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Show 1836- 1837I Fogg's Far West 133 But, truly, the little town with this soft Indian name is a beautiful place, as no one who has ever visited it has failed to remark. The incidents of its early history are fraught with the wild and romantic. The old village of Peoria was one of the earliest settlements of the French in the Mississippi Valley; and, many years before the memory of the present generation, it had been abandoned by its founders, a new village having been erected upon the present site, deemed less unhealthy than the former. The first house is said to have been built in new Peoria, or La viUe de Matlletj as was its nam de nique, about the year 1778; and the situation was directly at the outlet of the lake, one mile and a half below the old settlement." Its inhabitants consisted chiefly of that wild, semi- savage race of Indian traders, hunters, trappers, voyageurs, couriers du bois, and half- breeds, which long formed the sole link of union between the northern lakes and the southwest. After • Peoria, now the second largest dty in Illinois, is situated a hundred and sixty miks southwest of Chicago, on the west bank and near the outlet of Lake Peoria, an expansion of the Illinois River. Its site was visited in 1680 by LA Salle. Early in the eighteenth century a French settlement was made a mile and a half farther up, and named Peoria for the local Indian tribe. French missionaries were in this neighborhood as early as 1673- 74. In 1788 or 1789 the first house was built on the present site of Peoria and by the close of the century the inhabitants of the old town, because of its more healthful location, moved to the new village of Peoria, which at first was called LA ViUe de Maillet, in honor of a French Canadian who commanded a company of volunteers in the War of the Revolution. Later the name was changed to its present form. At the opening of the War of 1811- 15, the French inhabitants were charged with having aroused the Indians against the Americans in Illinois. Governor Ninian Edwards ordered Thomas E. Craig, captain of a company of Illinois militia, to proceed up the Illinois River and build a fort at Peoria. Under the pretense that his men had been fired upon by the inhabitants, when the former were peaceably passing in their boats, Craig burned half the town of Peoria in November, 1812, and transferred the majority of the population to below Alton. In the following year, Fort Clark- named in honor of General George Rogers Clark - was erected by General Benjamin Howard on this site; but after the dose of the war the fort was burned by the Indians. After the affair of 1812, Peoria was not occupied, save occasionally, until 1819, when it was rebuilt by the Americans. The American Fur Company established a post there in 1824* See C. Ballance, History of Peoria ( Peoria, 1870).- ED. |