>77.392 1348 Kaskaskia Under the French Regime By Natalia Maree Belting UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS URBANA : 1948 ILLINOIS STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES is the general title for a series of monographs in history, economics, sociology, political science, and allied fields. Each volume consists of approximately 450 pages, priced at four dollars. A volume may include two, three, or four individual monographs. Trices of individual numbers are indicated in the list of titles on the back cover. Volumes I-IX are now wholly out of print and therefore not listed. Requests for exchanges should be addressed to the ]£xchange Department, University of Illinois Library, Urbana. All communications concerning sale or subscrip- tion should be addressed to the University of Illinois Press, L^rbana. ILLINOIS STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Volume XXIX, Number 3 PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE GRADUATE COLLEGE BOARD OF EDITORS Clarence A. Berdahl D. Philip Locklin Raymond P. Stearns UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 800—5-48—32393 =: press:: Kaskaskia Under the French Regime By Natalia Maree Belting UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS URBANA : 1948 Copyright, 1948, by the University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Permission for reproduction in any form may be obtained from the Publisher, MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS -oT I. Introduction 7 II. Kaskaskia Beginnings 10 III. The Village of Kaskaskia 23 IV. Life in the Village 41 V. Making a Living 52 VI. Social Life and Customs 68 Appendix : Extracts from the Parish Registers 79 Notes on the Census of 1752 86 Bibliography 121 Index to Names 127 -^ Chapter I INTRODUCTION The story of the French in the IlHnois country in the eighteenth century is an important and romantic chapter in the history of the United States. But so far, it hasn't been told. Alvord outlined the plot in his Illinois Country, and various volumes of the collections of the Illinois State Historical Library have documented certain special phases of it. This present study deals almost entirely with the social history of the six Illinois villages with particular attention being paid to the largest settlement. The records for such a history are comparatively few and widely scattered. In the Archives .Rationales at Paris, in the archives of Quebec, in the Cabildo archives of New Orleans, and in the Randolph County courthouse at Chester, Illinois, lie the documents which are the chief sources. But scattered throughout the country are other collections of a few pieces that one must consult before he can draw an accurate picture of the period. Probably the most valuable of these are the Vaudreuil manuscripts included in the Loudoun papers, owned by the Huntington Library. Fortunately, photostats of most of the relevant documents from the French archives are in the Illinois Historical Survey of the LTniversity of Illinois; the records of the Superior Council are being calendared by the Louisiana Historical Society in each issue of its quarterly; many of the notarial files in Quebec have been calendared by Monsieur Roy, archivist of the province. The chief material for the present study, however, is contained in the volumes of the Kaskaskia Manuscripts now in the office of the circuit clerk at Chester. Altogether the}^ number 3002 documents, dating from about 1 719 to 1780 and beyond. Some of the later ones have been pub- lished in the Illinois Historical Collections, but those antedating 1763 have never been printed. Carefully repaired and provided with large and substantial portfolios by the LTniversity of Illinois, they are in ex- cellent condition, and though stained by water and time, few of them are illegible. They are arranged in volumes marked Private Papers, Public Papers, and Commercial Papers; however, since the sheets are loose and the pages unnumbered, there is considerable danger of mixing or actual loss. Some of the documents are already out of place, for in more than one case, records of the same transaction are scattered in three or four volumes. The author spent a week in the fall of 1939 microfilming those docu- ments bearing dates up to 1763 although on account of the shortness of 8 KASKASKIA UNDER THE FRENCH REGIME time, she was unable to copy all of the pertinent records in the folios of Commercial Papers after volume six. Many of these same documents have since been photographed by the Xational Park Service. Kaskaskia itself, along with the villages of Fort de Chartres and St. Philippe, no longer exists. The last French commandant, Xeyon de Villiers, left the Illinois country in June, 1764 with most of his troops and quite a few of the habitants, without awaiting the arrival of the British soldiers who were to take over the Illinois country under the treaty of peace. Louis St. Ange Bellerive was called from his post at Vincennes and left in command of the almost empty fort until October 10, 1765, when it was surrendered to Captain Thomas Stirling and his detachment of a hundred men of the Black Watch regiment. St. Ange left the British territory and with most of the wealthier habitants took up his home in the infant city of St. Louis, founded on the Spanish side of the Mississippi the previous year by Pierre Laclede. The years of the British occupation and the early days of the Amer- ican possession that followed were periods of anarchy. The lack of any authorized civil government left the inhabitants without any legal means of settling disputes and placed them at the mercy of men interested mainly in lining their own pockets. In 1818 Kaskaskia became the first capital of the state of Illinois, but in the next year the seat of the government was moved eastward to Vandalia. Gradually the population of Kaskaskia diminished until it became only a quiet, lazy country village half-slumbering on the river banks. Year after year floods menaced it, cutting the Kaskaskia channel wider and deeper and inundating streets and cellars, while above the town the bottleneck of land separating the Mississippi from the Kas- kaskia became narrower and narrower. Foreseeing the future, most of the few remaining families fled to higher ground on the Illinois side or took up new homes in Missouri. In 1881 the peninsula became an island; the town, not entirely destroyed, each spring lost a few more buildings as they toppled into the ever-widening Mississippi. The village site today is entirely gone; the tiny island is but a remnant of the old common fields south of Kaskaskia. Little remains even of memories of old France in the American bottom. Kaskaskia is gone; present-day Kaskaskia keeps alive only the name. Fort de Chartres is now a state park, and the stone fort of 1752 is in the process of reconstruction. Renault's concession of St. Philippe was long ago wiped out by the river. But in Prairie du Rocher in recent years some of the old customs have been revived by descendants of the early Creoles, and the cry of "La gui annee" is heard again on Xew Year's Eve. In Cahokia, the state has rebuilt the old courthouse which was originally the home of the engineer. Francois Saucier, and which is INTRODUCTION 9 now perhaps the only example of French architecture remaining in Illi- nois. Ste. Genevieve, moved from its original site on the low river banks to the hills above, still resembles the old French community founded by Kaskaskia habitants near the middle of the eighteenth century, though there is not a house standing which has not been remodeled by a suc- cession of Spanish, German, and American owners. In Old Mines, farther to the west, the lead mines are worked with primitive French methods, and men still tell the folk tales that were brought from France nearly two hundred years ago. With these few exceptions, river waters, British and American conquest, and the stream of German im- migration into southern Illinois and Missouri have obliterated the French culture of old Kaskaskia. Chapter II KASKASKIA BEGINNINGS Mission, 1703-1718 It was the year 1703. Anne was the new queen of England, Louis XIV the old king of France. Europe's soldiers had taken up arms again in the War of the Spanish Succession. A month's journey across the vast Atlantic, two colonial empires were growing side by side on the North American continent. The English trader and his French counterpart, the coiireur du bois, pushing westward from the Alleghenies and southward from the St. Lawrence, each scheming for the control of the Indian fur trade, were laying the groundwork for the coming wilderness struggle for colonial supremac}^ New York had passed seventy-seven years; the city of Philadelphia only a score. Quebec lacked but five years of ending its first century. Biloxi, far to the southwest, had been founded by the young French explorer, Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, only four years before. The first days of New Orleans were years in the future. So it was in Europe and the New World when on a spring day the Jesuit Father Marest, missionary to the Kaskaskia Indians, wrote at the top of his register "1703 Apr. 25, Ad ripam Metchigamiam dictam venimus."^ It was really the Kaskaskia River, a narrow stream that flowed lazily south through broad Illinois prairies and emptied into the i\Iississippi a few miles below the new Indian village. The Illinois tribe from which it took its name had originally lived much farther north. Settled with the Frenchman's other allies, the Wea, Miami. Shawnee, and Piankashaw, near La Salle's Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River, they had left in the late fall of 1700 with their missionary for new camp- grounds on the Des Peres River on the western side of the Mississippi opposite the Cahokia mission.^ It was this spot that they deserted in the early winter of 1703 with the intention of moving twenty- five leagues south, about a day's journey from the tannery that had been established on the Ohio River.^ W^ith the Kaskaskias were a number of French traders who had married into the tribe, and who, making their new homes on the river bank, became the founders of the French village of Kaskaskia.