What to see in America . stook refuge on the high rock where the French fort had been,and there kept their enemies at bay. But their provisionssoon failed, and their supply of water was stopped by thebesiegers cutting the cords attached to the vessels they usedto draw it up from the river below. They all died of hungerand thirst, and many years afterward their bones were seenwhitening on the height, to which their tragic fate has giventhe name Starved Rock. This rock is now in a state oldest permanent settlement, not only in Illinois,but in the entire INIississippi Valley, was Kaskask
What to see in America . stook refuge on the high rock where the French fort had been,and there kept their enemies at bay. But their provisionssoon failed, and their supply of water was stopped by thebesiegers cutting the cords attached to the vessels they usedto draw it up from the river below. They all died of hungerand thirst, and many years afterward their bones were seenwhitening on the height, to which their tragic fate has giventhe name Starved Rock. This rock is now in a state oldest permanent settlement, not only in Illinois,but in the entire INIississippi Valley, was Kaskaskia, somesix miles above where the river bearing that name joinsthe Mississippi. It was first an Indian village, then a missionstation, but slowly gathered to it a vagrant white French estab-lished themselves .— ^there in 1700. Atthe outbreak of theRevolution all theregion was underBritish control, andin 1778 a colonialforce came thitherfrom Kentucky led by George Rogers Starved Rock on the Illinois River. 238 What to See in America Clark, a restless rover of the woods, who at that time wasonly twenty-six years old. A surprise attack at night putKaskaskia in his possession in fifteen minutes without firinga gun. The honor of being the first American settlement in Illinoislies undecided between New Design and JBellefontaine,neighboring towns south of East St. Louis in Monroe County,and both settled about 1782. Up to the close of the BlackHawk War, Illinois was the far frontier, and as late as 1840several of its counties were without a single settler. It wasabout 1829 that the celebrated Black Hawk, then sixty yearsof age, endeavored to rally all the Western Indians into aconfederation to resist farther encroachments of the whites,but he only succeeded in persuading the young and restlessof two tribes, the Sacs and Foxes. With these followers hemade his headquarters on the north side of Rock River abouta mile from its junction with the Mississippi, on a highbluff
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Keywords: ., bookauthorjohnsonc, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookyear1919
