On March 18th, as part of the celebrations for the State of Illinois’s 200th anniversary, Woodstock Celebrates will host historian Charles Balesi at the Woodstock library for a talk on “When Illinois was Louisiana: The Forgotten French Face of the Illinois Bicentennial.” Charles is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose family was originally from Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean. He has written a book titled “The Time of the French in the Heart of North America,” which describes the history of the first European settlers to inhabit what is now the heartland of the United States. It’s a time typically forgotten by the descendants of the English-Americans and others who would later settle there, but Charles says that it is relevant to this day. “1818 [and the history of Illinois] wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t have the whole series of events that brought it to be… Nothing comes completely out of the blue, you have something to start with and it becomes big.”
Starting with the explorers Giovanni Verrazzano and Jaques Cartier, the French were among the first non-native nations to see what is now the United States and Canada, and were the first to voyage inland there by way of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. France would go on to found colonies in Quebec and New Orleans, and from there settled along the Great Lakes and Mississippi, meeting in modern-day Illinois. “The French were looking for the most valuable commodity of the time, which were pelts and furs,” says Charles. Beaver pelts were highly valued in Europe for use in many types of clothing, including felt hats. “If you’ve ever seen the Three Musketeers… beaver fur was essential to make those kinds of hats.”
The pelts were valuable enough that the French didn’t see the need to settle their colonies with more than a few mission priests and Voyageur traders. “The French weren’t interested in taking large amounts of land, they just wanted to trade,” says Charles, and as a result of this, “the big strength of the French was that they had a very good relationship with the Native Americans.” Frenchmen would take native wives while the French women stayed home, and the relationship between the two peoples was so close that when the Seven Years’ War was fought between Britain and France, it was named the French and Indian War by the American colonists after their two main enemies.
But the situation couldn’t last. Apart from hunting the beaver almost to extinction, “the French created a society with very small numbers… on the Anglo-American side you had some states with a million people, while on the French side, between Quebec and New Orleans, you had a grand total of only 50,000. The British fleet prevented the French from reinforcing their colonies, and it couldn’t work… the French lost their whole empire on the continent.” The last attempt by the French to reclaim North America came with Napoleon, who took back the Louisiana Territory (which had been ceded to the Spanish) after strong-arming Spain. He sent troops to garrison it, but made the mistake of stopping over in Haiti – in a short amount of time most of them were dead from yellow fever, and Napoleon had no choice but to sell the entire expanse to Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase.
When the State of Illinois was formed fourteen years later, its first capitol wasn’t Springfield, but Kaskaskia – a town on the Mississippi river, the largest and oldest in the state, which had been founded by the French. Kaskaskia was part of the Illinois Country, the stretch of land from Southern Illinois to St. Louis, which was almost singlehandedly responsible for feeding the early city of New Orleans. The area carries French names to this day, as well as a few traces such as the French Fort de Chartres, colonial buildings in Prairie du Rocher, the Courthouse and Mission Church in Cahokia, and a few descendants of the French themselves. Kaskaskia was destroyed in the late 1800s when the Mississippi changed course into it, and some remains were further destroyed by neglect over the next several decades. Charles makes no secret of his displeasure with the State of Illinois for this sort of neglect, including its lack of significant bicentennial celebrations this year – but he says that small communities like Woodstock are “picking up the slack.” “Every city is doing something on its own to celebrate the bicentennial of the state… it’s nice that communities, like this community, are doing something to commemorate the event.”
Charles Balesi’s presentation will be held at the Woodstock Library on Sunday, March 18 at 2 p.m.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 