Quashquema, Venus, Commerce: Before the Mormons Came

The site where Nauvoo now stands had several names and several identities before Joseph Smith arrived. The land along this wide bend in the Mississippi was Sauk and Meskwaki territory, and a large Sauk village near the bluff was called Quashquame, after a leader of that name. The village was an established community long before American settlers pushed into the region.

In the eighteen twenties, a captain named James White purchased the village site from the Sauk, reportedly offering liquor and two thousand bushels of corn as payment. The first American settlement on the land was a scattering of cabins that became known as Venus, which hosted the first Hancock County post office in eighteen thirty. In October of eighteen thirty-four the settlement renamed itself Commerce, anticipating growth as a river trading post.

Commerce never became what its founders hoped. The location was plagued by malarial swamp, the river trade proved thinner than expected, and by eighteen thirty-nine the place was in decline. When Joseph Smith sent agents to find land for his followers who had been expelled from Missouri, Commerce was cheap enough that the struggling church could afford it.

Smith's agents purchased the town and surrounding land at prices well below what the sellers had originally hoped for. What Commerce could not accomplish as a trading post, Nauvoo would attempt as something entirely different: a planned religious city on the Mississippi, designed by a man who believed he was building a preparation for the Kingdom of God.