The Republican Generation
1742–1766
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
Oliver Goldsmith, 1770
The Republican Generation’s childhood and youth were marked by imperial conflict, especially the French and Indian War of 1754–1763, whose aftermath helped generate disputes over frontier policy, taxation, and imperial costs. By young adulthood, this cohort became the institutional generation of the American and Atlantic revolutions: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and many others who converted revolutionary ideology into republican constitutions, parties, offices, and laws. This description is of the Strauss–Howe scheme of mainstream Anglo-American society, though; my own family history includes the French-Canadian frontier and the indigenous Americans, both of whose history was altogether different.
POKOUSEE. My maternal great7-grandmother. Pokousee, also Pokoussee or Po-Ko-See, nicknamed Kee-Zish and baptized Catherine Renard, was a Meskwaki woman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who was ancestral to Grace Lupient Chase, my great-great-grandmother. Though not quite as lost to the shrouding mists of history as Amor Via, Pokousee has only a fragmentary historical memory. She married Pierre Pelletier dit Antaya (1746–c. 1805), often simply called Pierre Antaya, one of the two founding settlers of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, who dwelt on the nine-square-mile grant afforded to such settlers by the incumbent indigeneous people in 1781. The two seem to have married at about the time of this settlement. I have done what I can to assemble the relevant materials to her life below.
From page 134 of Frenchtown Cemetery: Old Catholic Burying Ground, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, 1816–1840 (2022), by Marie Elise Antoine:
Most of these children, together with their mother, “Pokouſee, a Fox woman” appear on an 1824 list of mixed-race people who claimed land according to the treaty made at Washington City with the Sac and Fox chiefs on August 4th, 1824. The list, which has “Elizabeth, Marguerite, Maria, Theodiste, Euphrosine, Isaac, Isadore, and Chroyststome” is pictured to the right. The Anglophone clerk was clearly not especially familiar with the French name-forms. Nonetheless, the government use of this primary source has led me to employ “Pokouſee” as the primary form of this ancestor’s name. As the prior selection notes, though, she was baptized Catherine, often followed by Renard, “fox”. Of her life, a section was written in Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750–1860 (2014) by Lucy Eldersveld Murphy:
Although Prairie du Chien had seemed to be a single Native community in the 1760s, by the time Brisbois arrived in 1781, the “great mart” at the northern outskirts of the Meskwaki town was evolving into a distinct fur-trade village, as Euro-American and métis traders established stores and homes there. Brisbois soon met the local residents, including a large Meskwaki family of Des Chiens at the Prairie, descended from the chief of that name [Alim].
Pokoussee was probably among their daughters and she would play a central role in maintaining a Meskwaki presence on the land. She had recently married Pierre Peltier dit Antaya, one of the three negotiators Brisbois had met at Mackinac Island. (Many families in the Great Lakes area had alternate surnames, and the word dit was sometimes used to note the alternative name or alias used by a person or family.) Pokoussee and Pierre began to raise a family eventually consisting of twelve children. Pierre had followed in his father’s footsteps in entering the trade by 1762, and by 1779—before moving to Prairie du Chien—had been a trader for one of Mackinac’s general store companies. This branch of the Peltier family had used the alias “Antaya” for several generations in Quebec before Pierre arrived in Prairie du Chien, but this name probably recommended him to the Meskwaki community because of its similarity to the Meskwaki word, “netaya,” which means “my pet, dog, or horse.” Or perhaps there was a long-term connection between this Canadian family whose name suggests dogs, and the Dog Prairie.
Together with other bicultural, biracial families, Pokoussee and Pierre made their community an important fur-trade center, with strong links to Meskwaki, Sauk, Dakota, Ho-Chunk, and other Midwestern tribes. Marriages like Pokoussee and Pierre Antaya’s were a way to create ties between people of different cultural traditions. Unlike many ethnic groups, Indian peoples in the Midwest had approved of—and even encouraged—intermarriage. During the fur-trade era, traders learned that their Native customers expected them to marry local daughters, creating bonds of obligation to their in-laws and their communities. Native wives became interpreters who learned and taught both their own Native families and their husbands about each other’s expectations and cultures. Their bicultural children grew up to continue the patterns of mediation. The intermarriages and resulting kinship connected the Native people and traders; these relationships were the bases of the Indians’ willingness to allow Prairie du Chien and other Creole towns to take root in their backyards.
On Pokousee’s social place, drawing from several social histories, Murphy adds on page 148:
Native women like Chambreywinkau and Pokoussee had long enjoyed substantial authority and autonomy in tribal communities, and these traditions had persisted to a significant extent when they married fur traders like Pierre becoming cultural mediators, to use historian Clara Sue Kidwell’s term.
Murphy makes several other mentions of Pokousee in her very thoroughly researched text, which draws on correspondence and other contemporary documents for much of it. Pokousee is mentioned once more in a reference to her son Christostome:
And on February 4, 1834, [Chief] Keokuk himself and eleven other Native men told a Hancock County, Illinois, justice of the peace that “Christostome alias Christopher Entaya is a half breed of the Sac & Fox Tribes of Indians, and … is entitled to an equal share or proportion of the tract of land reserved by the said Tribes of Indians in their Treaty … and that the mother of said … Christostome … was … Po-Ko-See.”
Pokousee’s name
On the matter of Pokousee’s name, which occurs in so many forms, I reached out in May 2026 to Dr. Amy Dahlstrom, a linguist of Algonquian languages, who referred me to fellow Algonquianist Lucy Thomason. Lucy kindly answered and, though she did not immediately recognize the name, observed its resemblance to the Meskwaki animate intransitive verb stem po·hkosi-, “be broken in two”. She remarked that it would be conceivable that Pokousee’s name could be a nominalization of that verb stem, producing the form Po·hkosi·ha. However, not knowing the story behind the name, the clan affiliation, or the name in Meskwaki orthography, she did not speculate further. Of the secondary name Kee-Zish, she added: “Meskwaki people often have nicknames as well as clan names … Meskwaki ki·šeswa means ‘sun’, ‘moon’, or ‘month’.”
I immediately set to speculating about the possible implications of “be broken in two”, as another writing, this time from Antoine Cherier in 1841, identified her as a “large lame Indian woman” who was fluent in French and Meskwaki. Perhaps, I imagined, her name referred to her physical disability; Lucy reminded me, however, that “if Po-Ko-See turns out to be in any way descriptive of [her] personal and individual situation, it would be a nickname rather than a clan name. Also, there are specific verbs in Meskwaki that mean things like ‘to be lame’ and ‘to limp’ (although in Meskwaki, as in English or in any other language, there are of course myriad different ways of describing one and the same thing).”