The Indians Of Illinois In The 1600s
The Indians Of Illinois In The 1600s
Kaskaskia & The French Connection
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Canal Stories, a series brought to you by the Canal Corridor Association to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Illinois & Michigan Canal and the communities that were shaped by its legacy. As we discussed last week, Native Americans had lived in the Illinois Valley for well over 10,000 years before the arrival of the first Europeans, though the information we’ve uncovered about the region’s first inhabitants is through archaeology, linguistic analysis of Native American words and terms, by genetics, and even oral traditions.
However, beginning in 1673, with the arrival of the men of the Jolliet and Marquette expedition, information about the Indigenous people of northern Illinois and the Illinois Valley has become less ambiguous, more detailed, and better understood. Today, we’re traveling back to the late 1600s to learn about the Native Americans of the Upper Illinois Valley and their interactions with French explorers. This story comes to us from Mark Walczynski, Park Historian for the Starved Rock Foundation who specializes in the Franco/Native American period of the western Great Lakes and the Illinois Country.
Since the Pleistocene, or last great Ice Age, anthropologists categorize human occupation of today’s Illinois into five general categories: Paleo, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian, and Historic. We are living in the Historic period, which began in the summer of 1673, when the Jolliet and Marquette expedition paddled up the Illinois River during their famous voyage of discovery. The chronicler of the expedition, Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette, noted that the party disembarked at a village called kaaskaaskinki or kaaskaaskingi (known as Kaskaskia by the French), a large Illinois Indian village named for the Illinois subtribe who lived at the site. According to the missionary, the village, located along the north shore of the Illinois River, about a mile upstream from Starved Rock, consisted of seventy-four “cabins,” or a population of about 1,480 people. Leaving the village in the company of Illinois guides, the French party eventually reached Lake Michigan, where they continued their journey north: Marquette to the Jesuit mission of St. Xavier on Wisconsin’s Fox River, and Jolliet and the others to Jolliet’s trading post at Sault Ste. Marie.
In April of 1675, Marquette returned to the village, where he established the first Catholic mission in today’s Illinois and performed the first Catholic mass. Marquette died a short while later, while en route to his mission at St. Ignace, in today’s Michigan. Two years after Marquette’s second visit to Kaskaskia, another Jesuit missionary, Claude-Jean Allouez, arrived at the village to continue Marquette’s work at the site. The new missionary recorded 351 cabins at the site, or a population of about 7,000 people. The priest ministered to the local Illinois, taught them prayers in the Miami-Illinois language, and had his converts erect a thirty-five foot tall cross in the middle of the village. Allouez did not remain long at Kaskaskia, as it was rumored that the Iroquois, arguably the most powerful fighting force on the North American continent, might soon attack their Illinois enemies.
Between Marquette’s first arrival at Kaskaskia in 1673, and the spring of 1680, when the French explorer Robert Cavelier, better known as La Salle, arrived in the Starved Rock area, the village had grown to over 8,000, perhaps as many as 9,000 people. However, in September of 1680, when most of the Illinois had left Kaskaskia for winter hunting camps downstream, the long-rumored Iroquois invasion occurred. The Iroquois victors drove the remaining Illinois from the Illinois Valley and west of the Mississippi. Kaskaskia ceased to exist for three long years.
La Salle returned to the upper Illinois Valley in late 1682. During the last days of that year, his men began building Fort St. Louis, a fortified wooden structure located on the summit of today’s Starved Rock. Construction of the fort was completed in March of 1683. While the fort was under construction, La Salle traveled to today’s St. Joseph River country, in southwestern Michigan and northwestern Indiana, where he convinced numerous Miami groups to leave their established villages and resettle in the Illinois River Valley. Sometime later, La Salle’s second-in-command, Henri Tonti, traveled to today’s northeastern Missouri, where the Illinois who previously lived at Kaskaskia had fled, and convinced 6,000 of them to return to their former village. Also settling in the Illinois Valley and adjacent area was one group of “Chaneunon” (Shawnee), a band of Otoe (a trans-Mississippi tribe illustrated as Ouabona on La Salle’s map), and a few Mohegan tribesmen from today’s northeastern United States. This collection of Native settlements located between today’s Aroma Park, Illinois and Princeton, Illinois, and south to modern-day Hennepin, is sometimes called “La Salle’s Indian Colony” by historians. This collection of Native villages was intended to be a barrier to Iroquois incursions into the Illinois Country, providing safety in numbers against enemy war parties.
La Salle later claimed that 18,000 tribesmen and their families had settled near his fort, and researchers by way of the now famous Franquelin/La Salle 1684 Carte de la Louisiane map of the region have estimated the population of La Salle’s Colony to be as high as 20,000. However, these estimates are fraught with problems. To name a few issues, the numbers and symbols of populations illustrated on the map are vague, such as the use of the letter “h” next to some of the numbers. Second, some Illinois groups mentioned in La Salle’s correspondences as having resettled at Kaskaskia are depicted living in Iowa and southern Illinois (for example, the Tamaroa, Cahokia, Moingwena, Peoria, Tapouaro, and Coiracoentanon subtribes). More importantly, La Salle’s personal letters and reports contradict much of the information depicted on the map. Considering these problems, it is impossible to determine with any accuracy how many Native Americans lived in northern Illinois at this time.
Fort St. Louis was more than a fort: it also served as a trading post where local Native groups could, in the spring, after returning to their villages from the winter hunt, exchange the hides and pelts of furbearing mammals for items of European manufacture, including metal knives, guns, brass kettles, items of personal adornment, and more. The fort was the center for Franco-Amerindian trade and diplomacy in the region.
In time, intertribal disputes began to erode the cohesion of the colony. Long standing feuds between the Miami and the Illinois, for example, eventually led the Miami to leave their Illinois Valley camps; some Miami establishing new settlements in the Chicago area, while others returned to their former haunts in Indiana and Michigan. Further, the limited amount of timber used as firewood to heat their huts, to cook, for light, and to repel mosquitos during summer nights began to wane. With the loss of habitat, animals such as whitetail deer, elk, and a variety of furbearing species abandoned the area to find new places to live. And continuous farming in the same fields, year after year, depleted the nutrients from the soil, causing Illinois women to stray farther and farther from the safety of their camps to sow and harvest their crops, which exposed them to potential capture by roving war parties. By 1689, nearly all the non-Illinois colony tribes had left the valley for new settlements. In 1690, only about 1,000 Illinois remained at Kaskaskia, the others having established new villages at Lake Peoria. The following year, the remaining Illinois at Kaskaskia joined the others at Lake Peoria. With the tribes gone, the fort on Starved Rock became an albatross to the French, who soon thereafter abandoned their post and built a new fort near the Illinois at Lake Peoria.
Between 1691 and 1712, no semipermanent Native villages remained in the upper Illinois Valley. In 1712, one group of Illinois, known to us today as the Peoria, would return to the Starved Rock area and establish new villages near the famous bluff.
That concludes today’s Canal Story. Thank you so much for joining us as we continue our journey through the history of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, pass it along to your family and friends, be sure to leave a like or a comment, and we’ll see you again very soon.
Notes:
For more information on the Illinois Indians, see Massacre 1769, The Search for the Origin of the Legend of Starved Rock (by Mark Walczynski, published by the Center for French Colonial Studies, 2019).
What to see more works from Mark Walczynski? Get his books HERE!