USA > Illinois > Chapters from Illinois history > Part 18
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23
The minute of the surrender of Fort Chartres to M. Sterling, appointed by M. de Gage, Governor of New York, Commander of His Britannic Majesty's troops in North America, is preserved in the French archives at Paris. The fort is carefully described in it, with its arched gateway, fifteen feet high; a cut-stone platform above the gate, with a stair of nineteen stone steps, hav-
236 CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
ing a stone balustrade, leading to it; its walls of stone eighteen feet in height; and its four bastions, each with forty-eight loopholes, eight embrasures, and a sentry box, the whole in cut stone. And within, the great store- house, ninety feet long by thirty wide, two stories high, and gable-roofed: the guardhouse having two rooms above for the chapel and missionary quarters: the gov- ernment house, 84x32, with iron gates and a stone porch, a coach house and pigeon house adjoining, and a large stone well inside; the intendant's house, of stone and iron, with a portico; the two rows of barracks, each 128 feet long; the magazine, thirty-five feet wide, thirty-eight feet long, and thirteen feet high above the ground, with a doorway of cut stone, and two doors, one of wood and one of iron; the bake house, with two ovens, and a stone well in front; the prison with four cells of cut stone, and iron doors; and one large relief gate to the north; the whole enclosing an area of more than four acres. The English had insisted that, under the treaty of cession, the guns in all the forts belonged to them. The French Governor of Louisiana disputed the claim, but consented to leave those at the Illinois, with a promise of their restoration if his view proved correct. Hence the can- non of Fort Chartres were transferred with it, for the time at least.
St. Ange and his men took boat for St. Louis, where, feeling that their sovereign had utterly deserted them, they soon decided to exchange the service of His Most Christian Majesty of France, for that of His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. They were speedily enrolled in the garrison of St. Louis, of which St. Ange was appointed to the command, to the great satisfaction of his comrades and his old neighbors from the Illinois. One tragedy
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 237
signalized the accession of the new government at Fort Chartres. Two young officers, one French and the other English, were rival suitors for the hand of a young lady in the neighborhood, and a quarrel arose which led to a duel. They fought with small-swords early on a Sunday morning, near the fort; the Englishman was slain, and the Frenchman made haste to descend the river to New Orleans. The story of this, no doubt the first duel fought in Illinois, was related, nearly forty years after its occur- rence, by an aged Frenchman, who was an eye-witness of the combat, to the chronicler who has preserved the account. With the departure of the French soldiers, the last spark of life in the village of New Chartres went out. On the register, then in use in the church of Ste. Anne, was written; "The above-mentioned church (parochial of Ste. Anne of New Chartres) having been abolished, the rest of the paper which was in this book has been taken for the service of the church at Kaskaskia." And the Mississippi, as if bent upon destroying every vestige of the once happy and prosperous village, encroached upon its site until a large portion of it was swept away. Shortly after its abandonment the parish register of Prai- rie du Rocher, which place continued to be occupied by the French, records the removal of the bodies of the Rev- erend Fathers Gagnon and Collet, priests of Ste. Anne of New Chartres, from the ruined cemetery near that church on the point in the river, and their burial in the chapel of St. Joseph, at Prairie du Rocher.
The Illinois had now become a British colony, "in the days when George the Third was King." The simple French inhabitants with difficulty accustomed themselves to the change, and longed for the paternal sway of the commanders of their own race. It is said that soon after
238
CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
the British occupation the officer in authority at Fort Chartres died suddenly, and there being no one compe- tent to succeed him, the wheels of government stopped. And that St. Ange, hearing at St. Louis of the confusion in his old province, repaired to Fort Chartres, restored order, and remained there until another British officer could reach the spot. The story is typical of the man, who deserves a wider fame than he has won. For he was a fine exemplar of the fidelity, the courage, and the true gentleness, which are worthy of the highest honor. He spent a long life in the arduous duties of a frontier offi- cer, commanding escorts through the wilderness, sta- tioned at the different posts in the Northwest in turn, and for more than fifty years associated with the Illinois country, which became the home of his family. Born in Canada, and entering the Frenchi army as a boy, he grew gray in the service, and when surrendered to the foeman he had so long opposed, by the unworthy King, who made no provision for the men who had stood so steadfastly for him, he was more faithful to France than Louis XV had been. For his removal to St. Louis, and acceptance of a Spanish commission, were in the interest and for the pro- tection of his misled countrymen, who had settled at that place solely that they might still be French subjects. There he remained, the patriarch of the infant settle- ment, beloved and honored by all, until his death, at the age of seventy-six, in the year of the commencement of our revolution. And all who knew him, friends and foes, countrymen and foreigners, white men and red, alike bear testimony to the uprightness, the steady fortitude, the unshrinking courage, the kindliness and nobility of Louis St. Ange de Belle Rive, the last French Command- ant of the Illinois.
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 239
In December of the year of the surrender, Major Farmer, with a strong detachment of the 34th British Foot, arrived at the fort from Mobile and took command. The following year he was relieved by Colonel Edward Cole, a native of Rhode Island, an officer in the Old French War, who commanded a regiment under General Wolfe at the siege of Quebec, and was at the capture of Havana by the Earl of Albemarle. In letters written from the fort in 1766 to 1768, to his old comrade and partner in business, Col. Henry Van Schaick, he says: "This country is far from answering my expectations in any other point than the soil. I have enjoyed but a small share of health since I arrived. I have been much deceived in the description of this country, and am deter- mined to quit it as soon as I can. No comfort. Indians eternally about me." During his term of office Captain Philip Pittman, a British engineer officer, the same who had unsuccessfully endeavored to reach the Illinois dur- ing Pontiac's rule, visited the fort in pursuance of his orders to examine the British posts in the Mississippi Valley. In his report he says: "The walls of Fort Char- tres are two feet two inches thick, and the entrance is through a very handsome gate." He describes the works and buildings very fully, and concludes as follows: "It is generally believed that this is the most convenient and best built fort in North America." In 1768 Colonel Cole was followed by a Colonel Reed, who became so noto- rious for his oppression of the people, that he was speedily relieved by John Wilkins, Lieutenant-Colonel of the 18th or Royal Irish, the former commander of Fort Niagara, who reached the Illinois with seven companies of his reg- iment from Philadelphia, by way of Pittsburg, in September, 1768. From the correspondence of Ensign
240
CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
George Butricke, an officer in this expedition, we learn that, on their way down the Ohio, they killed so many buffalo that they commonly served out one a day to each company, and they were forty-three days on the way from Pittsburg to Kaskaskia. Speaking of Fort Chartres as "built of stone, with bastions at each angle, and very good barracks of stone, " he describes the land around it as the finest in the known world, and gives his opinion to the effect that "it is a shocking unhealthy country." Colo- nel Wilkins, under a proclamation from General Gage, established a court of law, with seven judges, to sit at Fort Chartres, and administer the law of England, the first court of common-law jurisdiction west of the Alleghen- ies. The old French court of the royal jurisdiction of the Illinois, with its single judge, governed by the civil law, had ceased with the surrender. Its records for many years were preserved at Kaskaskia, where the late Judge Breese saw and made extracts from them. When the county-seat was removed, less care was taken of them, and within a few years past these documents, so interest- ing and valuable to the antiquarian and the historian, have been used by veritable Illinois Vandals to light the fires in a country courthouse, and but a solitary fragment now remains. In Wilkins' time, that famous warrior, Pontiac, was basely slain at Cahokia, by an Illinois Indian. St. Ange, then commanding at St. Louis, honor- ing the noble red man, whom he had known long and well, brought the body to his fort and gave it solemn bur- ial. The friends of Pontiac, avenging his death, pursued one fragment of the Illinois tribe to the walls of Fort Chartres, and slew many there, the British refusing them admission. At Prairie du Rocher, about this period, is recorded the marriage of a French soldier, of the garrison
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 241
of St. Louis, with the written permission of M. de St. Ange, his commander, to an English woman from Salisbury, in Wiltshire, which the good priest writes, "Solbary, in the province of Wuilser." It is significant of the differ- ent races and the varying sovereignties in that portion of our country, that a French soldier, from the Spanish city of St. Louis, should be married to an Englishwoman by a French priest, in the British colony of Illinois.
The occupation of Fort Chartres, however, by the sol- diers of any nation, was drawing to a close. For seven years only the British ruled there, though, doubtless, believing it to be their permanent headquarters for the whole Northwest. But the Mississippi had ever been a French river, and could not bide the presence of the rival nation on its banks. Its waters murmured the names of Marquette and Jolliet, of La Salle and Tonty, and their memories would not suffer it to rest contented with suc- cessors of another race. So it rose in its might and assailed the fort, and on a stormy night in springtime its resistless flood tore away a bastion, and a part of the river wall. The British in all haste fled across the sub- merged meadows, taking refuge on the hills above Kas- kaskia; and from the year 1772 Fort Chartres was never occupied again.
The capricious Mississippi, as if satisfied with this rec- ognition of its power, now devoted itself to the reparation of the damage it had wrought. The channel between the fort and the island in front of it, once forty feet deep, began to fill up, and, ultimately, the main shore and the island were united, leaving the fort a mile or more inland. A thick growth of trees speedily concealed it from the view of those passing upon the river, and the high road from Cahokia to Kaskaskia, which at first ran
242
CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
between the fort and the river, was soon after located at the foot of the bluffs, three miles to the eastward. These changes, which left the fort completely isolated and hid- den, together with the accounts of the British evacuation, gave rise to the reports of its total destruction by the river. Parkman, alluding to it as it was in 1764, says: "The encroaching Mississippi was destined before many years to engulf curtain and bastion in its ravenous abyss." A work relating to the history of the Northwest, published only last year, informs us that "the spot on which Fort Chartres stood became the channel of the river," and even some who have lived for years in its neighborhood will tell you that it is entirely swept away. But this is entirely erroneous; the ruins still remain; and had man treated it as kindly as the elements the old fort would be nearly perfect to-day.
After the British departed, an occasional band of Indians found shelter for a little time in the lonely build- ings, but otherwise the solitude which claimed for its own the once busy fortress remained unbroken for many a year to come. Congress, in 1788, reserved to our gov- ernment a tract of land one mile square, on the Missis- sippi, extending as far above as below Fort Chartres, including the said fort, the buildings, and improvements adjoining the same. It would have been well to provide for the preservation of this monument of the romantic era of our history, but, of course, nothing of the sort was done. The enactment simply prevented any settlement upon the reservation, and left the fort to become more and more a part of the wilderness, and its structures a prey to the spoiler. Now and then an adventurous trav- eler found his way thither. Quaint old Governor Rey- nolds, who saw it in 1802, says: "It is an object of
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 243
antiquarian curiosity. The trees, undergrowth, and brush are mixed and interwoven with the old walls. It presented the most striking contrast between a savage wilderness, filled with wild beasts and reptiles, and the remains of one of the largest and strongest fortifications on the continent. Large trees were growing in the houses which once contained the elegant and accom- plished French officers and soldiers." And then, with a hazy idea of rivaling the prophecy of the lion and the lamb, he adds: "Cannon, snakes and bats were sleeping together in peace in and around this fort." Major Stod- dard, of the United States Engineers, who took possession of upper Louisiana for our government under the treaty of cession in 1804, visited Fort Chartres and thus describes it: "Its figure is quadrilateral with four bastions, the whole of limestone, well cemented. The walls are still entire. A spacious square of barracks and a capacious magazine are in good preservation. The enclosure is covered with trees from seven to twelve inches in diameter. In fine this work exhibits a splendid ruin. The inhabi- tants have taken away great quantities of material to adorn their own buildings." Brackenridge, United States Judge for the District of Louisiana, in a work published in 1817, has this passage: "Fort de Chartres is a noble ruin, and is visited by strangers as a great curiosity. I was one of a party of ladies and gentlemen who ascended in a barge from Ste. Geneviève, nine miles below. The outward wall, barracks and magazine are still standing. There are a number of cannon lying half buried in the earth with their trunnions broken off. In visiting the various parts we started a flock of wild turkeys, which had concealed themselves in this hiding place. I remarked a kind of enclosure near, which, according to
·
244
CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
tradition, was fitted up by the officers as a kind of arbor where they could sit and converse in the heat of the day." In 1820 Beck, the publisher of a Gazetteer of Illi- nois and Missouri, made a careful survey of the remains of the fort. He speaks of it then as a splendid ruin, "the walls in some places perfect, the buildings in ruins, except the magazine, and in the hall of one of the houses an oak growing, eighteen inches in diameter." Hall, the author of a book entitled "Romance of the West, " was at Fort Chartres in 1829. "Although the spot was familiar to my companion," he says, "it was with some difficulty that we found the ruins, which are covered with a vigor- ous growth of forest trees and a dense undergrowth of bushes and vines. Even the crumbling pile itself is thus overgrown, the tall trees rearing their stems from piles of stone, and the vines creeping over the tottering walls. The buildings were all razed to the ground, but the lines of the foundations could be easily traced. A large vaulted powder-magazine remained in good preservation. The exterior wall was thrown down in some places, but in others retained something like its original height and form. And it was curious to see in the gloom of a wild forest these remnants of the architecture of a past age." The Fort Chartres' Reservation was opened to entry in 1849, no provision being made concerning what remained of the fort. The land was taken up by settlers, the area of the works cleared of trees, and a cabin built within it, and the process of demolition hastened by the increasing number of those who resorted there for building mate- rial. Governor Reynolds came again in 1854, and found "Fort Chartres a pile of moldering ruins, and the walls torn away almost even with the surface."
To one visiting the site but a year ago, the excursion
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 245
afforded as strong a contrast between the past and the present as may readily be found. Leaving the railway at the nearest point to the ruins, the brisk new town of Red Bud, twenty miles distant, the greater part of the drive over the prairie and through the forest which inter- vene is as monotonous as a ride anywhere in Illinois may properly be. But when you reach the bluff, far overlook- ing the lordly Mississippi, and its lowlands to the Missouri hills beyond, and wind down the road cut deeply into its face to the little village of Prairie du Rocher, lying at its foot, a change comes over the scene. The wide and shaded village streets with the French names above the little stores, the houses built as in Canada, with dormer- windows and piazzas facing to the south, the mill bearing the name the Jesuits gave the site, the foreign accent and appearance of the people, the very atmosphere, so full of rest and quiet, to which hurry is unknown, all combine to make one feel as if in another time and another land than ours. It is as though a little piece of old France had been transplanted to the Mississippi, a century since, and forgotten; or as if a stratum of the early French settlements at the Illinois, a hundred years ago or more, had sunk down below the reach of time and change, with its ways and customs and people intact, and still pursued its former life unmindful of the busy nine- teenth century on the uplands above its head. It was not surprising to be told that at the house of the village priest some ancient relics were to be seen, and that some ancient documents had once been there. In such a place such things should always be. But it was a surprise when shown into a room adorned with portraits of Pius IX and Leo XIII, and expecting to see a venerable man with black robes, and, perhaps, the tonsure, to be suddenly
246
CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
greeted by a joyous youth, in German student costume, with a mighty meerschaum in his hand, who introduced himself as the priest in charge of the parish of St. Joseph of Prairie du Rocher. Arrived but six months before from the old country, he had been stationed here because of his knowledge of French, which is spoken by nearly all of the 250 families in the parish, including a number of colored people, the descendants of the slaves of early settlers. He led the way to his sanctum, where he dis- played, with pride, three chalices and a monstrance, or receptacle for the wafer, very old and of quaint work- manship, made of solid silver, and a tabernacle of inlaid wood, all supposed to have belonged to the church of Ste. Anne of Fort Chartres. He had also a solid silver table- castor, marked 1680, the property of his parish, the history of which is unknown. At an inquiry for old manuscripts, he produced, from a lumber-room, a bundle of discolored papers, fast going to decay, which he had found in the house when he took possession, but of which he knew little. Almost the first inspection revealed a marriage register of the church of Ste. Anne, with the autographs of Makarty and De Villiers, and a subsequent examination showed that these papers comprised a large part of the registers of that parish, as well as the early records of St. Joseph of Prairie du Rocher.
Such an experience was a fitting prelude to the sight of the old fort itself, though this was, indeed, difficult to find. In the early day all roads in the Illinois country led to Fort Chartres. Highways thither are the most prom- inent feature of the old village plats and ancient maps of the region. Now, not even a path leads to it The sim- ple French people along the way could not believe that any one could really wish to visit the old fort, and with
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 247 -
kindly earnestness insisted that the intended destination must be the river landing, which takes its name from the fort, but is some miles away from it. By dint of repeated inquiries a course was found which led to the goal after a five-mile drive from Prairie du Rocher. The ruins were approached by a farm-road across a beautiful level field, green with winter wheat, and the first sight of the low bank, which marks the position of the walls, and of the old magazine standing bravely up against the forest background, was a sufficient reward for the journey. Entering the enclosure through a rude farm-gate, which stands just in the place of its lofty predecessor of carved stone, the line of the walls and the corner bastions can be readily traced by the mounds of earth covered with scat- tered fragments of stone, beneath which, doubtless, the heavy foundations remain, except at the corner swept away by the river. On two sides the outline of the ditch can be seen, and the cellars of the commandant's and intendant's houses, and of the barracks, are plainly visible, half filled with débris, under which, perhaps, the old can- non of Louis XIV are still lying. Time has settled the question of title to them, and they belong neither to France nor Britain now. One angle of the main wall remains, and is utilized as the substructure of a stable. Two rude houses, occupied by farm tenants, are within the enclosure, which has been cleared of trees, save a few tall ones near the magazine and alongside the ditch. In front, the ground is open and under cultivation, and, looking from the old gateway, you have before you the prospect which must often have pleased the eyes of the officers of France and Britain, gazing from the cut-stone platform above the arch; the little knoll in front where Boisbriant's land grant to himself commenced, the level
248 CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
plateau dotted with clumps of forest trees, the gleam of the little lake in the lowland, and beyond, the beautiful buttresses of rock, rounded and shaped as if by the hand of man, supporting the upland which bounds the view. Of the vanished village of Ste. Anne, scarcely a vestige remains, save a few garden-plants growing wild on the plain. Occasionally a well belonging to one of its houses is found, but there is no sign of the church, where "sales were made in a high and audible voice, while the people went in and out in great numbers." The site of St. Philippe is covered by a farm, but to this day a part of its long line of fields is known as "the King's Highway," though there is no road there, and it is supposed that this was the route along which Renault brought the supplies from his grant to the river for transfer to his mines.
Yet, though so much has gone of the ancient surround- ings and of the fort itself, it was an exceeding pleasure to find the old magazine, still almost complete, and bear- ing itself as sturdily as if conscious that it alone is left of all the vast domain of France in America, and resolute to preserve its memory for the ages to come. It stands within the area of the southeastern bastion, solidly built of stone, its walls four feet in thickness, sloping upward to perhaps twelve feet from the ground, and rounded at the top. It is partially covered with vines and moss, and one might travel far and wide in our land to find an object so picturesque and so venerable. But for the loss of its iron doors, and the cut stone about the doorway, it is well nigh as perfect as the day it was built. Within, a few steps lead to the solid stone floor, some feet below the surface, and the interior, nearly thirty feet square, is entirely uninjured. You may note the arched stone roof, the careful construction of the heavy walls, and the few
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 249
small apertures for light and air, curiously protected against injury from without. Here one may invoke the shades of Makarty, and De Villiers, and St. Ange, and easily bring back the past. For, as it is to-day, it has seen them all, as they went to and fro before it, or exam- ined its store of shot and shell; it has heard the word of command as the grenadiers drilled on the parade ground hard by; it has watched the tawny chieftains and their followers trooping in single file through the adjacent gateway; and past its moss-grown walls the bridal pro- cessions of Madeleine Loisel and Élizabeth Montchar- veaux, and the other fair ladies from the fort, have gone to the little church of Ste. Anne. And gazing at it in such a mood, until all about was peopled with "the airy shapes of long ago," and one beheld again the gallant company which laid the foundations of this fortress with such high hope and purpose, the hurrying scouts passing through its portals with tidings of Indian foray or Span- ish march, the valiant leaders setting forth from its walls on distant expeditions against savage or civilized foe, the colonists flocking to its storehouse or council chamber, the dusky warriors thronging its enclosure with Chicago or Pontiac at their head, the gathering there of those who founded a great city, the happy village at its gates, and the scenes of its momentous surrender, which sealed the loss of an empire to France; it seemed not unreason- able to wish that the State of Illinois might, while yet there is time, take measures to permanently preserve, for the sake of the memories, the romance, and the history interwoven in its fabric, what still remains of Old Fort Chartres.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.