EARLY HISTORY OF PARK AREA
Cross marks site where Marquette and Jolliet entered Illinois in 1673
In Pere Marquette State Park there are 18 sites indicating occupation by prehistoric Americans and a village once located where the lodge now stands. It is believed that men, nomadic hunters and fishers, appeared in the Illinois valley possibly about the beginning of the Christian Era. Later stone age peoples by 900 A. D. made large leaf-shaped arrowheads and coarse, heavy pottery. By 1300 A. D. trade had developed and at Cahokia resulted in village-states. These peoples made small, finely-chipped arrowheads, pottery with handles and a variety of wares and cultivated corn, squash and beans.
When the French came to this region, the Illinois, Potawatomie and Kickapoo Indians were little removed from their ancestors whose cemeteries, burial mounds, house and village sites dotted the Illinois Valley as at the park.
Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette were sent by the French government over the Wisconsin portage, in the spring of 1673, to explore the Mississippi River for a passage to the Pacific Ocean. They coursed as far as the Arkansas River where they turned back and in September entered the Illinois River. The Marquette Monument, a large stone cross, alongside Route 100, commemorates this event as the recorded entrance of white men into Illinois.
Robert Cavilier, sieur de La Salle appeared shortly to govern and develop the region. His unbounded energy earned him the name “Prince of Explorers.”
He built Fort Creve Coeur near Peoria, now a state park, and in the spring of 1680 sent Father Louis Hennepin down the Illinois River to explore the upper Mississippi. Hennepin and his party spent five days at or across from the present lodge, waiting for the ice to go out of the Mississippi. On March 12, the expedition turned up the mighty Father of Waters. The Iroquois Indians invaded the Illinois valley that spring and mutinous soldiers destroyed Fort Creve Coeur as La Salle hiked to Montreal.