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Among the largest population centers in North America toward the end of the seventeenth century was the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, which, combined with surrounding settlements, enveloped as many as twenty thousand people for approximately two decades. Located at the top of the Illinois River valley, the village is not normally considered a significant part of American history, so it has remained relatively unknown. In many accounts, the location is discussed merely as a refugee center to which desperate, beleaguered Algonquians fled ahead of a series of mid-seventeenth-century Iroquois conquests that were part of the violence known as the Beaver Wars. Reeling from violence and constrained by necessity, the Illinois speakers who predominated in the place belonged to a “fragile, disordered world,” “made of fragments” and dependent on French support. The size of the settlement did not reflect a particular level of native power but was simply proportional to the devastation, suffering, and urgency felt by the people of the pays d'en haut (the Great Lakes area)—and particularly by the Illinois—at the start of the colonial period.1
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