front cover of Dawn's Light Woman & Nicolas Franchomme
Dawn's Light Woman & Nicolas Franchomme
Marriage and Law in the Illinois Country
Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Scholarly”!

Native women’s marital rights and roles in colonial Illinois society

Kaskaskia, Illinois, once the state’s capital, torn from the state by flood waters, and now largely forgotten, was once the home to a couple who helped transform the region in the 1720s from a frontier village to a civil society. In the heart of France’s North American empire, the village was a community of French-Canadian fur traders and Kaskaskia Indians who not only lived together but often intermarried. These Indigenous and French intermarriages were central to colonial Illinois society, and the coupling of Marguerite 8assecam8c8e (Dawn’s Light Woman) and Nicolas Franchomme, in particular, was critical to expanding the jurisdiction of French law.
 
While the story of Marguerite and Nicolas is unknown today, it is the story of how French customary law (Coutume de Paris) governed colonial marriage, how mixed Indian-French marriages stood at the very core of early colonial Illinois society, and how Illinois Indian women benefited, socially and legally, from being married to French men. All of this came about due to a lawsuit in which Nicolas successfully argued that his wife had legal claim to her first husband’s estate—a legal decision that created a precedent for society in the Illinois Country.
 
Within this narrative of a married couple and their legal fight—based on original French manuscripts and supported by the comprehensively annotated 1726 Illinois census—is also the story of the village of Kaskaskia during the 1720s, of the war between Fox Indians and French settlers, with their Indian allies, in Illinois, and of how the spread of plow agriculture dramatically transformed the Illinois Country’s economy from largely fur trade–based to expansively agricultural.
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Kaskaskia
The Lost Capital of Illinois
David MacDonald and Raine Waters
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
This first comprehensive account of the Illinois village of Kaskaskia covers more than two hundred years in the vast and compelling history of the state. David MacDonald and Raine Waters explore Illinois’s first capital in great detail, from its foundation in 1703 to its destruction by the Mississippi River in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as well as everything in between: successes, setbacks, and the lives of the people who inhabited the space.
 
At the outset the Kaskaskia tribe, along with Jesuit missionaries and French traders, settled near the confluence of the Kaskaskia and Mississippi rivers, about sixty miles south of modern-day St. Louis. The town quickly became the largest French town and most prosperous settlement in the Illinois Country. After French control ended, Kaskaskia suffered under corrupt British and then inept American rule. In the 1790s the town revived and became the territorial capital, and in 1818 it became the first state capital. Along the way Kaskaskia was beset by disasters: crop failures, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, epidemics, and the loss of the capital-city title to Vandalia. Likewise, human activity and industry eroded the river’s banks, causing the river to change course and eventually wash away the settlement. All that remains of the state’s first capital today is a village several miles from the original site.
 
MacDonald and Waters focus on the town’s growth, struggles, prosperity, decline, and obliteration, providing an overview of its domestic architecture to reveal how its residents lived. Debunking the notion of a folklore tradition about a curse on the town, the authors instead trace those stories to late nineteenth-century journalistic inventions. The result is a vibrant, heavily illustrated, and highly readable history of Kaskaskia that sheds light on the entire early history of Illinois.
 
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Kaskaskia Under the French Regime
Natalia Maree Belting. Foreword by Carl J. Ekberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

“The Illinois Habitant,” writes Natalia Maree Belting, “was a gay soul; he seemed shockingly carefree to later, self-righteous puritans from the American colonies. He danced on Sunday after mass, was passionately attached to faro and half a dozen other card games, and played billiards at all hours. He gossiped long over a friendly pipe and congenial mug of brandy in the half-dusk of his porch or in the noisy tavern.”

First published in 1948, Kaskaskia under the French Regime is a social and economic history of French Kaskaskia from 1703 to 1765. Using a readable, journalistic style, Belting brings to life the prairie terrain, the Kaskaskia mission, early architecture, building methods and materials, the beginnings of government, domestic tools and utensils, commerce, and the social customs of the pioneer.

In 1703, Kaskaskia was little more than a mission station in Illinois territory inhabited by a few French traders, their Indian wives, and a priest. Later in the century, the settlement became a flourishing French village filled with rows of low one-story French-style houses lining the streets. But the unique native and French bonds began when the explorers Louis Joliet and Pierre Marquette discovered a peaceful tribe, the Kaskaskia, while journeying along the Illinois River.

This historic friendship grew into a unique colonial culture, the remnants which can be seen through numerous primary source documents. Belting draws on and translates from eighteenth century French the Kaskaskia Manuscripts, in which French notaries recorded parish marriage contracts, property transactions (including slave sales), and estate inventories. She also examines the papers of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, among them the most complete census ever conducted in French Illinois, which provides a household-by-household enumeration of the population. What results is a comprehensive depiction of the lives and livelihood of French settlers in colonial Illinois.

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