Detroit and the “Fox Wars”: Telling Local and Imperial Histories in the Middle Ground

Richard White’s Middle Ground highlighted the importance of what had been a largely understudied geographical expanse. Created by means of a network of Euro-Indigenous intercultural brokers, this space also allowed for the development of localized expressions of these encounters. Detroit represents one such enclave, identified by White as the most volatile of the arenas of Euro-Indigenous interaction. In 1701, the French established a military and trading presence there, in an area located where several Indigenous homelands converged. By 1710, Detroit was a failed settlement in the eyes of French imperial authorities. Its inhabitants engaged in illegal commerce; its Indigenous residents engaged in an incessant cycle of war; and the palisades of its French fort were rotting into the ground. But what looked to these authorities as the imminent collapse of state control was actually the parsing-out of power relations by local French-Indigenous family networks. Nowhere was this bifurcated vision of Detroit more evident than during the initial events of the Fox Wars. A brutal campaign waged by the French state against the Meskwaki that would last twenty years began when a Meskwaki contingent attacked the French fort in 1712. There were two renditions of this event, one generated by imperial authorities, and another that can be traced through activities of French-Indigenous families. Its importance in local history is evidenced three hundred years later by a historical marker designating the site of the violence and by a French folk song. This paper will explore the multiple narratives of events of 1712 from contemporary and twenty-first century sources to illustrate how White's Middle Ground functioned via French and Indigenous brokers at Detroit and how it persisted much longer than White originally hypothesized.