By the charter of a king of England to a London land and trading company in 1606, Illinois belonged toVirginia; for the company was granted four hundred miles of Atlantic sea coast, with all the land west of it to the Pacific ocean. The company planted a colony on Chesapeake Bay, naming it Jamestown after the king who had been so generous to them, and after a few years was dissolved. But the colony continued to grow, increasing in sixty years to 30,000 inhabitants.

     While the English were raising tobacco on Chesapeake Bay, French traders stole in on them in the rear and preempted Illinois, 800 miles back in the wilderness. The first explorers were Joliet, a Quebec fur trader, and Marquette, the Jesuit missionary at Mackinaw, who came together on a canoe trip down the Illinois river in the summer of 1673, sixty-six years after the founding of the Virginia colony. Six years afterwards, in 1679, another wealthy Canadian trader by the name of Robert LaSalle, floated down the Illinois river with a large company, and built a fort at Peoria, naming it the Broken Heart because of his misfortunes. He also built a stockade on the top of Starved Rock, across the river from the present town of LaSalle, where it is said his lieutenant Tonti kept the French flag flying for ten years, waiting for LaSalle to return. But he never returned. He was assassinated by his men in Arkansas in 1687.

     A few miles below the mouth of the Illinois river was the headquarters of the Cahokia Indians, in a beautiful location on Cahokia creek, within sight of the St. Louis Mounds; and there the LaSalle explorers landed and left a monk to teach the Indians. It was the beginning of the white settlement at Cahokia, one of the four earliest historic places in Illinois, the other three being Kaskaskia, Peoria and Starved Rock, all of them becoming historic by the efforts of Robert LaSalle and his men to obtain a foothold here in 1679-82. While he was doing this the infamous king, Louis XIV of France, was getting ready by the repeal of the Edict of Nantes to drive his protestant subjects out of his realm. His pensioner, the worthless Charles II of England, was at the same time heaping up fuel for the fire of 1688. The Jesuit Allouez spent part of the summer of 1677 with the Indians near the

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mouth of Chicago river. But it was rather a visit than the beginning of an occupation. Kaskaskia the oldest existing date in the parish book is 1696.

     From the coming of LaSalle until the battle of Quebec in 1759 the French rule over this western country lasted eighty years. They were years of dreams of wealth, and of a western Catholic empire; but the mines of wealth were never found, and the empire never rose above the foundations. Soon after the departure of LaSalle there were log cabins in the edges of tlle groves near the Indian cornfields at Cahokia and Kaskaskia, cabins built not by settlers to shelter their families, but by traders who had beads and blankets and powder and knives and whisky to barter for furs. These points and others like them were chosen because they were Indian centers on the line of river navigation.

     Let us stop a moment midway of the eighty years of French rule, in 1719; the year of the publication of Robinson Crusoe, and of Watts' Psalms of David. Illinois is in district 7 of the 9 government districts of the territory of "Louisianna." The Mississippi Scheme is filling France with the hot fever of speculation. Unlimited wealth, is expected from the mysterious regions in the interior of the western continent. Shares in the Trading Company are eagerly bought for forty times their par value. Five hundred negro slaves from San Domingo are landed at Kaskaskia to mine the gold which is on the point of being discovered. It was the beginning of slavery in Illinois, and it continued for a hundred years. On the Mississippi, sixteen miles north of Kaskaskia, Fort Chartres is erected as the seat of government, named in honor of the government charter that is so highly valued. But in a few months the speculative bubble bursts and half a million shareholders lose their savings. The Illinois settlements however were not deeply involved, and every summer floated boat loads of grain and furs to the new distributing center at New Orleans. In one season 4000 "deerhides" of corn was thus exported.

     But a papal empire in the west was not to be. In the providence of God in this matter the experience of Europe is enough for the world.

     The French of Illinois were guilty of no great national crimes during their occupation here, but they were not available for God's purpose. As the Hebrew was God's choice among racial types, so the Anglo-Saxon among modem peoples. Then the existence of slavery made the settlements no place for a workingman. The immigration was confined to adventurers and officials, not settlers but transients. Again, they

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were handicapped because of their religion. No papal country stands in the front rank of nations to day, or ever will so stand, or ever could so stand except in a semi-barbaric age. What God will have is men, but a religious system that depends for its efficiency on suppressing individuality cannot produce men. A papal university may have the ablest teachers and the finest apparatus, but in a large sense the result will be disappointing. For this reason an elementary education wholly parochial is a wrong to the child. He who accepts the will of the church in place of the word of God is in a state of tutelage forever. Society suffers an arrest of development. See that strange period in the history of Europe when brilliant courts were thronged with brilliant men and women. The arts and literature flourished, and the church prospered. Yet the barometer of general intelligence, of human happiness and of human value steadily sank, or in favored localities remained barely stationary. Probably between the misery of human life under an oriental despotism, and under ecclesiastical rule when Chaucer and Dante were singing their songs and Petrarch was being crowned with laurel at Rome, there would be little to choose.

     It was decreed that the common man should not be educated, for if he was educated enough to awaken the man within him he must be educated enough to repress the man within him. It is safer therefore not to educate him at all, and that course in papal lands is pursued wherever possible. When the first Americans settled Illinois they opened a public school, and John Seeley was their first schoolmaster; but the only school having historical mention among the French here for a hundred years was the priests' school at Kaskaskia. "Not the fiftieth man can read or write," wrote Gov. St. Clair in his report as governor of Northwest Territory.

     In 1764 Great Britain took formal possession of Illiinois, and Spain of Missouri, and the French empire passed. Leaving little behind it, save the remains of its settlements in three counties, and the names of saints and apostles bestowed on towns and features of the landscape. The English retained possession less than twenty years. Spain held on for forty years; then restored it to France at the sword's point, and France sold to the United States. It was 121 years from the time when LaSalle took possession of the Mississippi valley; naming it after his king, Louisiana, to the time when the flag of the true western empire floated over all.

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[Edward P. Brand, Illinois Baptists -- A History, 1930. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]

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Chapter 4
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