In 1772, a pamphlet came off the presses in Philadelphia. Like many pamphlets of this era, it was a political manifesto, a rallying cry. Written by a subject of the British empire in North America, it painted an almost utopian vision of the future. Addressing fellow colonists, the author urged them to “strive to improve our situation.” He confidently predicted a coming age of economic prosperity, telling his readers to expect “the perfection of their settlements.” He counseled his audience to abandon outdated tradition and move forward into a brave new world of self-reliance and self-improvement. The author called for...

In 1673, the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet arrived at a village of the Peoria near the Des Moines River, the first Europeans to record a visit to the Illinois Country in the Mississippi Valley. Beaching their canoes at the edge of town, they shouted and made their presence known to the Indians, thereby opening the encounter between the French and these Algonquians at the margins of the Great Lakes world.¹

The Indians gathered in the center of their village to give the Frenchmen an extraordinary and distinctive welcome. As Marquette later recounted, chief men made speeches, and...

In 1680, an army of the Iroquois invaded the Illinois with a force of five to six hundred warriors, renewing the Beaver Wars. Chasing the Illinois from their villages in the Illinois Valley, they desecrated graves, burned buildings, and ruined fields. Catching up with their victims, they committed, according to one French account, “mutilation, by slaying, and by a thousand tortures besides.”¹ After this destruction, the Iroquois aggressors left the Illinois Valley full of markers of their violence, including “the half denuded skulls of Illinois dead” and pictographic memorials commemorating the Iroquois victory.²

To the French in Quebec and throughout...

At the dawn of the 1690s, the French empire included an unintentional colonial outpost in the Illinois Country. Containing Jesuits, fur traders, Indians, and the defiant inheritors of La Salle’s early Louisiana concession, it was a far cry from what anybody—whether in the government of New France or on the ground in Illinois—might have hoped it to be. Only the strategic imperative of Indian affairs, the all-important alliance against the Iroquois, kept imperial officials and the people in and around Fort Saint Louis collaborating. But while the resulting collaboration followed nobody’s ideal design, there were measured successes. The...

In 1715, imperial officials in Quebec were surprised to receive a report about a settlement that had “secretly” formed near the junction of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers in Illinois Country: “About 100 Frenchmen, who secretly went up to Michilimakinak two years ago, after consuming the wares of the merchants who had equipped them, went to the Tamaroa on the Mississippi River, where 47 were already established.”¹

Although Canadian officials had grown accustomed to frustrating reports concerning independent-minded Jesuit missions, La Salle’s defiant “imaginary kingdom,” and rampant illegal trade in the Illinois region, the news about this settlement was especially...

In 1730, a delegation of Illinois Indians traveled to New Orleans to meet with French officials. Their purpose was to offer condolences for French losses sustained during the Natchez rebellion the previous year at Fort Rosalie. As a Jesuit priest in Louisiana wrote, “They came hither to weep for the black Robes and the French, and to offer the services of their Nation to Monsieur Perrier [the Illinois commandant], to avenge their death.”¹ The rebellion had resulted in 120 French killed, and now British-allied Indians such as the Chickasaw threatened further violence against the French in the Mississippi Valley, reflecting...

When Anglo observersarrived in the Illinois Country in the late 1700s, they recorded their impressions of the French creole people who lived there. Their biased descriptions, as Edward Watts has shown, constructed the French colonists as a foil against which to contrast a heroic image of enterprising Anglo settlers in the early American West.¹ Where the English-speaking and Protestant settlers were entrepreneurial, carrying values of rugged individualism and industry to the frontier, the French were the opposite. Farming lazily in the compact and humble villages of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, the French were peasants—Old World, traditional, and communal. Moreover,...

In the 1750s, the French government built a new Fort de Chartres, replacing the old, dilapidated one built in 1725. The new fort was a big improvement. Constructed of limestone from a quarry near the settlement of St. Philippe, it was upon its completion one of the largest stone forts in North America and the largest by far in the French empire between Mobile and Niagara.¹ It was fifty-two meters on a side, built on a “star” pattern with bastions at each corner. Inside were a spacious commandant’s house, a chapel, two soldiers’ barracks, a dungeon, a magazine, and other...

In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the middle of North America witnessed an imperial shakeup of the highest order. The villages of the Illinois Country, along with all the land west of the Appalachian Mountains, passed officially to British control. Under a secret treaty with France, meanwhile, Spain had gained jurisdiction over the territory west of the Mississippi River in 1762. Illinois Country settlements and villages were now in the heart of an international borderland. To be sure, Illinois Country had been a borderland throughout its history, existing between Algonquian and Siouan worlds, prairie and woodlands...

The pamphlet titled Invitation sérieuse aux habitants de Illinoiswas published in Philadelphia in 1772, a few months after Daniel Blouin and William Clajon met with Thomas Gage and presented him with their extraordinary petitions for civil government. Of course, theInvitationwas unsigned, and its author was identified merely as “un habitant de Kaskaskia,” but it seems clear that theInvitationwas written by Blouin and Clajon.¹ TheInvitationmade many points similar to ones in the petitions from Illinois in the 1760s and even contained phrases similar to those in documents in the “Recueil.” Whether it really was...