Iliniwek Village: Eight Thousand Souls on the Missouri Bluffs
Near Nauvoo, Missouri
On a high sand terrace above the Des Moines River flood plain, just south of where you are now, sits one of the most extraordinary and least visited archaeological sites in the Midwest. The Iliniwek Village State Historic Site in Clark County, Missouri preserves the only known Illinois Indian village ever discovered in Missouri, and the largest, best-preserved village of that nation ever found anywhere.
The site was occupied from approximately sixteen forty to sixteen eighty-three. At its height, archaeologists estimate it held at least three hundred longhouses and a population in excess of eight thousand people, making it a substantial city by the standards of seventeenth-century North America. The Illinois Confederacy, or Illiniwek, were a loosely allied group of related Algonquian-speaking peoples who ranged across a wide swath of the upper Mississippi valley.
This village holds a special place in the written record of European exploration because it was here, in sixteen seventy-three, that Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette became the first Europeans documented to encounter the Illinois tribe on Missouri soil. Marquette recorded the meeting in his journal, describing the ceremonial welcome and the rich village life. It was one of the earliest European contacts anywhere in what would become Missouri.
The village sat on a terrace that gave its people wide views across the river bottomlands and defensive advantages against attack. Archaeological digs conducted in the nineteen nineties revealed numerous house foundations, storage pits, evidence of a palisade fortification, and the remains of at least one tribal member, recovered in nineteen ninety-eight.
Missouri acquired the one hundred twenty-seven-acre site in nineteen ninety-two. Today a walking trail of one and a quarter miles winds past interpretive signs, a reconstructed Illinois-style longhouse, and an oxbow lake. It is open year-round and costs nothing to enter. If you want to stand where Marquette stood and look out at the same river bottom he saw in sixteen seventy-three, this is the place.
