Chapter 1: Beginning “Where Illinois Began”
This chapter of A Bicentennial Crossroads and the ten that follow it describe the companion exhibitions and public programs produced by our state’s Crossroads: Change in Rural America host organizations. Those exhibitions and programs collectively formed a remarkable survey of continuity and change over two hundred years of rural Illinois’s existence, illuminating themes that connect its evolution with that of rural America in general.
Eagerly anticipating Halloween, more than 150 residents of southwestern Illinois crowded into every nook and cranny of Chester Public Library on October 16, 2018, to hear tales of the sinister and the supernatural drawn from their own local lore, accompanied by vivid descriptions of the historical contexts from which those stories emerged. One of the narratives with which local historian Shane Wagner regaled his standing-room-only audience recounts the Curse of Kaskaskia.[1]
Established by Kaskaskia Indians and French Jesuits in 1703 on a narrow peninsula between the Okaw and Mississippi rivers near the confluence of those two waterways, the village of Kaskaskia grew to become the largest and arguably the most important French colonial settlement in central North America, supplying New Orleans with flour ground from the wheat grown on the surrounding fertile farmland.
In the early nineteenth century, having been transferred from French to British to American control, Kaskaskia served as the seat of government of the Illinois Territory and subsequently the first capital of the state of Illinois. [2]
Eventually, however, one of the factors that enabled Kaskaskia to prosper—its proximity to a major river—proved to be its downfall. Flooding, exacerbated by deforestation-induced erosion, increasingly plagued the town. In 1881, the Mississippi, anticipating T.S. Eliot’s subsequent description of it as “a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,”[3] pummeled through the narrow isthmus at the north end of the peninsula and flowed into the channel previously occupied by the last few miles of the Okaw. The town, now greatly diminished in population and prominence, found itself marooned on an island between the old and new courses of the Father of Waters.[4]
Today, the once bustling village that housed Illinois’s original capitol encompasses fewer than twenty residents. Although the community officially remains within Illinois, it is accessible only by way of Missouri, via a bridge across the old channel of the Mississippi, which forms the island’s western boundary.[5]
To some southwestern Illinoisans, the fact that Kaskaskia, despite its essential role within the state’s history, is now literally so marginalized from Illinois that one must leave the state to go there symbolizes the degree to which such distant cities as Springfield and Chicago have eclipsed their region within the statewide milieu.[6]
Might Kaskaskia’s reversal of fortune be attributable to a curse? Accord