One of the most important influences on the Midwest American history is the French. Unlike the British and the Spanish, the French had a different way of viewing and dealing with the American Indians and their land; they were more interested in Christianizing the Indians and trading fur back to Canada out of the Indian land than segregating them or occupying their territories.
The French first came over to the Midwest from Canada in the form of explorers with the intention of finding a route to China in the East. The first explorer believed to start this mission was Cartier who ultimately failed to accomplish the goal of the exploration – getting to the East. The same mission failure was later met by Cartier’s followers, French-Canadian explorers like Nicollet, Radisson, Jolliet, La Salle and Samuel De Champlain, the later more famous in the history of North America for his foundation of the Cupid City. There are still several Midwestern village and county names named after those French explorers in our present time.
What more attracted the attention of those French-Canadian explorers throughout their continuous expeditions of the area was the fur. As a result, a relatively small group of them continued to conduct numerous journeys to the area and establish a fur trade with the Native Americans. Day after day, they became more and more dependent on the Indians in providing them with fur in exchange of a variety of goods and equipments. Within the domains of this fur trading between the French-Canadian and the American-Indian people developed a remarkably consistent interaction between the two sides leading eventually to some kind of mutual understanding.
That the main approach of the French to the Native Americans was not that of an occupier to an occupied nor was it really contributed to widening and strengthening better communication between the two nations. The give-and-take trade that gathered both sides not only sustained the humanitarian view of the American Indians by the French-Canadians, but it also crucially empowered the relationship between the human being and the land. This can clearly be seen in the marriage of many French-Canadian men to different American-Indian women. One of those French-Canadian men who got married to an American-Indian woman was the most famous fur trader, Joseph Bailey (1796–1830), who really represents the incarnation of that cultivated change in land and whose gradual and systematic transformation from a fur trader to finally a real estate developer is a clear proof of this very fact.
I would like to conclude my point about the French contact with the American-Indians, especially in the Midwest, by driving your attention to the uniqueness of the French treatment of the Indian man and land, which obviously contradicts that of the British, Spanish, or even American people. The contact of the Indians with the French in the Midwest gives us a vivid picture of one of the most civilized and cultural contacts ever in the long history of the American-Indians.