| In 1673, French explorers canoed down the Mississippi River, the western boundary of what is now Illinois and eventually northward on the Illinois River. Other expeditions followed and in 1675, Father Jacques Marquette founded a mission at the Kaskaskia Indian Village near present-day Ottawa. Cahokia, the first permanent settlement in Illinois, was a fur-trading post established in 1699. A few years later, the town of Kaskaskia was founded. In 1717, France placed Illinois into the Louisiana Colony. The end of the French and Indian War gave all land east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain in 1763. Many of the French settlers in Illinois moved across the river into Iowa. Only missionaries, fur traders, a few settlers, and English soldiers remained in the Illinois region. During the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), George Rogers Clark of Virginia and a group called the “Big Knives” raided English forts in Illinois. They captured Kaskaskia and Cahokia and made Illinois part of the county of Virginia. The land was given to the U.S. government and later named part of the Northwest Territory in 1787. The current Capitol of Illinois is the sixth such capitol in the history of the state. The first was located in Kaskaskia, Illinois, a city on the Mississippi River founded by the French in 1709. Kaskaskia had served as the territorial capital of Illinois since 1809, so it was deemed an appropriate location for the capital of the fledgling state. The first capitol building was rented by the state and was by all accounts a non-descript two story building which the state leased for $4.00 a day. Wishing to site the capital of the state in the interior, the first General Assembly petitioned Congress for a grant of land in the interior. It was decided to use a location on the Kaskaskia River around eighty miles Northeast of Kaskaskia. This location, which would be named Vandalia, Illinois, was selected in part with the hopes of encouraging settlers to move to other parts of the state which were still uninhabited. In 1820, with the completion of the new capitol, Vandalia, Illinois became the capital of the state. (In 1881 this decision to move the capital became wise in hindsight, as Kaskaskia was destroyed by a sudden change in the course of the Mississippi River.) The first capitol in Vandalia was also a simple two story house, and only used for a short time as a fire destroyed it in 1824. A third capitol was soon erected for a cost of $15,000. Soon after its erection, calls began to echo around the state to move the capitol to a location nearer the center of the state Reference |  |