Madison County, Illinois - Chapter 3: English Occupation (1765-77), 1912

While at the time of the English occupancy the main posts of the French in the Illinois country were the villages named in the pre¬ ceding chapter they had a strong cordon of posts on their eastern border, beginning at Detroit, extending diagonally through Indiana to Vincennes, and including posts at what are now Fort Wayne and Lafayette and the more distant outpost of Fort DuQuesne on the pres¬ ent site of Pittsburg. These posts, as well as those in Canada and on the lakes, were sur¬ rendered to the British. This passing of an em¬ pire took place ninety years after the discovery of the Illinois country and one hundred and fifty-five after the founding of Quebec - a long time to hold dominion and then to lose it. Un¬ der English rule, the French settlements de¬ clined, the transfer of allegiance, in 1765, was bitterly resented by the inhabitants. Hundreds of them refused to live under English rule and removed across the river to Ste. Genevieve or to the new settlement of St. Louis, while others went down the river to New Orleans. France had stripped herself of her trans-Mis¬ sissippi territory (also, by cession to Spain in 1763), but still the French preferred to live under Spanish than English rule. The Louis¬ iana territory remained a Spanish province rule until 1800, when it was receded to France and sold to the United States in 1803 by Na¬ poleon.

Missouri river, immediately opposite the pres¬ ent site of Alton, and named Fort Charles after the Spanish king. When the French re¬ gained the country in 1800 the name was changed to Fort Belle Fontaine, on account of a beautiful spring that issued from the side of the cliff of sufficient volume to supply the wants of a large garrison. When the French flag was supplanted on its ramparts by the en¬ sign of the great republic the fort was gar¬ risoned by Lmited States troops and became the most important post on the border. Here treaties were made with the Indians and sold¬ iers marched forth to defend exposed settle¬ ments both in Illinois and Missouri. Its loca¬ tion commanded both the great rivers of the west. Hence, in 1806, Gen. Zebulon Pike set forth on his famous expedition up the Mis¬ souri and across the plains, which resulted in the discovery of Pike's Peak. Here his family was domiciled during his absence and here one of his children died while he was away. Its grave is still seen in the little military cem¬ etery on the bluff, the tablet overgrown with the moss of over a century, but the inscrip¬ tion thereon still legible. Here, at Belle Fon¬ taine, also, Lewis and Clark, in the spring of 1804 (after camping the previous winter at the mouth of Wood River in Madison county) set forth on their world-famous trip to the head¬ waters of the Missouri and thence to the Pacific.

iana which included forts Madison, Massac, Osage and Vincennes. During the war of 1812 it was frequently threatened by hostile tribes of Indians but never attacked. For the twelve years following 1815 the garrison at Belle Fontaine was of varying strength, but after the erection of Jefferson Barracks the garrison was transferred to that post. The last return to the war department from Belle Fontaine was dated June 30, 1826, at which time the troops consisted of four companies of the First Infantry, under Maj. W. G. Kearney. Ten days later the fort was aban¬ doned as a military post, although an arsenal of deposit was maintained there until 1834, after having been garrisoned for sixty-six years by the troops of three nations succes¬ sively. The reason for the original establish¬ ment of this post by the Spaniards was, doubt¬ less, to repel British aggressions, after Eng¬ land had obtained possession of the country, immediately across the river.

To resume our narrative: The transfer of the Mississippi valley from French to British rule inspired the great conspiracy of Pontiac, to which reference has been made. The mighty Indian chieftain, a Napoleon in military ge¬ nius, foreseeing, with prophetic vision, the im¬ pending ruin of his people, if the wave of Anglo-Saxon invasion was not rolled back, or¬ ganized and carried out the greatest concerted Indian uprising ever known on the continent, and but for the failure of his subordinates to carry out his plans and the refusal of the French commanders, especially those in Illi¬ nois, to violate the treaty and aid him in ex¬ terminating the English, the hands of the clock in western civilization would have been turned back a decade, but, after two years of bloody warfare on the border, the conspiracy col¬ lapsed and a treaty of peace was signed be¬ tween the warring tribes and the English.

The transfer of the Illinois country to England was made in 1763, but the latter did not obtain possession until two years later, two of the English expeditions sent forward to Fort Chartres being defeated and turned back by Pontiac's forces.

The outbreak of the Revolutionary war again lit the flames of conflict all along the Canadian border from the western slopes of the Alleghany mountains to the borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky. Bands of savage marauders, in the pay of England and led by British officers, swept down on the unprotected settlers and crimsoned the land with the blood of the helpless and innocent. To check these outrages and to carry the war into the enemy's country Gen. George Rogers Clark organized a force of Virginians and Kentuckians to capture the British posts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes. Of that historic march and conquest volumes have been writ¬ ten, but a passing reference must here suffice. Floating his army down the Ohio in flatboats, Clark landed his forces on Illinois soil. He then marched across the country, surprising and capturing the garrison at Kaskaskia on the Fourth of July, 1778. He then sent a force northward, capturing the post of Cahokia and the villages en route. In the spring of 1779 he marched an army across a flooded country to Vincennes and captured that important post on the Wabash, thus completing the conquest of British strongholds in the Mississippi val¬ ley. The French settlers welcomed him gladly. They detested British rule and made themselves helpful to Clark in various ways, many enlisting in-the force with which he cap¬ tured Vincennes. Clark not only conquered the country, but held it successfully against both the British and their Indian allies to the close of the war in the face of seemingly in¬ surmountable difficulties.

The treaty of peace between the colonies and England, in 1783, made the country to the Mississippi a part of the territory of the young republic. The Fourth of July has a double significance for Illinoisans ; it marks the birth of national independence and likewise the overthrow of British rule in the country northwest of the Ohio. The defeat of Mont¬ calm on the Plains of Abraham, in 1759, gave the French empire in the west to the British; the capture of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, by

George Rogers Clark, nineteen years later wrested that same empire south of the great lakes from its conquerors and transferred it to the great republic. Clark, a young man of twenty-five, thus became ruler of the future Madison county of 1812. He did a great work in exploring, pacifying and developing the country. He visited the Cahokia earthworks in the present bounds of Madison county and made an official report to the government of Monk's Mound and the Indian legends con¬ nected therewith.