The Illinois Confederacy and the French Illinois Country

When the French paddled south through the Great Lakes and portaged into the Illinois River in sixteen seventy-three, they entered a world that was already organized. The Illinois Confederacy, a loose alliance of related Algonquian-speaking peoples, occupied the heartland of what would become this state. The Peoria, the Kaskaskia, the Cahokia, the Tamaroa, and several smaller groups together numbered perhaps ten thousand people at European contact. They called themselves Illiniwek, which Marquette recorded as meaning 'the men,' or simply, the people.

Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, and Louis Jolliet, a fur trader, were the first Europeans to map the river. They traveled down the Illinois in sixteen seventy-three and described a landscape of extraordinary richness: vast prairies rolling to the horizon, bison herds moving like dark weather across the grass, rivers thick with fish. René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle arrived in the Illinois country in sixteen seventy-nine and built Fort Crèvecoeur near present-day Peoria in sixteen eighty, one of the earliest European structures in the interior of the continent.

France claimed the entire region as part of Illinois Country, a territory stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. French missionaries established towns at Kaskaskia and Prairie du Rocher in the south. These settlements survived long after France lost the territory to Britain in seventeen sixty-three and long after the American Revolution swept the British out in turn. Kaskaskia became the first state capital of Illinois in eighteen eighteen.

The Illinois Confederacy, meanwhile, had been nearly destroyed by the late seventeen hundreds. Warfare with the Iroquois and later with the Potawatomi, combined with disease and displacement, reduced their numbers from thousands to a remnant. The Peoria tribe today is headquartered in Miami, Oklahoma, the last institutional heir of the confederacy that once gave this state its name.