KASKASKIA, lals-lcasIT-a, Ill., a township in Randolph County, on both sides of the Kas kaskia or Okaw River, at its junction with the Mississippi opposite Saint Genevieve, Mo. A part of it now obliterated wa's the oldest town in the West, the first permanent white settlement in the Mississippi Valley. Marquette in 1675 had established a mission among the Kaskaskia Indians near the present Utica, Ill, on the Illinois River; the Jesuits Merest and Saint Cosme, guided by Tonty (q.v.), removed the mission in 1700 to the Mississippi bottoms three miles from the river, near the Kaskaskia. It throve greatly, and was not only a large Indian market, but sent produce and furs to New Orleans. Fort Chartres was built there in 1720; eminent French officers and adventurers came thither as Vaudreuil and the command ant Chevalier de Bertel — and with its gay French life it was named "the Paris of the West.° A noted Jesuit college and convent were maintained there. It, formed one of the chain of posts by which France was to hem in English colonization; but in 1763 it fell into the hands of the English, who made it their capital in that region. On 4 July 1778 George Rogers Clark (q.v.), with a company of 200 Virg is militia, captured it for the United States by a night attack; this enabled us to claim and obtain possession of the Northwest Territory by the peace of 1783, and changed the destiny of this whole region. It remained a leading western
town, and was the capital of Illinois as a Terri tory (1809) and a State (1818) ; but on removal of the seat of government to Vandalia in 1819, it began to (twine. I ne river steaculy en croached on the meadow ; and in 1892 united its course with the Okaw, converting a large part of the old site, with most of the ancient build ings, into an island, which in 1899 crumbled into the river after several great floods. North of the junction still remains about a third of the town site, with the foundations of a church and of the capitol building. In 1891 the Illinois legislature appropriated $50,000 to remove the old cemetery to a point on the bluffs, and a large monument has been erected there. 142. Consult 'Kaskaskia: A Vanished Capi tal) (in Chantauquan, Vol. XXX, Chautauqua, N. Y., 1900); 'Kaskaskia and its Parish Rec ords) (in Magazine of American History, Vol. VI., New York 1880).