Introduction There are many types of history. Much modern history is thesis-driven, the mustering of facts and examples to demonstrate a particular interpretation of the past. This sort of history necessarily interposes the author''s understanding between the sources and the reader. Another type is descriptive, presenting material to the reader with minimal interpretation to enable the reader to see and interpret the past for him- or herself. That is the sort of history we have endeavored to write here, a simple exposition of Kaskaskia, the largest town in Illinois from the time of its founding in 1703 until well into the nineteenth century. Colonial Kaskaskia was a center of French culture and language in Illinois and the largest of the French villages in Illinois, a prosperous agricultural settlement exporting grain and other resources down the Mississippi to Louisiana. The return trip brought the goods of Europe to the middle of the wilderness, where the citizens of Kaskaskia enjoyed a lifestyle far more sophisticated than that of the pioneers slowly advancing the frontier from the Eastern Seaboard. Life in French Kaskaskia, of course, was not without problems.

War came near at times and claimed the lives of local citizens, and crops did not thrive every year. Still, for two generations the inhabitants of Kaskaskia were prosperous and content, but that happy state ended suddenly. The French government lost Canada and then abandoned Illinois and Louisiana at the end of the French and Indian War. The town suered through more than a decade of inept and corrupt British rule that drove many citizens across the Mississippi to the Spanish-ruled west bank. During the American Revolution, George Rogers Clark captured the town from the British, securing Illinois for the United States. The emerging nation, however, could not adequately govern the new territory, and during the 1780s, the citizens of Kaskaskia lived through an era of virtual anarchy, during which they lived in fear or abandoned their homes and ed. A priest lamented Kaskaskia''s situation, and from that lament arose the First notion that Kaskaskia suered under a curse. Kaskaskia did revive when the United States was Finally able to assert control in the 1790s.

Kaskaskia became the capital of the Illinois Territory and then the First state capital of Illinois, and the town was home to leading political and economic Figures in the early, shaping years of Illinois. Good fortune, however, did not long endure. Natural disasters of unprecedented magnitude--crop failure, earthquake, tornado, ood, and pestilence--seemed to haunt Kaskaskia and robbed the town of vitality. People came to regard Kaskaskia, once the center and focus of Illinois, as just a quaint and somehow foreign relic. Finally, the great river, so long Kaskaskia''s highway and source of its prosperity, turned on the town, washing away the buildings and even the very ground on which it was built. The changing course of the Mississippi was merely the coup de gr'ce, the Finishing blow, the last of the disasters that led even reasonable people to wonder whether Kaskaskia had been cursed. As the last of old Kaskaskia fell victim to the river, newspaper reporters, eager to Fill pages with sensational stories, seized on old notions and combined them with their own creative imaginations to present new Fictions as old traditions. Some still regard these late Fictions seriously.

Others less credulous reject this fake lore but still feel that an aura of the unnatural surrounds the events that befell Kaskaskia and led to its Final destruction. Today, new Kaskaskia, now a tiny village with fewer than a score of inhabitants a few miles from the location of the old town, preserves some of the relics of old Kaskaskia. The furnishings of the church date to the early days of the French town, and visitors can see the bell sent by the king of France to Kaskaskia in 1741 and rung to announce George Rogers Clark''s annexation of Illinois to the United States. New Kaskaskia is well worth a visit, but it is nothing like the old town. Other relics of old Kaskaskia also survive: written documents, objects, maps, engravings, sketches, and photographs made before the city crumbled into the Mississippi River. (We exclude all imagined reconstructions; the only modern illustrations are photographs of objects that still exist.) They all contain some essence of the lost town so important to the origin of modern Illinois and perhaps also some of the atmosphere that led people to whisper that Kaskaskia had fallen under a curse.