Mississippi Valley - villages with whom Wisconsin's Oneota culture had traded for centuries. Some archaeologists therefore think it likely that epidemics of measles or smallpox may have swept through native communities here decades before Nicolet stepped ashore at Red Banks.

When the French arrived and began living in Indian villages, diseases once again broke out. "Maladies wrought among them more devastation than even war did,"... more...

Original Documents and Other Primary Sources

	Menominee Vocabulary, 1893
	Indian Versions of Some Early Wisconsin Events
	The Meskwaki (Fox) and Mascouten resist the French in 1712.
	An 1818 War Department report describes early U.S. fur trade policies.
	The diary of the British commander in Wisconsin during Pontiac's war in 1763.
	The Ho-Chunk recall 18th-century battles with the Meskwaki (Fox).
	A French official summarizes Wisconsin tribes in 1736
	The governor of New France surrenders to the English in 1760.
	Speeches of Pontiac (1763) and Souligny (1848) against white incursions.
	Fr. Baraga's 1853 Ojibwe Dictionary
	Memoirs of an Interpreter among the Ojibwe, 1840-1900
	Smallpox decimates the Ojibwe in the 1770's
	A French priest writes home in 1721 about Indians, beavers, and fur.
	Sex, drinking, and moral corruption on the Wisconsin frontier in 1702.
	View of Charles de Langlade's warriors at Braddock's defeat in 1755.
	Brief Potawatomi Language Vocabularies, 1920-1932.
	A Long Ho-Chunk Vocabulary, 1880
	An English view of No. America in 1754
	A popular French map of the Great Lakes in 1757.
	Madeline Island Historical Museum

Primary Sources Available Elsewhere

	Jonathan Carver crosses Wisconsin in the 1760's
	An electronic text of the complete Jesuit Relations, at Creighton University.
	Collected historical documents from the Wisconsin Historical Society
	All of Charlevoix's letters from North America, 1721-1722.
	Baron Lahontan describes his visit to Wisconsin in 1688.
	A historical, documentary, and descriptive history of Wisconsin to 1854

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