Fort Crevecoeur, the Broken-Heart Fort

On the fifteenth of January, sixteen eighty, a French explorer named René-Robert Cavelier, known to history as La Salle, drove stakes into the east bank of the Illinois River near what is now the suburb of Creve Coeur. He and his lieutenant Henri de Tonti were building a fort, a simple stockade with a cannon platform and a storehouse, in a landscape they barely understood, during a winter that was doing its best to stop them.

La Salle named the place Fort Crevecoeur, which is French for broken heart. He had earned the name honestly. His men had been deserting. His debts were mounting. His great Mississippi expedition had barely started, and already it was falling apart. The fort was a physical declaration that he was still going.

He finished it in early March. Then he left, walking all the way back to Fort Frontenac, near present-day Kingston, Ontario, to resupply. He left Tonti in charge.

By mid-April, the remaining men had had enough. They pillaged the fort, burned what they could not carry, and headed back to Canada. Tonti was left with almost nothing. The fort that had taken the winter to build was gone before spring ended.

Fort Crevecoeur is recorded as the first European-built structure within the present-day boundaries of Illinois. Historians later debated exactly where it stood, a researcher in two thousand twenty-two suggested the documents pointed to Beardstown rather than the traditional Creve Coeur location, but the question has not been settled. A monument marks the traditional site along the river. La Salle never gave up. He eventually made it to the Gulf of Mexico.