FOX WAR

FOX WAR. The Fox, or Mesquakie, peoples dominated the Mississippi and its tributaries in northern Illinois, eastern Iowa, and southern Wisconsin throughout much of the French colonial period. Loosely tied to the expanding French empire by the Great Lakes fur trade, beginning in the first decades of the eighteenth century the Fox resisted New France's attempts to incorporate them into the evolving French–Algonquin alliance of the Great Lakes. Fearful that their trading advantages and communities would be jeopardized by expanding French–Algonquin hegemony, the Fox became bitterly embroiled in a war with the French and their Indian allies. The Fox's attempt to remain independent of French political control threatened the precarious stability of the entire region's French–Indian alliance system. French officials accordingly mobilized large military campaigns to subjugate Fox communities. After a series of indecisive battles beginning at Detroit in 1712, the Fox attempted to form alliances with the region's other Indian groups, including the Winnebagos (Ho-Chunks) and Kickapoos. Fearful that they might lose not only their trading advantages throughout the region but also their entire political and military alliance system in the Great Lakes, the French responded with a campaign of extermination. Fox communities were besieged and terrorized throughout the 1730s. Eventually driven west of the Mississippi, Fox refugees resettled in Iowa but maintained close allegiances to their former homelands and with traditional allies, particularly the Saux.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edmunds, R. David, and Joseph L. Peyser. The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

NedBlackhawk

See alsoMesquakie ; Wars with Indian Nations .