In 1989, Mackinac State Historic Parks secured a National Endowment for the Humanities self-study grant, which resulted in the development of a ten-year Interpretive Plan for its historic sites in Mackinaw City and on Mackinac Island, Michigan. During the self-study process it became apparent that research into French-language documents was essential for future exhibits and programs. The planning team agreed that locating, translating, and publishing documents pertinent to seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Michilimackinac and the Great Lakes region could provide valuable historical information previously inaccessible to English-language researchers or the public.

While attending the annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society...

In the first half of the seventeenth century, as the English colonized most of the Atlantic coast of North America, the French moved into the interior of the continent via the St. Lawrence River. By the 1670s, French fur traders and missionaries were operating in the western Great Lakes region, winning the Lakes Indians as their allies and trading partners. In 1671 Father Jacques Marquette founded a Jesuit mission at Saint-Ignace de Michilimackinac, on the straits which join Lakes Michigan and Huron. Within a decade, Michilimackinac had become the western hub of the French fur trade with the Indians in...

Second Ensign Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre’s first command, which he assumed in 1729, was among the Chippewas at the Chagouarnigon post, also known as La Pointe, on the southwest shore of Lake Superior, near Ashland, Wisconsin. The strategic post, a gateway to the Siouan tribes, had been reestablished in 1718 by his father, Captain Jean-Paul Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, and there is evidence that Jacques lived there as a teenager, becoming proficient in Indian languages and culture as his father had. The young Saint-Pierre was appointed to this command to replace Louis Denys de La Ronde, a colorful fifty-four-year-old captain whose...

From 1737 to 1739 Saint-Pierre appears to have remained in the lower colony. It was during this time, on 27 October 1738; that the thirtyseven-year-old bachelor married Marie-Joseph Guillimin, the twentythree-year-old minor daughter of Charles Guillimin, king's councillor in the Superior Council of New France, a shipbuilder and once-wealthy merchant descended from a noble family of Brittany. Two days earlier, on 25 October, in the Château Saint-Louis in Quebec, before Governor-General of New France Charles de La Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois, the marriage contract of Marie-Joseph Guillimin and Jacques Legardeur de SaintPierre had been drawn up, after which a copy...

Hostilities between the French and English North American colonies initiating King George’s War, the North American extension of the War of the Austrian Succession, began in 1744. Jean-Baptiste-Louis Le Provost Duquesnel, commandant of Louisbourg, attacked and destroyed the English fort on Canso Island, Nova Scotia, on 13 May 1744, but his subsequent expedition against Annapolis Royal failed. The English colonists responded in the spring of 1745 with an expedition under William Pepperell against Louisbourg, a thorn in the side of the Atlantic seaboard English colonies. The fall of Louisbourg to Pepperell in June 1745 was to prove a grievous loss...

Louis de La Corne, the Michilimackinac commandant from 1745 to 1747, left that post in July 1747 with a war party of Potawatomis, Illinois, Sauks, Miamis, and Menominees to raid rural settlements in New York. His second-in-command at Michilimackinac, Charles-Joseph Noyelles de Fleurimont, known as De(s) Noyelle(s), was acting commandant of the post after La Corne’s departure. After accomplishing their mission, on 30 August 1747, La Corne’s Indians were assembled in Montreal about to return to their villages, awaiting their promised presents from the French for their war service. At the same time Beauharnois, who was in his last weeks...

The notion of a western sea that would provide the French with a navigable northern water route to Asia can be traced back to Giovanni da Verrazano who sailed for Francis I of France in 1524. Finding “a barrier of new land” (the Atlantic coast of North America), he unsuccessfully sought “a strait to penetrate to the Eastern ocean.” By 1717, the king’s first geographer, Guillaume Delisle, had put on paper his conception of where the mythical Western Sea (Mer de I’ouest) and River of the West (Rivière de I’ouest) might be situated. Knowing by then that the Gulf of...

The two synchronous manuscripts that have come to light illustrate in great detail Saint-Pierre’s two distinct roles during his years as commandant of the posts of the Western Sea. His orders specified that he had been “assigned to go in search of the Western Sea” and “to disregard even his plans for personal gain.”¹ His official report of 7 October 1753 covers the highlights of his entire tour of duty in the Western Sea, focusing upon incredible hardships, his relations—some of them death-defying—with various Indian tribes, and his efforts to locate the elusive river leading to the equally...

By the late 1740s traders from Virginia and Pennsylvania had established fruitful relationships with the Iroquois (Mingo), Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami Indians in the Ohio River Valley. The French viewed with alarm the success of the English traders at their trading posts of Venango on the Allegheny and Logstown near the forks of the Ohio, and as far west on the Ohio as Pickawillany (Piqua, Ohio) to the south of the French post among the Miamis. In 1749 the English Crown granted the Ohio Company land on both sides of the Ohio River, with settlement in mind. This territory was...

Saint-Pierre did not die in vain even though the Battle of Lac Saint-Sacrement (Lake George) was not decisive. The English colonials’ planned attack on Fort St. Frédéric and invasion of New France from the south were stopped in their tracks. At the same time, the preemptive strike by Dieskau failed to defeat his enemy the way Braddock had been crushed at the Monongahela, and it was the French who were obliged to withdraw from the field of action, leaving their wounded general behind to be taken prisoner. This alone was sufficient reason for the English to rejoice and the French...