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The Upper Country began as an alliance between people from France and the local villages of the Lakes. But before the start of that process of coming together, the Great Lakes underwent a terrible period of tearing apart. Beginning in the 1640s, competition over the fur trade fueled a cycle of wars that left much of the region nearly depopulated. The Iroquois are usually regarded as the aggressors in the Beaver Wars. Their raids destroyed villages and scattered the people. Several eastern nations, such as the Erie and the Neutrals, ceased to exist. Others saw their power drastically reduced. Europeans at this time came only rarely to the Upper Country, so most of what is known about this era of turmoil must be pieced together from oral traditions and accounts by Frenchmen who did not well understand what was happening.

Survivors scattered in all directions. Large numbers moved to towns in Canada, and others were adopted into the Iroquois themselves. In the Upper Country, refugees inhabited new villages to the west, out of reach of the Iroquois attacks. Green Bay and Chequamegon became the most important of the new population centers. These new centers drew people from many different tribal backgrounds. To keep the peace, they had to innovate. Simply relying on the old clans and lineages would not do when people from so many different tribes lived side by side in the same village. A class of informal village chiefs emerged as leaders throughout the region.

This is not to say that the old forms of tribal power and authority disappeared. They remained very important, especially for politics beyond the village. The Council of Three Fires, for example, an alliance of the three main Anishinaabe tribes, remained one of the strongest regional powers. And Europeans preferred to treat the tribes as sovereign nations rather than as scattered ethnic groups that blurred together. But increasingly, real life in the Upper Country came to be organized on the basis of villages and regions rather than the traditional tribes. And above it all remained the frightening sense that the old world had shattered, with no new structure to replace it. In the later decades of the 17th century, the Upper Country would look to France to provide that structure.

The alliance took shape from the bottom up. Many French traders and missionaries, and many Indian men and women, played a role in laying its early foundations. It was formed through countless individual interactions and relationships, economic, diplomatic, marital, religious.


Perrot among the Sioux

Among the many alliance chiefs of the early years, the figure of Nicolas Perrot stands out, and today he is honored as the Upper Country's founder. Perrot was an explorer, trader and interpreter from Bourgogne. He traveled so extensively that the Indians called him Metamiens, "Iron Legs". In fact, his journeys helped to delineate the boundaries of the Upper Country. He lived at times among the Ottawa, Potawatomi, Sioux, and other nations, learning their languages and their ways. He built French posts at Green Bay and Prairie-du-Chien. In 1671, he used his influence to draw over a thousand Indian leaders to Sault-Sainte-Marie, where, in what is known as the "Pageant of the Sault", French officials symbolically claimed sovereignty over the Lakes. The gathering marks the start of the wider French alliance and is considered the founding moment of the Upper Country.

The alliance took shape over the next several years. The Indians and Métis of the Great Lakes looked to the governor of Canada as a regional leader, calling themselves "Children of Onontio". The 1701 Great Peace of Montreal cemented the alliance, committing all the chiefs of the Upper Country, Huronia, and much of Ohio to the cause of France and to one another.

In the eighteenth century we see the French alliance system in its mature form. It became the dominant political structure in the Upper Country, overshadowing older tribal affiliations like the Council of Three Fires. Detroit, founded the same year as the Great Peace, became the center of regional trade and diplomacy. All of the established chiefs of the region worked to maintain the alliance, while new men sought opportunities outside it.

These opportunities were numerous. The English and Dutch continually sought to expand their influence westward. The Dutch built forts at Oswego on Lake Ontario and on Grand Island in the Niagara River. English traders built posts at Black Rock on the Niagara, at the Forks of the Ohio, along the St. Joseph River, and above all on Sanduskey Bay. Each new trading post was built to entice groups of Indians away from the French. Other chiefs sought more complete independence outside the reach of any of the empires. They had the most success in the Ohio Country. Throughout the century the new republics of Ohio steadily grew, causing French influence there to gradually unravel.

But the core of the alliance held together. The key parts of the Upper Country - Detroit, Manitoulin, the Mackinac Straits, Green Bay, Chequamegon, and Ouisconsin - remained under the firm control of the Children of Onontio.

Trading for guns at Fort Michilimackinac

The Wars of Independence brought new challenges to the Upper Country alliance. On the one hand, disunity among the English meant a shift in the balance of power toward the French. On the other hand, independence unleashed expansionist impulses in the new states. Unprecedented numbers of traders and settlers from the English states began to come west. Three major Yankee communities took shape around Lake Erie: Connecticuters on the Cuyahoga, Massachusetts republicans on the Ashkany, and New England loyalists around Sanduskey Bay. Increasing numbers of Virginians and Pennamites were coming to the trading towns near southern Lake Michigan. The stream of newcomers put great stress on the alliance.

Leaders of the Upper Country had to build the alliance's institutional strength. The Grand Assembly began to meet in 1777, giving the allied leaders a permanent forum for the first time. Within the individual countries, French officials and Métis village leaders spurred the creation of local governments. The first elected councils and magistrates appeared in Green Bay, Kekionga and Michilimackinac. Canadian officers began to form militia units as well, channeling the warrior traditions of the Upper Country into an organized defense.

The French Revolution brought still more changes, realignments, and conflicts to the region. Canada stayed loyal to France and accepted the new regime, but Louisnana wavered. In 1793 the French Republic and England went to war, and some of the fighting spread to America. In a serious blow to the alliance, English and loyalist forces captured Fort Michilimackinac. The French were able to begin a new fort on nearby Mackinac Island, but it was an obvious sign of weakness. Canada had to scramble to keep leaders on its side. The war ended four years later with France in a weaker position in the Upper Country than at any time since the start of the colonial era.

Although England and France continued fighting, peace held for a few years in America. It was events in the Upper Country that provoked the next round of warfare. The independent English commonwealth of Virginia had grown increasingly close to France, England being an enemy common to both. In 1802 officers from both powers met in Upper St. Joseph to negotiate the future of the Ohio Country. They formed a plan to divide the whole region between them, shutting out all other powers. The pact sparked the War of the League of St. Joseph, the last and fiercest major imperial war in Boreomerica's history. The Great Lakes became a major theater of fighting. During the war it became clear that England was unable to sustain a military presence on the Lakes. English and allied forces made some gains but could not hold them.

Negotiations following the fighting were different from what had come before. After past wars, each empire had looked for advantages that would prepare it for the next one. This time, all sides sought a solution that would prevent future wars. There were so many sides involved now, most of them pursuing local agendas rather than European ones. Continental peace became the goal. The rise of the neutral Ohio Alliance was one clear sign of this. In the Upper Country, the combatants agreed that it would remain a French protectorate, but other communities were to govern themselves within it.

The end of the war brought a new order to all the French colonies. The emperor Napoleon sent his brother Jerome to America to rule most of the large colonies as King of New France. Jerome's rule was mostly a peaceful one in which the Upper Country continued to grow and develop. The new groups of settlers who arrived, such as the Dutch founders of New Holland, by and large were content to live under French protection. But the Upper Country was still an alliance, not yet a state. The different constituent countries were basically free to act independently. New Holland and Sanduskey were alliance members, but at this point their people were still citizens of New Netherland and the Dominion of New England, respectively.

Growth accompanied peace. New farming villages were cropping up around the main towns as the Lakes' economy began to look beyond the fur trade. Most of the cultivation was done in the Indian fashion with hoe rather than plow; the plow would not predominate in the Upper Country until canals and railroads made commercial farming possible, and even then, traditional methods persisted in many villages, even to the present day. The spread of livestock, however, was altering life in many places. Pigs and cattle led to changes in land use, soil treatment, hunting practices, and many other aspects of village life.


A traditional "three sisters" field today on village land in Kekionga Country

The lead mines on the Aux-Fèves produced another newly important commodity. Located on the upper Mississippi River along the border between the Upper Country and Illinois, the Aux-Fèves mines became the subject of intense rivalry between the parts of New France. A royal decree declared the mining region to be part of the Upper Country and therefore subject to Canada, but their position on the river made it easy for Louisiana merchants to dominate the trade. Canada sponsored two major road projects linking the river to ports on Lake Michigan. But the more southern route, from Galènie to Chicagou, passed through disputed territory. Illinois, still subservient to Louisiana, attempted to take control of that disputed zone, posting militia to collect tolls and rebuff the Canadians. The result was the Kishwauki War of 1822-5. The war was notable for the inability of the royal government to contain it. Ultimately it was resolved thanks to mediators from Ohio who convinced the two sides to stand down. The war also led Illinoisans to resent Louisianan control, and they declared themselves to be a separate colony within New France soon after.

King Jerome allowed the parts of New France to develop their own institutions, signing off on Illinois's separation from Louisiana and Huronia's new provincial government. In the Upper Country, much development happened at the local level. Most of the main towns were beginning to function as bureaucratic states, and new governments formed in Chicagou, Miliouqué, and Grand Portage.

The 1833 fall of the Bonapartist regime did not cause much disruption. Canada declared independence and continued to oversee its dependencies as before. The governor at Detroit was not even replaced.

Fort Detroit in the early 19th century

The Miami War shook the Upper Country in a time when it was still sorting out just what its identity was. The fallout from the English Wars of Independence had brought peace among the continent’s major powers and recognition of the Upper Country as a single unit. The much smaller Kishwauki War (1822-1825) against Illinois defined its borders and clarified the relationship among the Francophone states. But much was left unsettled when it came to the Upper Country’s internal workings. It was not yet completely clear if the Grand Assembly in Detroit was a true government or a mere meeting of allied, self-governing countries. The governor, though chosen by the Assembly, still had to go to Quebec to confirm his position. Much of his power was military as the commander of Fort Detroit. He ruled his local domain of Detroit Country with nearly unchecked power; the old French paternalistic government was still basically in force there. The Miami War revealed the inherent conflict between the governor’s statewide and local roles. It also revealed that the structure of the Upper Country was fragile and inadequate to meet the needs of a growing population.

The conflict grew from the undefined boundaries between the constituent countries of the Pays-d’en-Haut. Sanduskey Country was simply defined as the largely English settlements around the bay and the islands. Did it extend up the shore a little? Who knew? It was not urgent when the population was small, but as the population of English and Mixed people grew and spread, the question became an important one. Likewise, Detroit country certainly included the land around Lake St. Clair and the newer settlements down on Lake Erie, but whether it extended farther was an open question. The lively Mixed town of Kekionga (*Ft. Wayne) was located at the forks of the river Miami-du-Lac and no one was sure how far downriver it extended.

The lower Miami-du-Lac and Miami Bay were thus located between three major clusters of settlements who all had reason to think of the area as their own natural backyard. By the 1820s it was becoming clear that it would be an important crossroads for trade and a big source of income for whoever controlled it. The three adjacent parts of the Upper Country began to compete to be the one that would have it.

So all three constituent countries made moves to get the land. They commissioned traders to build fortified posts at or near the mouth of the river. Militia came in to man the forts. There was no artillery - the separate towns could hardly afford that - but there were plenty of muskets and ammunition, and some of them were used to intimidate or attack the other side. There is no clear date when the “war” began, but parts of the Miami-du-Lac and western Lake Erie were decidedly unsafe by the the 1836 trading season.

The war’s only real offensive came at its climax in the spring of 1838. The key figure was Rémi Taschereau, member of a prominent Canadien family who had had an impressive military career in the Great Lakes. He had become Governor of the Upper Country five years earlier and therefore was also commander at Detroit. He agreed with the Detroit merchants that Miami-du-Lac was important to the town's interests. He also saw the actions of the Kekiongans and Sanduskeymen as an affront to his authority as governor. Taschereau resolved to drive them out of the area by force, occupy the Miami-du-Lac area, and use his authority to goad the state assembly into approving the new status quo.

Tashereau’s campaign was preceded by a delegation to the Kekiongans and Sanduskeymen with official orders to abandon their trading posts. The traders and militia did not quite know what to make of this, since the Upper Country’s governor had never ruled by decree outside of Detroit Country. Soon after came the Detroit Militia in two sloops and several dozen canoes, led by Tashereau. They quickly stormed the blockhouses of their rivals, who mostly fled at the approach of such a large armed force. But the attack had the effect of uniting the other two sides in the three-way rivalry. The Sanduskey militia joined the Kekiongans in paddling upstream to a defensible position at the fork of the Miami-du-Lac and the Glaise Rivers, where there sat an abandoned fort. They quickly dug in, reinforced by new militia companies called up from Kekionga. John Gibbs took command, a soldier of mixed Scottish, French, and Indian origin typical of the Mixed leadership in Kekionga. He enthusiastically re-declared the fort’s old name, Fort Defiance. By the time Taschereau and his men arrived, Gibbs was ready for them. The defenders of the fort threw back the first attack. Taschereau had no choice but to withdraw to the mouth of the river, having occupied the land that was his objective but failed to defeat the rival forces outright.

By then, delegates to the Grand Assembly were gathering in Detroit. Taschereau knew that the assembly could not begin proceedings without him, and he hoped to delay it until he could establish more firmly Detroit’s military control of the Miami-du-Lac. He sent word to his lieutenant, Pierre Jalbert, to send additional men. Most of the delegates in Detroit, however, were outraged at the heavy-handed way that Taschereau was acting. They met outdoors, in front of the fort and the newly built hall of assembly, and began to hold an extralegal session, speaking forcefully against the governor’s actions. Jalbert was unwilling to arrest en masse the leaders of the entire Upper Country, so the delegates continued meeting. The situation in Detroit was so tense, furthermore, that Jalbert feared that if he sent additional men to the Miami-du-Lac, he might lose control of the town entirely. Taschereau raged against his lieutenant’s inaction, but it probably kept the Upper Country from erupting into full-blown rebellion.

The delegates sent an appeal to Canada, whose judicial council still served as the court of last resort for the Upper Country. Canada ordered both Taschereau and Gibbs to stand down and the militia to disband. In a related ruling, they declared that the lower Miami-du-Lac valley was to be neutral territory subject directly to the state government of the Upper Country; the Grand Assembly was left to draw the borders with more specificity. The governor, afraid to return to Detroit, went to Montreal to account for his actions.

The crisis in Miami-du-Lac showed the serious need to reform the Upper Country’s institutions. First and foremost, the city and country of Detroit needed local governments separate from the governorship. Next, the powers of the Grand Assembly to make state laws had to be made clearer. Finally, the powers of militia had to be taken away from the individual towns and regions and made subject to the Upper Country’s civil government. The reforms passed over the next two years helped the Upper Country transform from a frontier alliance into a modern state.

The Miami War actually helped to create a more united Upper Country identity. Earlier it had been feared that largely Anglophone Sanduskey would eventually leave the state and join with Upper Connecticut, and the fact that it had sent no men to the Kishwauki War had fed those fears; but the Miami War confirmed its loyalty to the Pays-d’en-Haut, despite differences in language. Likewise Kekionga, in many ways tied more to the Ohio than to the Great Lakes, earned the sympathy of the lakeshore settlements and solidified its political and social ties to the rest of the state.

The rival trading posts at the mouth of the Miami-du-Lac were consolidated into one, termed Great Miami, which was under the direct authority of the state and the Grand Assembly. The town that took shape around it grew into an important commercial and industrial city, taking its name from the post. In 1862 it became the seat of its own country government, which it remains today.

In the years following the Miami War, the Upper Country transformed into a state. Three intertwined processes brought this about: separating from Canada, building a state government, and growing a modern economy. These processes fed one another during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They greatly changed life in the Upper Country, building on the core cultural essence that was already in place.

Confederal politics did much to help the Upper Country to think of itself as a state. People from the PH had served on the Grand Council for years, and with the fall of the French Empire, Canada and its dependencies also joined the growing Congress of the Nations. The constituent countries each sent members to Congress, but they were seated together as representatives of a single neutral region, similar to members from other underdeveloped regions like Ohio and West Florida. From the 1840s the members of the confederation were generally known as states, including the Upper Country. Then in 1847 Huronia achieved independence from Canada. It was generally assumed that the Upper Country would follow, once it was ready.


A candidate for Grand Assembly gives a speech in Detroit, c. 1850.

The reforms of the late 1830s and 40s produced a Grand Assembly that had real legislative power. Among the first things it did to exercise its power was sponsor a series of road building projects, something Canada had done in past decades. In the early 1850s it launched an even more ambitious project with Illinois to build the Chicagou Canal, which allowed navigation across the old portage between the Illinois River and Lake Michigan. The canal did more than draw people to Chicagou: it was an economic declaration of independence from Canada. From that point, a growing portion of the state's trade would be with the Mississippi River basin. The Canadian trade that had once been the Upper Country's raison d'être declined in relative importance.

The Assembly also embarked on a long quest to harmonize the different legal systems in the state. It took jurists more than twenty years to produce a code that was acceptable to all of the constituent countries. The basis was the Napoleonic Code Civil, with enough flexibility to allow for varying local customary law, as well as the pockets of the Upper Country that had used English Common Law. The code was propagated in the early 1860s, and it became the foundation for a new state judiciary. At this point, it can truly be said that the Upper Country was operating as a modern state. Canada loosened its last political controls over the Upper Country, leaving only a few symbolic connections; for example, a Canadian official was still on hand in Detroit to formally open each session of the Grand Assembly.

The consolidation of the state meant an end to the independence of the constituent countries. New Netherland accordingly severed all links with New Holland, so that its people could be citizens of the Upper Country alone. But in Sanduskey Country, the change was much more controversial. Sanduskey had originally been an English possession, but the political changes made this harder to keep up. In 1855 it voted to abolish the vestiges of its royalist government, replacing the viceroy with an elected deputy-governor. But the people the easternmost towns, called the Firelands, objected strongly. Their parents and grandparents had been diehard Loyalists, and they did not want to lose their connection to England. They split from Sanduskey to form a separate country and refused to approve the new law code. England refused to step in to the controversy, and so the Firelands found itself in the odd position of being a royalist territory without any Crown representative. It would have an anomalous status within the Upper Country for several decades.

From this time the Upper Country began to experience economic changes to match these political changes. The late nineteenth century brought railroads, large-scale shipping, commercial farming, and industry to the Great Lakes. Indigenous people provided much of the labor, but they were not enough. Immigrants from other states and from Europe came to do the work that this revolution required.


A team of German laborers digging the Ouisconsin-Renard Canal, Prairies Country, c. 1870.

The state's developing transport network made commercial farming possible. Many indigenous communities began to adopt European-style methods so that they could produce enough to sell. This brought men into the fields for the first time. Immigrant farmers had to contend with a bewildering system of land ownership, which combined large areas of communal village land with echoes of the seigneurial system inherited form Canada. Some reforms opened up limited tracts to private ownership, both to attract newcomers and to encourage productivity among local farmers. Agriculture, like all other aspects of Upper Country life, evolved as a mix of indigenous and European ways.

In the north, logging and mining finally replaced furs as the drivers of the economy. These industries, more than farming, relied on outside capital and local labor. Customary law held the companies in check and prevented them from exploiting the resources to the extent that they might have liked, but they still changed the face of the north. Hunters became wage laborers. Villages became half-empty for much of the year as men went away to work. Trading towns like Grand Portage and Fond-des-Lacs transformed into bustling, dirty port cities. It had not been so long since sails had replaced paddles on the Lakes; now they gave way to steam as the age of the great freighters began.

The mines were a root cause of the Upper Country's last war. To the northwest of Lake Superior lay the rich iron range of Mesabi. The Mesabi mines employed many local Anishinaabe men, but they had also attracted a large English immigrant population. This was because, while the border was fuzzy, Mesabi was under the control of the English colony of Assiniboia, part of the greater region of Rupertsland. In 1893, the largely French-speaking people of Assiniboia revolted and became a state of the ASB. Five years later, the young state voted to separate from England entirely and become a republic. This alarmed the English people of Mesabi. They staged their own revolt and asked to become a constituent of the Upper Country. Assiniboia and the Upper Country came to blows over this, but ultimately the confederal government sided against Assiniboia.

The twentieth century turned in an atmosphere of growing pride in the Upper Country. News reports of the course of the Mesabi War, culminating in the "victory" handed down by the confederal Parliament, caused many citizens to look beyond their local areas for the first time and identify with the wider state. An outpouring of creative works can be seen in this era celebrating the Great Lakes - their beauty, peoples, and folklore. The poem Song of Manabozho had been written earlier by a Yankee who had spent some time on Lake Erie and learned a little about Anishinaabe folklore. Now, translated, it became more widely read and came generally to be considered the Upper Country's national epic.


Early 20th-century illustration of Nokomis descending from the moon

By now railroads crisscrossed the state, linking the farming lands with the growing industrial centers and the lakeside ports. The Upper Country had become an economic powerhouse, no longer the colonial backwater it had been just a generation or two earlier. But urbanization caused concern. The village, and the extended family network that it represented, was seen as the bedrock of society. People feared the isolation of individuals and nuclear families that city life could foster. Most city families maintained links with the old home village and made an effort to visit regularly, something still typical today.

The early twentieth century was also an age of centralization in the state. The constituent countries surrendered their power progressively and quickly. By the 1930s they were little more than administrative units. The Firelands finally agreed to stop pretending to be an English dominion and consented to reunification with Sanduskey.

Beginning in the 1970s, this trend began to reverse itself. A series of Devolution Acts restored some authority and fiscal independence to the separate Countries. Concurrent with this was a revived interest in the particular cultures of the different parts of the state. An indigenous literature has blossomed as people desired to tell their own stories in their own languages. Other writers explored the meaning of the blending of the European and the Indian that characterizes many Upper Country communities. Traditional festivals that had been losing energy were revived with the help of folklorists and artists.

Ongoing issues in the Upper Country center around a transitioning economy. Industry, especially in the smaller cities, is on the decline, and some of the mines are no longer productive. Farming, too, employs less people as agriculture becomes even more mechanized. This has served to sharpen the age-old disparity between the chief cities and the countryside. A strong agrarian Green movement has attempted to address some of these concerns. And of course, the Upper Country grapples with the same question faced by people everywhere: how to adjust to a changing world without losing sight of who they are.