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HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ILLINOIS.
reduced to a few hundred dissolute and depraved survivors of a once vigorous and warlike race.
During the early part of the French occupation, there arose a chief named Chicagou (from whom the city of Chicago received its name) who appears, like Red Jacket, Tecumseh and Logan, to have been a man of unusual intelligence and vigor of character, and to have exercised great influence with his people. In 1725 he was sent to Paris, where he received the attentions due to a foreign potentate, and, on his return, was given a command in an expedition against the Chickasaws, who had been making incursions from the south.
Such was the general distribution of the Indians in the northern and central portions of the State, within the first fifty years after the arrival of the French. At a later period the Kickapoos advanced farther south and occupied a considerable share of the central portion of the State, and even extended to the mouth of the Wabash. The southern part was roamed over by bands from beyond the Ohio and the Mississippi, including the Cherokees and Chickasaws, and the Arkansas tribes, some of whom were very powerful and ranged over a vast extent of country.
The earliest civilized dwellings in Illinois, after the forts erected for purposes of defense, were undoubtedly the posts of the fur-traders and the missionary stations. Fort Miami, the first military post, established by La Salle in the winter of 1679-80, was at the mouth of the St. Joseph River within the boundaries of what is now the State of Michigan. Fort Creve-Coaur, partially erected a few months later on the east side of the Illinois a few miles below where the city of Peoria now stands, was never occupied. Mr. Charles Ballance, the historian of Peoria, locates this fort at the present village of Wesley, in Tazewell County, nearly opposite Lower Peoria. Fort St. Louis, built by Tonty on the summit of "Starved Rock," in the fall and winter of 1682, was the second erected in the "Illinois Country," but the first occupied. It has been claimed that Marquette established a mission among the Kaskaskias, opposite "The Rock," on occasion of his first visit, in September, 1673, and that he renewed it in the spring of 1675, when he visited it for the last time. It is doubtful if this mission was more than a season of preaching to the natives, celebrating mass, a
