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. INDIAN CRUELTIES Learning of the wrecking of his enterprise, La Salle hurried to the Illinois valley to search for his companions, arriving at Pere Marquette State Park by canoe on December 7, 1680. On the north bank of the Illinois River he viewed the fury of the Iroquois, for here were Illinois women and children tortured to death by fire, impaled on poles. Having found no trace of Frenchmen, he stripped the bark from the trunk of a tree, hung a board with a drawing of his party in a canoe, tied a letter to Tonti, his trusted lieutenant, to the board directing him to a cache of supplies hidden nearby. On December 7, 1681, La Salle with a party of 22 Frenchmen, reunited with Tonti, rendezvoused with 18 Indians at the mouth of the Illinois River. This party remained 12 days building elm bark canoes for the long trip down the Mississippi. Three months later La Salle stood at the mouth of the river and claimed the Mississippi valley for France, naming it “Louisiana.” TONTI SUCCEEDS LA SALLE La Salle’s successor in the Illinois country was Henri Tonti, an Italian in the French army. He had lost a hand in some battle, for which he substituted an iron one, which so impressed the Indians that he became famed as the man with the Iron Hand. He served as guide to the Seminary Fathers who founded Cahokia, today the oldest permanent settlement in the Mississippi valley. This party stopped overnight at the mouth of the Illinois River on December 5, 1698.