Climate, Ecology and History in North America’s Tallgrass Prairie Borderlands*

Abstract

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.