aders; and in spite of the King himself, who feared that the diffusion
of the colony would breed disorder and insubordination.

Detroit, the most important of the western posts, struggled through a
critical infancy in the charge of its founder, La Mothe-Cadillac, till,
by a choice not very judicious, he was made governor of Louisiana.
During his rule the population had slowly increased to about two hundred
souls; but after he left the place it diminished to a point that seemed
to threaten the feeble post with extinction. About 1722 it revived
again; _voyageurs_ and discharged soldiers settled about the fort, and
the parish register shows six or eight births in the course of the
year.[320]

Meanwhile, on the banks of the Mississippi another settlement was
growing up which did not owe its birth to official patronage, and yet
was destined to become the most noteworthy offspring of Canada in the
West. It was known to the French as "the Illinois," from the name of the
group of tribes belonging to that region. La Salle had occupied the
banks of the river Illinois in 1682; but the curious Indian colony which
he gathered about his fort on the rock of St. Louis[321] dispersed after
his death, till few or none were left except the Kaskaskias, a sub-tribe
of the Illinois. These still lived in the meadow below Fort St. Louis,
where the Jesuits Marquette, Allouez, Rale, Gravier, and Marest labored
in turn for their conversion, till, in 1700, they or some of them
followed Marest to the Mississippi and set up their wigwams where the
town of Kaskaskia now stands, near the mouth of the little river which
bears the same name. Charlevoix, who was here in 1721, calls this the
oldest settlement of the Illinois,[322]--though there is some reason to
believe that the village of Cahokia, established as a mission by the
Jesuit Pinet, sixty miles or more above Kaskaskia, and nearly opposite
the present city of St. Louis, is, by a few weeks, the elder of the two.
The _voyageurs_, _coureurs de bois_, and other roving Canadians made
these young settlements their resort, took to wife converted
squaws,[323] and ended with making the Illinois their home. The missions
turned to parishes, the missionaries to cures, and the wigwams to those
compact little Canadian houses that cause one to marvel at the ingenuity
which can store so multitudinous a progeny within such narrow limits.

White women from Canada or Louisiana began to find their way to these
wi