Among its many provocations was the monopoly for trade in Spanish ports. Portugal had returned the asiento in 1701, and Philip reawarded it to the Louis XIV. He, in turn, granted it to Jean-Baptiste Ducasse, then governor of a sugar colony, Saint-Dominique. The three, Ducasse, Louis and Philip, were to split the profits.
The asiento included the right to deliver African slaves to Veracruz for the lowland sugar plantations. The Council of the Indies thought France dangerous and impeded its implementation. Natives made no protest; they didn’t want that work. The new viceroy, the Duque de Albuquerque, signed off when he arrived in 1702. The Portuguese buttressed England and Austria in the war.
This time, the Iroquois, temporarily weakened by smallpox, declared themselves neutral. Native groups moved back into lands they’d been forced to abandon. The Tamora left the Peoria to live with the Cahokia in 1699. The next year, Rouensa and the Kaskaskia left Pimitéoui.
The French had two goals: securing control of the Mississippi river and gaining access to Spain’s silver mines in northern México. They still thought the Missouri river would take them to Santa Fé. It empties into the Mississippi between the Illinois and Kaskaskia rivers that come from the left bank. Cahokia lies between the confluence and the Kaskaskia.
The French minster for colonial affairs dispatched Pierre Le Moyne to resume La Salle’s search for the mouth of the Mississippi in 1698. Le Moyne had been born in Québec, worked as an independent fur trader, and fought the English at Hudson’s Bay. He built his first gulf fort, Maurepas, on Biloxi Bay in 1699. His second was Fort Louis de la Louisiane on the Mobile river.
At the same time, 1698, the Séminaire des Missions Étrangères sent priests into Illinois country from Québec The Jesuits had already organized a mission at Starved Rock under Jacques Gravier. They assigned Pierre-Gabriel Marest to him that year. After some jurisdictional spatting, the first group left François Buisson de Saint Cosme with the Cahokia and directed the rest of their men south towards Le Moyne.
Marest followed Rouensa and the Kaskaskia. He had been the Jesuit chaplain for Le Moyne’s Hudson’s Bay expedition. Rouensa later said he had moved his band at the request of the Louisiana governor.
Gravier joined Henri de Tonti’s delegation of Cahokia coureurs de bois going to Fort Maurepas in 1701 with a load of beaver pelts. Soon after, the Illinois settlements was sending dried bison ribs south.
Nearly simultaneously, Charles Juchereau was in Paris lobbying the French ministry for a concession to develop a tannery in Illinois country. He argued he could provide an alternative for coureurs then selling furs to the English. He left Montréal in 1702 with some thirty men to build a fort near the mouth of the Ohio river. After he died in the 1703 smallpox epidemic, the Cherokee attacked. Some survivors went to Fort Louis. Others became coureurs.
Canadian authorities complained about his activities, as did Père Marest. Le Moyne supported the concession. His wife was the daughter of Marie-Anne Juchereau. Jucheareau’s family had begun lending money to coureurs in Montreal in the 1690s. Tonti was a client in 1693.
Le Moyne died in 1706. France tried to regularize the gulf region with a proprietary grant to Antoine Crozat in 1712. He, the Spanish and the English all had to handle the consequences of Le Moyne’s policy of encouraging young men to learn native languages and explore the country.
The El Cuartelejo Apache killed a white man and his Pawnee wife in 1706. The booty included a French gun and powder, a kettle, coat, and red-lined cap. Four days later, Juan de Ulibarrí arrived from Santa Fé on another matter. It was the first Spanish expedition onto the plains and Le Moyne’s coureurs were already on the upper reaches of the Arkansas and Missouri rivers.
In Europe, each state maneuvered to capture territory from one of its enemies. The Treaty of Utrecht awarded the throne of Spain to the House of Bourbon and adjudicated land claims. Spain kept its colonies in the new world, but lost its non-peninsular territory in Europe.
France was not allowed to profit from its influence in Spain. The treaty stipulated the two crowns could not be consolidated as the Austrian and Spanish had been under the Hapsburg Charles V. It eliminated the French monopoly in the fur trade, and mandated it be opened in western Canada (Rupert’s Land) to Hudson’s Bay Company. England also won the monopoly for importing slaves to México. All commerce between Nuevo México and the French became illegal again.
Notes: The French minster for colonial affairs was Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain. Pierre Le Moyne was the Sieur d'Iberville. Charles Juchereau was the Sieur de Saint Denis. Cairo, Illinois, is near his tannery. The War of Spanish Succession is called Queen Anne’s War in American history textbooks.
Caldwell, Norman W. "Charles Juchereau de St. Denys: A French Pioneer in the Mississippi Valley," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 28:563-579:1942.
Fortier, John. "Juchereau de Saint-Denys, Charles," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume 2, 1982 revision.
Morrissey, Robert Michael. Empire by Collaboration, 2015.
Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade, 1997; on the asiento.
Thompson, Joseph J. "The Cahokia Mission Property," Illinois Catholic Historical Review 5:195-217:1922.
White, Richard. "The Louisiana Purchase and the Fictions of Empire," in Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, Empires of the Imagination, 2009.
Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706, in Alfred B. Thomas, After Coronado, 1935.
Map: Shannon, "Map of Mississippi River," Wikimedia Commons, 5 April 2010.
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