Location of Fort Crevecoeur (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Location of Fort Crevecoeur Fort Crevecoeur (pronounced Cravekur) was the first structure erected by white men in what is now known as the State of Illinois. It was built in the year 1680, by Rene Robert Cavalier, who was ennobled by King Louis the Fourteenth of France as Sieur de LaSalle, aided by thirty-one other Frenchmen who came with him from Fort Frontenac, now at Kingston, in Canada; and, also, by some of that part of the tribe of Illinois Indians that occupied the two villages, on each side of the Illinois River, near a place then called "Peoria," where he landed and built the Fort. He began the work on the fifteenth day of January, 1680, and the fort was practically completed on the twenty-second day of March of the same year, when he left his Lieutenant, Henry de Tonty, in charge of it and, taking with him two canoes and six men, went back to Fort Frontenac (Illinois Historical Collections, Vol. 1, pages 87 and 131). A few days after his departure he sent word back to Tonty to build a fort at Starved Rock, near Ottawa, and Tonty went up there for that purpose with some of his men. Those who remained at the fort, stripped the place of everything valuable, and threw what they could not carry into the river. It is generally believed that they burned the fort; but, the Iroquois Indians on the tenth of September of that year waged war against the Illinois Indians, for whose protection in part LaSalle said, in getting their permission to build the fort, it was to be built; and, it is probable that in the battle between those tribes, at that time, the fort was burned. Tonty tells of the desertion of his men, and says that they left him stripped of everything, but he does not say they burned the fort, something he would have been apt to mention if it had occurred (Vol. 1, Illinois Historical Collections, Pages 80, 81 and 132). During the two hundred and thirty-nine years that have since elapsed, history, conjecture, and tradition, have been so confused that the site of the fort has become lost. That the fort was built on the east side of the River at Peoria is no longer questioned. The writings of those who saw Fort Crevecoeur show the following facts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.