196 Kansas History “To the Other Side of the Sun”: Indigenous Diplomacy and Power in the Midcontinent by Garrett Wright
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Artist Karl Bodmer’s combined sketches of an Oto and Missouri Indian, and a Ponca chief, circa 1833-34. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 41 (Winter 2018–2019): 196–209 196 Kansas History “To the Other Side of the Sun”: Indigenous Diplomacy and Power in the Midcontinent by Garrett Wright n late 1724, Mitchigamea, Otoe, Missouria, and Osage ambassadors left their homes in the American Midwest and embarked on an eighteen-month journey through the French Atlantic empire. Along the way, they endured meager rations, a shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico, and illness while crossing the Atlantic. They intended to meet with the “Great Chief” of the French, fifteen-year-old King Louis XV, in order to affirm an alliance with him and to outline their expectations of their French neighbors in the Illinois Country. “I came here to see the King on behalf of my Nation Iand my people,” one of the diplomats stated in a speech to imperial officials in Paris. “If I do not hear from him then I will go back to my people.” They received their wish: by the time they returned home in early 1726, the four Native American emissaries had conducted a diplomatic ceremony with the king, who had promised to “see to the needs of [their] Nations.”1 The Native delegation to France offers a different perspective on the history of the early modern Atlantic world. Histories of coastal American societies tend to focus on the incorporation of indigenous peoples into Atlantic networks of exchange and diplomacy, either through direct colonization or the indirect flow of European trade goods. Such incorporation was far from one-sided, of course, and Native peoples living near coastal European empires often resisted and subverted imperial goals. Yet Atlantic histories largely follow the westward movement of people, ideas, and trade goods from Europe and Africa to the Americas. This study instead follows Native individuals who lived far from the centers of any European empire as they traveled eastward to discover a new world and establish relationships that would benefit their respective nations back home in North America. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of 2 scholarship that highlights the power of Native nations vis-à-vis European empires in the continental interior. Garrett W. Wright is a PhD candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation focuses on travel and diplomacy in the eighteenth-century Central Great Plains. He wishes to thank Kathleen DuVal, Caroline Newhall, Robert Richard, Aubrey Lauersdorf, the participants of the 2016 “Transatlantic Historical Approaches” workshop cosponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill and King’s College London, and the anonymous readers for Kansas History for their comments on earlier drafts of the article. 1. “Relation de l’arrivée en France de quatre Sauvages de Missicipi, de leur sejour, & des audiences qu’ils ont eues du Roi, des Princes du Sang, de la Compagnie des Indes, avec les complimens qu’ils ont fait, les honneurs & les presens qu’ils ont reçûs, &c.,” Mercure de France 1 (1725): 2833, 2850. 2. Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Elizabeth A. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015). “To The Other Side of the Sun” 197 A history of Native diplomacy in the 1720s reveals the legitimate diplomatic representatives by agents of the layered nature of American history. The Mitchigameas, French empire—not as mere novelties.6 Otoes, Missourias, and Osages lived and thrived in the French officials organized and funded the delegation midcontinent long before they sent representatives to with one goal in mind: impressing the Native American France, and they would do so long after the diplomats ambassadors. The prospects for France’s North American returned home. The delegation to France provides a holdings appeared grim in the early eighteenth century. glimpse into one moment of cross-cultural diplomacy After years of land speculation fueled by Scottish in which Native peoples seized upon an alliance with economist John Law’s exaggerated marketing, the so-called the French to further their own interests within their Mississippi Bubble burst in 1720, exposing the fragility respective territories. Analysis of the delegation therefore of the paper money liberally distributed by the Banque extends the history of the continental interior back in Royale. With little financial backing and few settlers, time, long before the westward expansion of the United Louisiana appeared to be on the brink of collapse. French States in the nineteenth century, to underscore the region’s settlers and officials frequently complained about scarce vibrant, long-ago past.3 food, shoddy settlements, and little protection against Such American Indian expeditions to European Native populations demanding tribute from invasive territories were not uncommon in the early modern era. French settlers. Many colonial officials believed that Native American delegations from nations across the Louisiana’s future hinged upon the success of garrisons continent often visited the empires encroaching on their in the Illinois Country, where Frenchmen believed they borders and beyond. In meetings with imperial officials, would find precious minerals that might give Louisiana Native diplomats sought to render European newcomers a more stable source of financial support. The Illinois useful as purveyors of goods, neutral diplomatic Country also had great potential for intraimperial trade mediators, or proxy warriors in conflicts with other Native with France’s former enemies in Spanish New Mexico, an nations. Historians have recently begun to reveal the opportunity made possible by the end of the Quadruple quantity and breadth of these expeditions, with a primary Alliance (1717–1720). Such commerce would give French focus on American Indians’ travels through the British colonists access to Spanish merchandise, namely, minerals empire.4 Few historians have analyzed the Mitchigamea, and horses.7 Otoe, Missouria, and Osage delegation to France in detail, The success of European imperial projects in the Illinois and in older narratives, the Native ambassadors tend to Country hinged upon the support of Native nations who be portrayed as passive travelers following French guides lived nearby in Illinois and the Great Plains. Yet French and piquing the curiosity of cosmopolitan Europeans officials recognized that their sparse settlements and rather than as ambassadors with motivations rooted in lack of supplies in the Illinois Country would do little to their respective nations’ interests.5 This article argues convince strong Native nations to ally with the French. that the Native emissaries who traversed the Atlantic To this end, officials conceived a plan to fund a Native Ocean did so to assert their territorial sovereignty and delegation to Paris, where the Indians might witness to incorporate the French empire into their network of France’s cultural, demographic, and military power that allies in North America. As such, they were treated as was so lacking in North America. Louisiana’s governor, 3. J. Frederick Fausz similarly extended the history of one western 6. In Ellis and Steen, “An Indian Delegation in France, 1725,” the city, St. Louis, far beyond the scope of traditional narratives to include authors state that the Native diplomats came from “the wilderness” and the eighteenth-century context for the region. See Fausz, Founding St. were treated as “a novelty and not as representatives of a legitimate Louis: First City of the New West (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011). culture.” Ellis and Steen insist that the diplomats “said what was 4. Coll-Peter Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of expected” and accomplished little. Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Jace Weaver, The 7. Company of the Indies Instructions to Bourgmont, January 17, Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000– 1722, in Pierre Margry, ed., Découvertes et Établissements des Français dans 1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Alden T. l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique Septentrionale, 1614–1698, mémoires et Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 documents inédits recueillis et publies par Pierre Margry (New York: AMS (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Press, 1974), 6:389–91; La Renaudiere to the Minister, August 3, 1723, 5. Richard N. Ellis and Charlie R. Steen, “An Indian Delegation in Series C13C4, Archives Nationales, Paris, France, folio 105, microfilmed France, 1725,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (September at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Williams Research Center, New 1974): 385–405; DuVal, The Native Ground, 107; Olivia A. Bloechl, Native Orleans, LA (hereafter HNOC). For more on John Law and the burst American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: of the Mississippi Bubble, see Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Cambridge University Press, 2008), 188. Theorist and Policy-Maker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 198 Kansas History Guillaume De L’Isle’s 1718 map of French Louisiana representing the location of the Mississippi River in relation to geographic features, river- ways, and assumed locations of native groups and villages with whom Europeans such as the Frenchman Bourgmont would have interacted in the central plains and middle west. Courtesy of Library of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.