Agricultural societies in North America faced difficulty in the late sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries, thanks to several climate events—the Little Ice Age, most important-ly. Many Algonquians in the Ohio River valley were dedicated to farming, but they strug-gled. For people such as the proto-Illinois, who lived south of Lake Erie and in the OhioValley in small-scale villages linked by kinship and a shared language, the new conditionsmay have produced as many as thirty fewer frost-free days, resulting in “dark” times in theirregion.

At the end of the seventeenth century the upper Illinois Valley was a literal and meta-phorical ecotone, an important place of divisions. Ecologically it marked the transition

Field biologists have coined the term ecotone to characterize the border zones betweentypes of vegetation (such as grasslands and wetlands) where different species and ecologicalcommunities meet and interact. According to ecologists, ecotones are special because theyoften open new configurations of possibility and create “edge effects”: an increase in thevariety of plants and animals where the two zones overlap. In the transition zones, certainspecies—particularly mobile animals—can exploit multiple habitats within a small space.

This essay reconsiders the rise and fall of the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, arguing thatit was a center of exploitation—perhaps the most remarkable bid for power in seventeenth-century native North America. Having invaded the tallgrass prairies during a period of cli-mate change, the Illinois went to the village not out of desperation but to continue a power-seeking trajectory begun in the early 1600s. Assembling in great numbers at the top of thevalley did provide security, of course, but it also gave the Illinois a unique ability to capital-ize on the particular ecological and social advantages of their recently mastered borderlandsregion. Most important among these were opportunities for bison hunting, slavery, andslave trading—the foundations of an ambitious economy and social strategy that the Illinoisspeakers sought to maximize in their massive population center

Located at the top of the Illinois River valley, the village is not normally considered asignificant part of American history, so it has remained relatively unknown. In many ac-counts, the location is discussed merely as a refugee center to which desperate, beleagueredAlgonquians fled ahead of a series of mid-seventeenth-century Iroquois conquests that werepart of the violence known as the Beaver Wars. Reeling from violence and constrained bynecessity, the Illinois speakers who predominated in the place belonged to a “fragile, dis-ordered world,” “made of fragments” and dependent on French support.