No abstract

In the late 1600s, one of the largest population centres in North America — the so‐called Grand Village of the Kaskaskias in the upper Illinois River Valley — suddenly dissolved as various factions among its indigenous inhabitants split apart. While historians have often explained the resulting migrations as a response to the beginnings of colonial history in this region, this article argues that a greater factor may have been climate change. The region of the Illinois Valley was one of the most important ecological transition zones in North America, a biome-scale ecotone between the grasslands of the West and the woodlands of the East. New studies suggest that a major drought in this period had a drastic effect on the special ecological mosaic here, causing interruptions in dynamic ecosystem processes which likely impacted indigenous ways of life. This article provides not only a better understanding for one of the most consequential turning points in late seventeenth-century North American indigenous history, but also a model of the potential benefits of bringing ethnohistory, deep history, climate history and ecology together in a single cross-disciplinary narrative.

At the end of the Seven Years' War, the British Empire made its most serious effort to establish control over the trans-Appalachian west when it sent soldiers and colonists to the formerly-French settlements of the so-called Illinois Country. Despite this region's abundant resources and the presence of sympathetic Illinois Indians in the area, the British effort failed dismally. This essay explains the weakness of the British in part by examining the special ecology of the tallgrass prairie and one of its most important non-human inhabitants, the bison. Exploring the central (though ignored) place of bison in the lives of the Illinois Indians - the easternmost bison people in North America - I show how the animal was more than just a source of calories; it was the basis of collaborative relationships between the Illinois and colonial newcomers throughout the eighteenth century. In particular, bison trade was the foundation of a strong accommodation between the Illinois and the French regime in the Mississippi Valley beginning in the late seventeenth century and lasting through the Seven Years' War. When the British arrived in the 1760s, various factors combined to deplete the bison herds in the region, which in turn undermined the possibility of close diplomacy between the British and the Native people. Far from a simple story of aggressive newcomers and the commodification of nature, this was a scenario in which policy, ecology and imperial rivalries were all entangled, each affecting the other. This essay thus tells a new story, not just about a key chapter of imperial history in the early West, but also about a little-known bison culture at the very edge of the prairie-woodlands divide.

During climate changes of the early 1600s, a group of Algonquians moved west from the Great Lakes into a distinctive landscape—the tallgrass prairies of the midwest. Adapting themselves to this cultural and ecological borderland between the woodlands and grassland biomes of North America, these Algonquians created an identity as the Illinois and invented a new lifeway as pedestrian bison hunters. Their bison-based economy encouraged important changes in Illinois social life, including a new division of labor and conflicts with neighbors. When the contact era opened, these changes interacted in devastating fashion with the changes caused by the arrival of European colonists. Like other groups, the Illinois participated in mourning war, they suffered from disease, and they participated in trade which intensified their conflicts. But their actions cannot be fully understood without considering their bison economy, which shaped social and ecological realities for the Illinois. This essay shows how the Illinois’ adaptation to their distinctive prairie environment helped to influence their history.

Social network analysis is a burgeoning field of sociology, but it has only recently been adopted by social historians. This article provides an overview of the promise of social network analysis for social history, as well as a critical discussion of what the method does and does not provide. It focuses especially on the problem of "whole network" analysis and sketches questions that social network analysis can help answer in the past. The author then offers a reflection on his own experience using the method and shows what it provided in the study of a French-Indian community in the colonial Mississippi Valley.