Starved Rock: La Salle's Fort and a Legend in Stone

The sandstone bluff rising a hundred and twenty-five feet above the Illinois River has been, at different moments, a French colonial stronghold, a disputed battlefield, and the site of one of the most enduring legends in the Midwest.

In the winter of sixteen eighty-two and sixteen eighty-three, the explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle and his lieutenant Henri de Tonti built Fort Saint Louis du Rocher on the summit of this rock. La Salle had already descended the Mississippi to its mouth and claimed the entire river valley for France. The rock, Le Rocher, the French called it, was an obvious strategic choice: its steep sides were nearly unscalable, and whoever held it controlled movement along the Illinois River. Within the palisade walls, La Salle and Tonti gathered a community of thousands of Native Americans from multiple tribes seeking protection from Iroquois raids. For a few years, this bluff was the most important French outpost in the interior of North America.

The fort was abandoned in sixteen ninety-one after the Native communities that had sheltered beneath it dispersed. A generation later, the rock acquired its name through a story that historians still debate. According to legend, after the Ottawa chief Pontiac was killed by an Illiniwek warrior in the seventeen sixties, retaliating Ottawa and Potawatomi forces pursued the remaining Illiniwek to this bluff. Surrounded and cut off from water and food, the defenders are said to have starved to death on the summit rather than surrender. No direct documentary evidence has ever confirmed the massacre happened here, and scholars now regard the story as largely legend.

What is certain is the park's subsequent history. In nineteen eleven, the state of Illinois purchased the site, making it the state's second state park. Through the nineteen thirties, the Civilian Conservation Corps built the stone lodge and the trail network that visitors still use today. The eighteen canyons cut into the surrounding bluffs by glacial meltwater streams, some with waterfalls, draw more than two million people a year.