Harmar found life in the settlements he visited as crude as the path he traveled. Kaskaskia was a French village of one hundred and ninety-one men, old and young, with an accompaniment of women and children of various mixtures of white and red blood. Cahokia, then the metropolis, had two hundred and thirty-nine Frenchmen, old and young, with an accompaniment similarly mixed. Between these settlements was Bellefontaine, a small stockade, inhabited altogether by Americans, who had settled without authority. The situation was a beautiful one; the land was fertile; there was no taxation, and the people had an abundance to live upon. They were much alarmed when told of their precarious state respecting a title to their lands, and they gave Tardiveau a petition to carry to Congress. On the route to Cahokia, another stockade, Grand Ruisseau, similarly inhabited by Americans, was passed. There were about thirty other American intruders in the fertile valleys near the Mississippi, and they, too, gave Tardiveau a petition to Congress. The Kaskaskia, Peoria, Cahokia, and Mitcha tribes of Indians numbered only about forty or fifty members, of whom but ten or eleven individuals composed the Kaskaskia tribe; but this does not mean that danger from the Indians was not great, because other and more hostile tribes came in great numbers to hunt in the Illinois country. The significance of the diminished numbers of these particular tribes lies in the fact that they had the strongest claim to that part of Illinois which would be first needed for settlement. At Kaskaskia and Cahokia, the French were advised to obey their magistrates until Congress had a government ready for them, and Cahokia was advised to put its militia into better shape, and to put any turbulent or refractory persons under guard until a government could be instituted.(102)