The first existing records of white men in Illinois were made by Father Jacques Marquette. On May 17, 1673, he and Louis Jolliet, with five voyageurs, left Mackinac, paddled over parts of Lakes Huron and Michigan into Green Bay, thence up the Fox River, crossed at the portage, and went down the Wisconsin.
On June 17 they entered the Mississippi. On the west side of the river, in what is now Iowa, they encountered and exchanged friendly greetings with the Kaskaskia tribe of Illinois Indians. The adventurers passed the mouth of the Missouri, saw the famous Piasa or Thunder Bird painted on the cliffs near the present city of Alton, and reached the mouths of the Ohio and Arkansas Rivers. There, having determined that the Mississippi flowed not into some western ocean, but into the Gulf of Mexico, and fearing Spaniards and hostile Indians, the Marquette party turned back late in July 1673.
They returned by way of the Illinois River, which Marquette described in his Journal: “We have seen nothing like this river for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, ducks, parrots, and even beaver.” And Jolliet later reported that the valley was “the most beautiful and most suitable for settlement.”
Near Starved Rock they encountered the same tribe of Kaskaskia, now returned to their ancestral village site (about nine miles below the town of Ottawa), and their friendliness so won Father Marquette that he promised to return and set up a mission among them. From the Desplaines River they took the ancient portage trail to the Chicago River, thence to Lake Michigan, and up to Green Bay. Here Marquette, ill from the hardships of the voyage, was left behind, and Jolliet went on alone to Montreal where, almost in sight of the town, his canoe overturned and his carefully kept Journal was lost. Nevertheless he gave enthusiastic verbal descriptions of the new country, of its fertility, and ease of cultivation; he spoke of its marvelous transportation facilities, and showed how, with a canal built through “but half a league of prairie,” a boat could sail from Lake Erie down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
On October 25, 1674, with two voyageurs as companions, Father Marquette set out from Green Bay to keep his promise to the Kaskaskia. The voyage proved a hard one, and not until December 4 did the party reach the mouth of the Chicago River. Because of the severe cold and the recurrence of his old illness, Marquette stopped “two leagues” above the mouth of the river for the winter. With the spring his strength returned, and in Easter week, 1675, he established the first mission in the Illinois country at the Great Village of the Illinois, calling it the Mission of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. But then, weakened again by illness, he decided to return to St. Ignace (Mackinac). He was canoed up the eastern shore of Lake Michigan by his two faithful companions; finally, when he was unable to go farther, they landed near the river named for him in the present State of Michigan. There, on May 18, 1675, he died.
Robert René Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the French explorer, came later to the Illinois country. In 1679, after the sinking of his Griffon on Lake Erie, he erected a fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph River, ascended that river, portaged to the Kankakee, and canoed up the Illinois River to Lake Peoria, where he made friends with the Peoria tribe of the Illinois. About two miles below the lake, on the south side of the river, he built Fort Crèvecoeur in January 1680. In his absence the men mutinied and plundered the fort, and raiding Iroquois burned the Peoria village. Upon his return to the Illinois Country in 1682, La Salle, with Tonti, built Fort St. Louis at Starved Rock as a key to the vast empire of forts and commerce he had conceived. But his enemies at court prevailed, and he was soon recalled. Returning to France, he received permission from the king to establish a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi; on March 20, 1687, on a branch of the Trinity River, he was shot from ambush.
Tonti, La Salle’s lieutenant, obtained in 1690 the privileges previously granted La Salle. In 1691-92 he moved Fort St. Louis from Starved Rock to Pimitoui, on Peoria Lake. For ten years he devoted himself to bringing in settlers, missionaries, and trade supplies. When he died in 1704, a chain of forts stretched from Montreal to Mobile. Tonti had at last succeeded where his chief, La Salle, had failed.
The Mission of the Holy Family was established at Cahokia in 1699 by priests of the Seminary of Foreign Missions. In 1703 the Jesuits moved the Mission of the Immaculate Conception to the Indian village of Kaskaskia, sixty miles below Cahokia, a short distance from the mouth of the Kaskaskia River. These two towns on the American Bottom, Cahokia and Kaskaskia, soon became the centers of French life in the Illinois country. In 1720, after the collapse of the Mississippi Bubble, the commandant of the Illinois country completed Fort de Chartres, 17 miles north of Kaskaskia. The name Illinois was first officially used when the seventh civil and military district of the French province of Louisiana was so designated.
Meanwhile British colonists were advancing on French territory. New York fur traders reached the Great Lakes by way of the Mohawk Valley; Carolina frontiersmen pushed around the southern end of the Appalachians into the lower Mississippi Valley; the English continued their Hudson Bay fur trade. Land speculation grew among the English colonists.
In 1747 the Ohio Land Company was organized, and in 1749 was granted 200,000 acres of land near the forks of the Ohio on condition that the territory be fortified and a hundred families settled on the land within seven years. Thus began the struggle which, at the end of the French and Indian War, found England in possession of all French territory on the North American continent.
The English occupation of the Illinois country did not begin at once. Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa, rose against the British in 1763, and captured all but three of the newly acquired forts in the Lakes Region. He was not defeated until the following year, and it was not until October 10, 1765, that the French flag was lowered and the British raised at Fort de Chartres. Here, on December 6, 1768, was held the first court under English jurisdiction in the Illinois country.
By this time the British colonists were moving into the land beyond the Alleghenies. Speculators in Virginia, Connecticut, and New York were organizing colonies, and colonial firms engaged in extensive trading operations. But few if any American settlers were attracted to Illinois, and the British showed no capacity for dealing with the French inhabitants. Chaos prevailed, and the population diminished.
Thus there was widespread sympathy in Illinois for the Colonial cause in the American Revolution. In 1776-77 powder purchased from the French and Spaniards was run up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans to Wheeling, West Virginia. As the war progressed, the strategic position of the Illinois country as a link with Spanish and French allies, and as a base for attack on the British at Detroit, became apparent.
The task of winning this country was undertaken by George Rogers Clark in 1778. Authorized by the Governor of Virginia, he floated down the Ohio River with a band of 175 men. From Fort Massac he set out overland for Kaskaskia. On July 4, 1778, while Rocheblave, the expatriate Frenchman in command for the British, was penning another of his whining letters to England, Clark entered the village, and was greeted warmly by the inhabitants. Father Gibault, at Clark’s request, traveled to Vincennes, won the allegiance of the people there, and persuaded them to sign the Oath of Vincennes. Hearing of Clark’s successes, the Virginia Assembly decreed on December 9, 1778, that Illinois was to be a county of Virginia. But six days later Vincennes was lost to the British under the command of Governor Hamilton of Detroit.
Seeing the entire territory threatened, Clark set out for Vincennes with 170 men. It was February; the rivers and bottom-lands were flooded; for miles the men waded in water up to their waists on one of the most courageous marches in American history. At Vincennes Clark succeeded in detaching the townspeople from the garrison, and on February 25, 1779, Hamilton capitulated. Later that year Clark planned a campaign against the British at Detroit, but it was not carried out. The next year, when the British attacked the Illinois towns, Clark came to the aid of Cahokia and helped beat them off. As the war drew to a close, military operations ceased except for periodic Indian raids at the instigation of the British.
To organize the vast territory which Clark’s conquest had secured for the United States, the Ordinance of 1787 was passed. It created the Northwest Territory as a Federal territory to consist of the present States of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; slavery here was prohibited, except as a punishment for crime; a territorial government with limited suffrage was set up; provision was made that any area with sixty thousand persons could organize as a State and apply for admission to the Union.
Despite the Treaty of Paris in 1783, trouble with the British and their Indian allies continued. In 1794 American forces defeated the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and by the Treaty of Greenville of the next year the Indians ceded small tracts of land at every important post and portage throughout the territory, including the site of the future Fort Dearborn, one at Peoria, and another at the mouth of the Illinois River. The United States then adopted an Indian policy which by 1809 had obtained from the Indians practically all of Ohio, eastern Michigan, southern Indiana, and most of western and southern Illinois.
Against this growing threat of the white man rose Tecumseh, and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet. They organized the Indians of the Northwest Territory, ordered white men barred from Indian villages, and forbade the selling of any more land to them. The Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811, though a victory for the whites, had deterred Tecumseh little, and the Indians in the conspiracy remained active throughout the War of 1812, aiding the British in gaining possession of most of the Northwest Territory. Detroit was captured; the garrison and inhabitants of Fort Dearborn were massacred by the Indians a few miles from the fort as they attempted to flee on August 15, 1812. The end of the war brought the Northwest Territory back to the American republic, but the problem of the Indians continued down to the Black Hawk War of 1832.
Illinois remained part of the Northwest Territory until 1800. In that year, by an Act of Congress approved May 7 but not effective until July 4, 1801, it became part of Indiana Territory. In 1809, by an Act approved February 3, the Territory of Illinois was created, which included within its bounds the present State of Wisconsin. Illinois became a territory of the second class on May 21, 1812; during all of this territorial period Illinois was governed by Ninian Edwards. Finally, on December 3, 1818, shorn of the Wisconsin Territory, it was admitted as a State of the Union, although its population was only 40,258, far short of the 60,000 stipulated by the Ordinance of 1787.
A State constitution was ratified without being submitted to the people, and Shadrach Bond, elected without opposition, became the first State governor of Illinois. The first capital was Kaskaskia; two years later Vandalia succeeded it. Through the efforts of Nathaniel Pope, territorial delegate from Illinois, the northern boundary of the State, fixed by the Ordinance of 1787 at an east-west line placed at the tip of Lake Michigan, was moved 51 miles north, to a line along the longitude 42° 30′, and as a result Illinois obtained a shoreline on the Great Lakes. The reason given was that “additional security for the perpetuation of the union” would be afforded if Illinois were identified with the northern States. Today this added territory contains 55 per cent of the population of the State.
