University Place

Welcome all! My name is David Krugler, and I'm a Professor of History here at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. It is my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Dr. Eugene Tesdahl, to speak to you tonight about the topic of women smugglers in early American in the first half of the 18th century. Dr. Tesdahl holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Secondary Education from Luther College in nearby Decorah, Iowa, and a Master's degree in History from Miami University in Ohio. In 2012, he completed his Ph.D. in Early American History at the University of Colorado, studying under noted Colonial Historian Fred Anderson. In recent times during his tenure here at UW-Platteville, which began in August of 2014, Dr. Tesdahl has taught classes on Early American, Native American History. He has given public addresses on topics such as the Fox Wars and Native American Cosmology. It's my pleasure to turn the lecture stand over to Dr. Tesdahl. Good evening, and welcome to University Place. So tonight my topic is Women Smugglers in Early America. And my guess is that most of us when we hear the word smuggling, we don't think of Mohawk women or French habitants in the early 18th century. And yet, that's exactly my topic here this evening. Perhaps when you hear the word smuggling, many different images come to mind. And before we get to them, I want you to cast your eyes to the image behind me. Because again, the story of smuggling I'm going to tell you tonight, it is certainly about dynamic people who transcended a borderland between the U.S. and Canada in the early 18th century. But at this time, this was a borderland that marked boundaries between La Nouvelle France, or New France, and Colonial New York. But in many other ways this was, to Mohawk women, this was in fact simply known as Kahnawake, or Mohawk land. It wasn't a bordered land or a borderland. It was, in fact, simply, Mohawk land. And so for native women to cross it and at times take goods and information that was deemed valuable to French and British parties in the early 18th century, this was simply not an imposition because, again, this was deemed as an extension of Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, territory. And so the image I start with here, this is called "Nurturing" by artist John Buxton. And part of why I cast our eyes to this right now, while this is a story of smuggling, this will also concern vibrant Iroquois families and the women who held them together sometimes through smuggling or what the French and British called "illicit trade," but also by bearing children, raising them and crafting families in this contested space between New France and New York. So tonight I will give us this

topic in four different pieces

Why I bother to study smuggling in the early 18th century, and why we should turn our attention to it? What makes this a Haudenosaunee story, or an Iroquois story? And why the Haudenosaunee, or the people of the long house in the early 18th century, why they are involved in this story at all? Next I will work to recover the Gantowisas, or the dynamic Mohawk women who conducted this trade. And lastly we will talk about some of the lasting lessons of smuggling in the early 18th century. So first as I said, let us think about this word "smuggling." So when we think of smuggling, you might think more of an image like this, right?

Not the 18th century

the early 20th century. Here we have Federal officers who have confiscated illicit alcohol, running it from Canada to the U.S. And very interestingly, in the image you even have some of these long bottles of Canadian whiskey are wrapped up and disguised as salamis. And I always find that pretty interesting. But the false top of this car was not good enough to fool these Federal agents. And so with smuggling, I suggest that most of you here tonight might think more of a scene like this. You might think of Prohibition or drug mules from Mexico, or arms traffickers in the Middle East. You might also even think of cigarette smuggling between the U.S. and Canada along the very borderland of New York and Canada that I am talking about tonight. But tonight then as with many histories, this is as I said a story of borderlands and bordered lands. And so smuggling in any of these contexts from the 21st century to the early 18th century, smuggling never becomes smuggling until there are nations, peoples or entities to label something as smuggling or illicit, rather than legitimate trade. And so to a certain extent, this story is about empires, particularly the French and British Empire in the early 18th century. But as I said, it's also about these dynamic and enterprising Haudenosaunee women. So from 1701 to 1754, it was these dynamic Haudenosaunee women who did exactly this. They thwarted French and British attempts to control trade between Albany and Montreal. And they did it not necessarily to please the British or the French, but to satisfy their own political, social and economic aims. And so what these Haudenosaunee women and, to a certain extent, French Canadian women, were doing in the early 18th century was thriving in a space between British and French empires. They would represent their nations, protect their families, and in the process, remake the Atlantic world. So first off, to enter this story as I paraphrase a couple great writers here, I stood on the shoulders of Giants, and I found this topic by following the footnotes, something that some of you might have done more than once. You might sometimes take the time to read the footnotes of a piece of history. You might be fascinated as to who originally wrote something or who is writing a secondary source. And when I did that with this case of smuggling, a topic I had no intention of actually writing about,

I found footnotes like this

"Probably a good deal of this forbidden trade passed through the hands of the Demoiselle Desauniers." And so I thought, who were these "Demoiselle Desauniers?" I also saw quotes like this, "Furs actually in the town were smuggled out to Caughnawaga in the baskets of the squaws." And I wanted to know more about how Mohawk women were, evidently, involved in this illicit trade. And lastly, "Attributes which allowed Lydius to trade with both Canadians and English colonists, and be trusted by none." And these names, especially, Lydius, the women of Caughnawaga and New Caughnawaga and the Demoiselle Desauniers, among others, were names of known smugglers who continued to pop up in footnotes and, later, in the primary document record as well. And I followed those to disclose this story that I'm telling you tonight. So once again, part of our tale centers around these dynamic Mohawk women. So the Haudenosaunee or the People of the Longhouse, the Iroquois Confederacy, was one of the most powerful and influential native nations of eastern North America and many would suggest still are to this day. But in the 17th and early 18th century, this was definitely the case. And the Iroquois Confederacy and the Haudenosaunee people, while the Mohawks in particular were known for their military strategy and ability to attract the attention, sometimes the ire, and sometimes the admiration of both the British and the French, again part of my interests in the Haudenosaunee people is that they were also very effective at raising dynamic families, retaining a complex spiritual system and cosmology, and ultimately playing by their own rules even when the British and French expected them to kowtow to their own. So as I said, this is at the heart of it, a Haudenosaunee story, an Iroquois story. And part of that story then starts a little bit before 1701 when I said I was going to tell you about smuggling. And the main part that starts before 1701 is that Caughnawaga, or New Caughnawaga, as you see depicted in this period image, the French called Sault Saint Louis, or as this says, St. Louis Indiana Castle. And in 1676, several key clans of the Mohawk nation left the Mohawk River valley of upstate New York or Colonial New York, and they moved 196 miles north. So the red oval at the bottom, Albany, also Daughnaghoalege, the prominent Mohawk town there. And about 196 miles north, you see Montreal. And New Caughnawaga was constructed just south of Montreal in 1676. Classic American and Canadian textbooks would have us believe that this relocation of a significant portion of the Mohawk nation represented a splintering or a breaking of the Haudenosaunee or the Iroquois Confederacy. Several pieces of my research, as well as modern Iroquois oral history bear out a very different story. The Iroquois Confederacy was not broken in 1676. In fact in many ways it grew. It expanded. And so part of that classic misunderstanding is that by 1676 many Mohawk men who had married Huron women who had already acculturated to the French becoming even practicing Catholics. The classical notion was that they forced these Mohawk men to move near Montreal to be closer to Catholic priests. Part of why we know that is not the whole story is that very year, 1676, using birch bark canoes like this, Mohawk women from near Albany paddled the 196 miles to New Caughnawaga-- not to trade, not to smuggle, but to simply visit their kin who had moved north. So this clearly reflects not a full break of the Iroquois Confederacy. Moreover, Haudenosaunee oral history suggests that, again, this was not a breaking, but more like a Haudenosaunee presence near the French. And part of what I call that is a Mohawk satellite. So then New Caughnawaga back here, we see it less as this distant broken group of Haudenosaunee people, but we see it more like a satellite or a colony of the Iroquois very near the French so that the Haudenosaunee of the Mohawk River valley near Albany can keep tabs on the French. They have access to French trade goods, French tactical information. And again, this is being monitored by mostly Mohawk women who in the 17th century are not so interested in trade as they are simply renewing kinship ties with their family. It will shift then in the early 18th century, that dynamic, Haudenosaunee women see that the British and the French want to access to the goods, services and information at either ends of this 196 mile stretch, a stretch of rivers and lakes from the Hudson to the St. Laurence with Lake Champlain and Lake George in between-- a corridor that I call the riverine highway. And when the Haudenosaunee started to ply these waters dynamically from 1701 to 1754, not only did they start to dominate both illicit and legitimate trade along this riverine highway, they also started to dictate the ways the British and the French functioned in their land. So again as I said before, there's some debate over what makes this smuggling. Is it trade or is it smuggling? And in conducting research, it's very important then, especially when I was conducting a series of oral history interviews with Haudenosaunee people in Quebec, Ontario and New York State, to go with my primary document, 18th century research, that this notion of smuggling in the 21st century brings to mind a very contentious topic of cigarette smuggling and avoiding excise taxes and possibly even using arms to protect this trafficking. So some people were cautious about speaking to me when I was conducting this research. But it's clear then that from the native perspective in the 18th century or in the 21st century, this exchange that heated up in the early 18th century, it was seen as trade by them. And again, these women were exchanging goods from Albany to Montreal and mostly bringing beaver fur back down the 196 mile riverine highway. But they also were continually mostly interested in simply visiting their family. Again, it's mostly termed smuggling from the British and the French from a series of edicts on the French side and acts of navigation and trade from the British side. These are the things that made this trade illegal from the British and French perspective. And again, some people when they think of 18th century smuggling and they find out that for the most part it was not drugs or weapons or something you might associate with smuggling, but ultimately it was mostly cloth, blankets and clothing from Albany that was cheaper and higher quality than those available in New France. And from New France it was mostly beaver furs. These do not seem like contraband, dangerous items, and indeed they are not. But like some trade restrictions today, the point of these laws that forbade this trade was to protect the markets of England and France and not to permit colonies to trade between each other. And ultimately it was aimed to disadvantage colonists. But some colonists, as you might know about smuggling in other colonies at this time and again perspectives of these Haudenosaunee women, those imperatives from distant metropoles, Paris and London, did not stop these women from seeing that there could be money made in this system. So as I said, this was what was being smuggled. And again, if you look at this image, stroud, wampum and beaver. So stroud, mostly blue and red. This is called saved-list stroud. It's one of the most typical types of wool cloth that was sold and traded in the early 18th century in both the colony of New York and in New France. And with this cloth, both natives and colonists made everything from coats and jackets and shortdowns to leggings and breechcloths and other items. Also we had wampum made out of the welk and quahog clamshells, white and purple. These beads, which by the 17th century were partially manufactured by the Dutch, into use as wampum belts that could send political and social and economic messages in the way they were woven together and the way orators told stories while they handled them. This was also an important trade item. And again as I said, the main thing coming from New France was beaver fur as depicted at the upper right. So again this does not seem like a very incendiary trade. And during peace time it wasn't, really. But the reason why this trade becomes so significant from 1701 to 1754 is the way in which the Iroquois Confederacy had declared neutrality in 1701 in a series of treaties between the French and the English, known as the Grand Settlement. So prominent Iroquois women directed the entire Confederacy to choose neutrality between the British and the French. And when that happened, then this was very advantageous for this contraband trade. So that the Haudenosaunee then were neutral in a military sense. They were not going to fully side with either the French or the English between 1701 and more or less in the 1750s. And this then meant that women who were trading or smuggling had the ability to play the French off the English. So that if a good enough price was not received at Albany, one could say in Montreal that Albany was giving a different price and so that was very advantageous, the leverage that was created for these native women. And despite this, by the 1720s during peacetime, both the French and the British were trying to quell this smuggling. They were trying to stop it. It was illegal to traffic goods between these two colonies. Although as long as the trafficking was not deeply hurting either colony, neither colony worked very hard to stop it. And yet once in a while, like we hear in this account from 1721... This is an English account lamenting the smuggling that's going on from September 8 of 1721, "Particular care should be taken to put the forts already built in the best condition they are capable of and to build others in such places where they may best serve to secure and enlarge our trade and interest with the Indians, and break the designs of the French in these parts. For this purpose it would be of great advantage to build a fort in the country of Seneca Indians near the Lake Ontario which might perhaps be done with their consent by the means of presence. And it should be rather attempted without loss of time to prevent the French from succeeding in the same design which they are now actually endeavoring at." So again we can see this smuggling even in times of peace in the 1720s along the riverine highway was wrapped up in this complex both military and economic competition between the British and the French. But now let's turn our attention more to these Gantowisas, these Haudenosaunee, and mostly Mohawk women who were actually doing this smuggling. So when we tear into these documents... Again, here is one of the mimeographed examples of some of the accounts that show smuggling. Most of these documents are coming from trade journals, daybooks and ledgers, both in New York and in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. In this case, these are judicial records from the National Archives of Quebec in Montreal. You may see that these are difficult to read, even if you're fluent in 18th century French. And those of you who have ever had difficulty reading someone's handwriting that gets even more frustrating when that person has been dead for 200 years. And yet it is possible to retrace the actions of some of these smugglers who you might also surmise worked pretty hard to hide their tracks. And yet the lessons that they reveal are worth uncovering. So in this image another thing that permits us to examine the Gantowisas who were conducting this trade comes from a series of letter books that were kept by Robert and John Sanders of Albany and Schenectady, New York. And what's interesting here is in this account you might make out in the middle "porter de la prsente Sauvagesse Marie Magdaline." If you see that in the middle. So this says, "the current porter, "the native woman, Mary Madeline." It also goes on to say, "She has a deformity in one of her eyes, and she tells me that she knows you perfectly well." It's interesting that in some of these passages in this particular letter book,

this is how some of these native women come forward

their name, some descriptors about them, and then how much stroud or wool or other goods they are taking to the north, and how many furs they're bringing back down. Also at the top of this page you might see Mons., short for Monsieur or Sir, and then you see the roman numeral 12 (XII) and a smoldering pipe. So this is a complex code. This entire letter book is written in code. The people to whom the Sanders brothers were writing were never identified. They were given aliases, mostly Roman numerals and some ideograms, pictures. So Mr. XII, smoldering pipe, you might assume since it was an ideogram that it might have been a Native person. It seems that a lot of these are not in fact Native people. And due to other context clues, I believe that I have teased who some of these anonymous people were. One of them seems to be John Hendricks Lydius who I spoke of earlier, a very prominent and successful smuggler at this time. And yet I have aimed to bring women like Marie Magdaline off this page to probe further into who they were as individuals and how they were members of the Haudenosaunee league to go beyond brief descriptions in accounts like this. And while some of their stories are still unfolding, that these women had the ability to own property under Haudenosaunee culture and tradition, this made them very different from English women at the time. Also that they had the ability and the inclination to travel 196 miles every summer also even sets them apart from some dynamic French women, as well. But this cast is not merely comprised of Native women. Again here are some of the key players in this story. John Hendricks Lydius's signature is here in the center left. Down the bottom right, you have the signature of his wife, Genevieve Masse Lydius, who was a prominent trader in her own right. And at the top we have part of a very important journal from 1729, which was another coded journal by a noted smuggler, Catherine Dagneau in Montreal. And Catherine Dagneau is an interesting case because she was typical of many of the female property owners in New France at this time. Many French women in New France who owned property, they were widows. And so in fact, Catherine Dagneau was also known as Veuve la (inaudible). Her husband had passed away. He had a trading company that specialized in trading with the Mohawks at Albany. And also as was the case for some widows who inherited property in France, many of the widows in New France, like Catherine Dagneau, who inherited their husband's businesses, might have been better entrepreneurs and better businesspeople than their husbands. And so Catherine Dagneau not only continued her husband's lucrative trading business and also translation business, for he and then she spoke Mohawk fluently, but she expanded it and grew it. She would even expand it so much that when smugglers like John Hendricks Lydius started to encroach in her trade, she worked to have him expelled from New France, something she accomplished in 1731. So also as this story of contraband trade emerges, we have then some of this cast of characters, Genevieve Masse Lydius. We also have various Mohawk men and women, Taniscaumingue, Guerrerendiague, Conquasse, and the list goes on. Sometimes you can also see that these names of the natives at New Caughnawaga are showing French influence, like Sauvagesse Agnese, Marie-Magdaleine, Sauvage Jacque, the wife of Tegouassin or Marie-Therese. And so again, it was important to me to not just establish who was doing this smuggling, whether they be French, Haudenosaunee, Anglo-Dutch or other. But, who were they as people, and how did they fit into the culture and history of northeastern North America. So I mentioned that Catherine Dagneau would keep a journal. And she started that journal in Montreal at her trading house in 1729. She would keep it until the fall of 1731. And in some cases, it seemed pretty typical or unremarkable. It seemed to be a journal in which

she simply recorded her daily transactions

beaver furs for woolens, something very typical of traders' daybooks at the time. But many of her accounts disclose passages like this, "Three Indian women arrived loaded with contraband merchandise at Mr. Moriceau's place, interpreter, and for the account of said Moriceau, they could see from there at what point the commerce broke the regulation since this interpreter engaged in smuggling with little oversight so he could hide himself." In another passage, she says, "The Indian woman named Dorothe told me that there were two canoes who left for Choeguen loaded with beaver and that four Indians paddled them." And so once again, her account, similar to the later book used by the Sanders brothers, contains coded language. It also contains various words and names in French, English, Mohawk and Dutch. And it also then does a great deal to tell us more about what this smuggling was, who was doing it, why they were doing it, and why it mattered. One account that she offers that is particularly useful, she said in 1730, "Coming out of a sermon of the parish at a quarter after noon, I met with the wife of Tegouassin, an Indian woman from Sault St. Louis, loaded with Indian print cotton. I saw and handled them. There ten pieces that she took to Lidius's home for which we left terrified that she would be captured. I could assure that there is never a guard during the day who does any patrolling, and especially when they are warned that there will be contraband merchandise coming in." So perhaps you also now get a bit of a sense that not only was Catherine Dagneau trying to condemn her competitor Lydius, particularly in this case telling us how much merchandise was coming to his house, but ultimately she was a smuggler herself. And so in some cases, she will implicate Lydius while still leaving herself blameless, which again for people who do that sort of thing even today, even if you don't respect it, you might acknowledge that sometimes it is done remarkably well. So this brings me then to part of the lasting lessons then of what Haudenosaunee smugglers and French women and others who were plying this trade and profiting greatly in the early 18th century have to teach us. The first thing, as I mentioned to you, is that most of this trade, while it was begrudged by both the English and the French during times of peace, it was not particularly policed very stringently. This would change significantly during times of war. And smuggling, just like today, smuggling which might be an annoyance during times of peace becomes both more important and more of a liability during times of war. And so during King George's War, for the most part these Native women were still trafficking the English woolens, which were of higher quality and lower price that both French and Native consumers in Nouvelle France wanted. And they were trafficking the Canadian beaver furs that were in short supply in New York by this time. But along with them then in King George's War, since those smuggling corridors were already established, they were also trafficking during King George's War muskets, powder, lead, flints, rope, articles needed to conduct war. And perhaps most significantly not only were goods changing and becoming more important during King George's War, but so was tactical information. So the women who were trafficking these goods, even wartime stores, also were gathering knowledge of French and British troop movements, the size of forces, the amounts of weaponry in their command. And so in many ways, the information that they transported became even more significant than the goods had ever been. And so ultimately this would become very significant. This smuggling corridor that we've been looking at from Montreal to Albany, just north of New York City by the late 1740s became more significant than it had ever been. And promised to possibly shake up the ways in which the British and the French thought of eastern North America as depicted here. Particularly in 1745, this tactical information and that riverine-highway that linked Albany to Montreal became very significant. For in 1745 the great French fortress of Louisburg out on the Atlantic coast, which in many ways functioned as a gateway to the Saint Laurence River, in 1745 during King George's War that post fell to the English. And when it did, most goods coming by tall ship either from Europe to Quebec and Montreal or from the Caribbean to Quebec and Montreal ceased, for the British blocked those ships at Louisburg. And when that was the case then, smuggling from 1745 to 1748 at the end of King George's War, rather than slow, it in fact exploded larger than it had ever been. Because then not only was it the main route for those smuggled goods, but again even legitimate trade then largely now had to pass through that established smuggling channel. And it would for the duration of that war. And another thing that I want to leave you with, this story of 18th-century smuggling, is that the way in which smuggling functions between times of peace and times of war, this sadly is not merely a relic of the early 18th century. War is with us today in the 21st century, as is smuggling, as is the way they function. And so some final things to think about as to how this topic of dynamic Haudenosaunee women of the early 18th century thwarting the trade restrictions of the British and the French, how they relate to modern topics, I'll leave you with some of these suggestions. Today or recently we might see headlines like this, "A rogue weapons smuggler who profited mainly from arms dealing..." This is not talking about John Hendricks Lydius; this is talking about Viktor Bout, a prominent arms smuggler in all parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, a Russian who at times had been an ally with the U.S. and later was captured by them. Also this quote, more recently, "Government officials, ambassadors and military commanders gathered on a mountainside outside of Kabul to burn the drugs which were seized from smugglers in recent months." What we have in the current war in Afghanistan is that routes, smuggling routes that linked particularly the subcontinent of India and Pakistan with Afghanistan, those are being used and have been used over the past few years to smuggle drugs, but especially arms. Those were not originally built to do that. They were built to smuggle alcohol from India and Pakistan into Afghanistan. And again, during times of war then these turn to very different means with very different significance levels. And lastly as I said, this is a very recent headline, "How Canada's natives became cigarette smugglers..." So the notion of smuggling cigarettes from New York to Canada along this very riverine-highway I've been telling you about is still a hot topic today. To do this without paying excise tax, this is an issue of economics, but also of sovereignty to many Haudenosaunee people in the 21st century. So I hope we have taken away today that these enterprising Haudenosaunee women were not just profiting from what the British and French called illicit trade. They were dictating the terms of exchange, often on their terms in ways that they wanted, not just ways the French or British expected. And in the process they would be influencing European empires and remaking America and the Atlantic world in ways that still matter to this day. And so with this, I will leave you pondering the significance of some of these Haudenosaunee women. To some degree they might still seem like they are with their back turned to us, like this image from John Buxton's painting "Negotiation." But in other ways hopefully, you feel that what they were doing was not necessarily just about profit, but about people, about family, about empire and perhaps about redefining borders in new ways. Thank you very much. (applause)