Le Sueur in the Sioux country: rethinking France's Indian alliances in the Pays d'en Haut

Abstract

This essay explores the career of Pierre Charles Le Sueur, an explorer, fur trader, soldier, and diplomat in the nominal service of the French Crown at the turn of the eighteenth century among the Indian peoples of the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi Valley, the Pays d'en Haut. It uses Le Sueur's story to suggest a new explanation for the instability of France's Indian alliances in the Pays d'en Haut that brings current ethnohistorical accounts – which have largely emphasized the diversity of, and conflicts of interest between, Indian villages in the region – into conversation with revisionist works on Louis XIV's France which have similarly deconstructed monolithic portrayals of the “absolutist” state with which these peoples engaged. Le Sueur's story – his transition from a contraband trader, or coureur de bois, in the Pays d'en Haut to a prominent agent of French empire – reveals the layers of bitter political infighting within New France and Louisiana over control of the lucrative fur trade; the gambles and deception that often shaped the dealings of colonial agents with officials at Versailles; and, most importantly, the destabilizing effects that their schemes could have upon the Pays d'en Haut as trade routes conveying powerful means of war into the continental interior consequently shifted, offsetting tenuous balances of power between the very Indian peoples the Crown hoped to galvanize as allies. Exploring Le Sueur's risk-laden and ultimately ill-fated attempts to integrate the powerful Sioux peoples of the Upper Mississippi into existing networks of trade and diplomacy that had long been centered upon their enemies in the Great Lakes region reveals these alliance systems as the often tumultuous entanglement of two equally complex systems: the village politics of the Pays d'en Haut and patron–client networks linking these spaces with the court of Versailles.