From the time the French had first entered the pays d’en haut until the second half of the 18th century, the Great Lakes region can be seen as what historian Richard White has called a “middle ground” between Algonquian people like the Ojibwe, Menominee, Odawa, and Potawatomi, on the one hand, and European empires like the French on the other. The term “middle ground” indicates that both groups benefited mutually from their relationship; Natives and French were interdependent and neither party could fully impose its will upon the other. One way in which we can see the creation of a “middle ground” situation in Wisconsin is in the development of the communities of La Baie/Green Bay and Prairie du Chien.
These communities, usually located at or near points where Native people gathered, were originally trading posts, sometimes associated with small military forts. When French traders established or moved to these posts, they often married Native women, which created an advantage for both the trader and the Native family. In Native communities, family or kin ties were crucial in establishing relationships of trust. Traders who married into Native communities had greater access to trade partners, and the families of Native women who married Frenchmen also had greater access to trade goods for their families. The children of these intercultural marriages often played important roles in these communities and beyond.
“La Baie” or Green Bay
One man of French-Odawa heritage who attained particular notoriety was Charles Langlade, born at Fort Michilimackinac on the Straits of Mackinac, who became a trader and French colonial military officer. Fluent in the Odawa and French languages, Langlade was asked to lead French and Native forces in several battles. He led a group of Odawa warriors at the Plains of Abraham battle between the French and British armies, and it was he who surrendered the French forces to the British at Fort Michilimackinac in 1761. After the end of the war, Langlade transferred his allegiance to Great Britain, and moved with his family to La Baie, where he established a home and continued in the fur trade. He and his family were joined there by others, including Pierre Grignon, Sr., who settled on land adjacent to the Langlades’ and married Charles’ daughter Domitille. Other French-speaking traders who settled in La Baie in the last quarter of the 18th century also established marital connections to the Menominee and Odawa people.
Later visitors to La Baie noted that the population of the small town—some 500 inhabitants, by 1820—was overwhelmingly of French-speaking or mixed European/Native origin. The pattern of land organization in the town and up the Fox River was the same as that used in Quebec: the long lot system. In this system, lots are narrow and deep: the narrow side fronts on the river and the lot stretches far inland from the river. This kind of land organization is often known as “ribbon farms,” and can be seen in French settlements throughout the former New France. In Wisconsin, by 1812, long lots lay perpendicular to both sides of the Fox River from Green Bay to De Pere. Though sizes varied, typically a long lot would measure one or two arpents wide (one French arpent is equivalent to about 192 English feet) on the narrow side, and at La Baie could measure up to eighty arpents, or nearly three miles in depth.
Prairie du Chien
The community of Prairie du Chien, located north of the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers, had similarities to La Baie both culturally and in land distribution patterns. French-speaking traders who had settled there had marital connections to several Native peoples, including Sauk, Ho-Chunk, and Mdewakanton and Sisseton Dakota. Some French speakers moved up from the Illinois country to settle in Prairie du Chien, and others who had been born in Quebec City and Montreal also took up residence in the Mississippi River community.
At Prairie du Chien, there was a variant of the French-Canadian long lot system, caused by the influence of settlers from the Illinois Country and physical barriers of the river and bluffs that hemmed in the prairie. While there were agricultural long lots in the vast expanse of the prairie which were used for farming and communal pasturage, there were also three villages divided into long lots. Americans traveling in Prairie du Chien in the early 1800s recorded that houses were constructed in the traditional Illinois Country French-Canadian style of upright beams called poteau sur solle (posts on a sill) or poteau en terre (posts in the ground). Other early American observers noted the culture of the town’s French-speaking and mixed inhabitants, writing disapprovingly that they seemed to lack the desire to gain wealth through hard work, but rather worked enough to provide and spent Sundays in pleasurable pursuits. They also noted the great hospitality of the French residents of the prairie.
Other French Speakers
There are other examples of French-speakers playing a role in the early history of Wisconsin. In 1795 a French-Canadian named Jacques Vieau started a fur trade post at the site of present-day Milwaukee. A clerk for the North West Company, he also worked out of La Pointe and La Baie. His son-in-law, fur trader and businessman Solomon Juneau, who was born in Quebec in 1793, became instrumental in the development of the town of Milwaukee. He became an American citizen in 1831, and with a partner laid out plans for the city on land that he had been granted by the U.S. government. Juneau became village president and then the town’s first mayor when it was incorporated as a city in 1846.
Immigrants from the French-speaking region of Belgium called Wallonia settled near Green Bay in the mid-nineteenth century. Migrants from Belgium to the counties of Door, Kewaunee, and Brown were attracted by land newly available for purchase and were principally engaged in farming in their new home. Towns named Namur, Rosiere, Belgium, and Brussels recall this heritage, and the Belgian Heritage Center, located in Brussels, celebrates the French-speaking Belgian roots of this population.
From 1800 on, new policies established by the United States government directly impacted the culture and economy that brought together French speakers and their Native trade and family partners. A new system for managing the fur trade through “fur factories” was developed, and treaties were imposed on the Native people that forced them to turn over their traditional homelands to the U.S., which the government sold to American settlers and land speculators. In addition, American culture encouraged the development of an agrarian society different from what characterized the world of the French-speaking fur traders and Native peoples.
The culture and the fur trade economy that brought together French speakers and their Native trade and family partners disappeared from Wisconsin. There remain the many names that French explorers and traders gave to the rivers they traveled and the sites of trade, such as Fond du Lac, Platteville, La Pointe, Flambeau, Lac Courte Oreilles, and many more. And in homes throughout the state, French traditions in food and celebrations continue to be handed down generation to generation. All bear witness to Wisconsin’s heritage as part of la Nouvelle France.
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