Fort Massac: Where Four Nations Met the Ohio
Near Metropolis, Illinois
At the point where the Ohio River bends just north of its confluence with the Mississippi, the bluffs above Metropolis, Illinois, have been occupied by soldiers speaking four different languages across three centuries. The site matters because of where it sits: whoever holds this bluff can control movement on the lower Ohio.
The French built Fort De L'Ascension here in seventeen fifty-seven, during the French and Indian War, as part of their chain of frontier posts connecting Louisiana to Canada. The fort was renamed Massiac in honor of the Marquis de Massiac, the French Naval Minister, and came under Cherokee attack but held. When the French and Indian War ended in seventeen sixty-three, the French abandoned it. Before the British could occupy the fort, a band of Chickasaws burned it to the ground.
The site lay empty until seventeen seventy-eight, when Colonel George Rogers Clark stopped here with his Long Knives regiment on his way to capture the British-held Illinois Territory. Clark's strike from Fort Massac took Kaskaskia without firing a shot and secured the Illinois country for Virginia and the young United States. President Washington ordered the fort rebuilt in seventeen ninety-four, and for two decades it served as the westernmost American military post in the Old Northwest.
On November eleventh, eighteen oh three, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived at Fort Massac on their way west. They recruited volunteers for their Corps of Discovery here, among them, by most accounts, George Drouillard, part French-Canadian and part Shawnee, fluent in English, French, Shawnee, and the sign language of the plains, who would become one of the expedition's most valuable members. The Corps departed the next morning into the wide Ohio, toward a continent nobody had yet mapped.
