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
	An 1818 War Department report describes early U.S. fur trade policies.
	The Ho-Chunk recall 18th-century battles with the Meskwaki (Fox).
	A French official summarizes Wisconsin tribes in 1736
	The Meskwaki (Fox) and Mascouten resist the French in 1712.
	The governor of New France surrenders to the English in 1760.
	Speeches of Pontiac (1763) and Souligny (1848) against white incursions.
	Indian Versions of Some Early Wisconsin Events
	The diary of the British commander in Wisconsin during Pontiac's war in 1763.
	Smallpox decimates the Ojibwe in the 1770's
	Sex, drinking, and moral corruption on the Wisconsin frontier in 1702.
	A French priest writes home in 1721 about Indians, beavers, and fur.
	Report on the Menominee at Termination, 1958
	Fr. Baraga's 1853 Ojibwe Dictionary
	Memoirs of an Interpreter among the Ojibwe, 1840-1900
	View of Charles de Langlade's warriors at Braddock's defeat in 1755.
	Brief Potawatomi Language Vocabularies, 1920-1932.
	Alfred Bridgman's English-Menominee word list from the 1870s
	A Long Ho-Chunk Vocabulary, 1880
	A popular French map of the Great Lakes in 1757.
	An English view of No. America in 1754
	Madeline Island Historical Museum

Primary Sources Available Elsewhere

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	Collected historical documents from the Wisconsin Historical Society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

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