Colonial History on the Mississippi River

I grew up, and still live, in the great state of Illinois, in the American Midwest. Although Illinois has a rich Native American past, which I hope to explore in a future video, the history of European settlement only extends back to the late 17th century. That history, however, is very eventful. For more than a century, Southern Illinois lay at the heart of American history. Here, in what is now a quiet region of cornfields, woods, and small towns, the great colonial empires of the New World met and clashed. America's first western frontier came into being, and the career of the Civil War's greatest general began. The key to the region's importance was, and is, the mighty Mississippi River. It's in Southern Illinois, about halfway along the river's 2,300-mile journey from the north woods of Minnesota to the Louisiana bayous, that the Mississippi's greatest tributaries, the Missouri and Ohio, meet the main stem. This October, I spent a day following the Mississippi about 160 miles from the mouth of the Missouri to the mouth of the Ohio, stopping at a series of historical sites along the way. This video follows my journey. For the better part of a century, what's now Southern Illinois was a critical node in New France, the sprawling French colonial empire that arched across North America. Some of the few French forts and settlements, between Quebec and Louisiana, were clustered along the Mississippi, near the mouths of the Missouri and Illinois rivers. One of these settlements, St. Louis, grew into a major city. The rest have remained small towns. The best-preserved early French settlement along the middle Mississippi is St. Genevieve, the only site in this video on the Missouri side of the river. Founded around the middle of the 18th century, it was never an important place. But its well-preserved houses provide an excellent idea of French colonial architecture. Perhaps the most striking building in St. Genevieve is the Louis Bolduc House, constructed in 1792. As you can see, it's a log cabin, built of vertical posts caulked with bousselage, an adobe-like mixture of mud, straw, and horsehair. The wide eaves of the roof helped to protect the walls from weathering and created shady porches for the summer heat. By the time the Louis Bolduc House was built, New France had disappeared. In the wake of the Seven Years' War, known in America as the French and Indian War, France had ceded its territories east of the Mississippi, including the modern state of Illinois, to Great Britain. To escape British rule, some French settlers crossed to the Western Bank, which was nominally under Spanish control. But Kaskaskia, the largest French settlement in the region, now lay in British territory. The European settlement at Kaskaskia had been founded as a Jesuit missionary center and trading post at the beginning of the 18th century and eventually grew into a sprawling town with more than 5,000 inhabitants. Around 1758, anxious about British invasion, the people of Kaskaskia began to build a fort on the bluff overlooking the town. Although it was never used, and apparently never completed, its remains are still visible. The same cannot be said of Kaskaskia itself, which stood along the Kaskaskia River, a tributary of the Mississippi. During a flood in the spring of 1881, the Mississippi jumped its banks and surged into the channel of the Kaskaskia, devouring the banks on both sides and sweeping houses into the water. Within a few years, the entire town had vanished. As Kaskaskia sank into the river, the bones of its early settlers were moved to the Garrison Hill Cemetery on a bluff overlooking the town's own watery grave. Another Kaskaskia was founded beyond the river's new western bank, but it was never more than a shadow of its former self. Today, with a population of 21, it's virtually a ghost town. It contains, however, the so-called Liberty Bell of the West, a memento of the daring raid that brought the Illinois country into the United States of America. In 1778, during the American War of Independence, Colonel George Rogers Clark led an expeditionary force of about 150 men from Virginia to evict the British from their outposts on the Ohio and Mississippi. After a long march through the wilderness, Clark divided his men into three groups just outside Kaskaskia. He sent two groups to enter the town from different directions and order the inhabitants to surrender their weapons. Clark himself led a band of picked men into Fort Gage, the British command post at Kaskaskia, where they found the entire garrison sleeping. The fort and town were captured without a shot. Clark ordered the church bell, sent from France by Louis XV, to be rung in celebration. This is the Liberty Bell of the West that awaits the rare visitor to modern Kaskaskia. By 1818, the year Illinois gained statehood, the first steamboats were already plying the Mississippi, bringing produce and passengers up and down from St. Louis to New Orleans. One of the many steamboat landings developed along the way was Thebes, Illinois. During my visit, thanks to extremely low water, the pilings of 19th century steamboat docks were visible. The railroads that shaped so much Midwestern history are also in evidence at Thebes, where the Missouri Pacific Railroad Bridge crosses the Mississippi. Completed in 1905, the bridge is almost 4,000 feet long and cost $2.8 million. Sixteen men lost their lives building it. I ended my trip in Cairo, the southernmost tip of Illinois. Cairo, spelled the same as Egyptian Cairo, but pronounced differently, is a shadow of its former self, having lost 90% of its population since 1950. It's not unusual to find abandoned houses like these, swallowed by kudzu vines. When it was still a thriving place during the first year of the Civil War, Cairo was the headquarters of Ulysses S. Grant and the base from which he launched his assaults on Forts Henry and Donaldson and, as it turned out, the meteoric military career that would bring him to Appomattox and the White House. During Grant's residence, a fort was established just south of Cairo, at the point where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet. More than a half century before, that same spit of land had hosted the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which paused here for a week while the leaders taught their men how to fix latitude and longitude. More than a century before that, the first French explorers canoed past this place, following the great river that would shape so much of American history. Check out the other videos on this channel for more journeys into the past.