on with which our modern imitations
in 1836 and 1856 were feeble indeed. A monument of it stood not many
years ago upon the banks of the Mississippi, in the ruins of Fort
Chartres, which was built by Law when at the height of his fortune, at
a cost of several millions of livres, and which toppled over into the
river in a recent inundation.

In 1759 the French power in North America was broken forever by Wolfe,
upon the Plains of Abraham; and in 1763, by the Treaty of Paris, all the
French possessions upon this continent were ceded to England, and the
territory of the Illinois became part of the British empire.

Pontiac, the famous Ottawa chief, after fighting bravely on the French
side through the war, refused to be transferred with the territory; he
repaired to Illinois, where he was killed by a Peoria Indian. His tribe,
the Ottawas, with their allies, the Pottawattomies and Chippewas,
in revenge, made war upon the Peorias and their confederates, the
Kaskaskias and Cahoklas, in which contest these latter tribes were
nearly exterminated.

At this time, the French population of Illinois amounted to about three
thousand persons, who were settled along the Mississippi and Illinois
rivers, where their descendants remain to this day, preserving a
well-defined national character in the midst of the great flood of
Anglo-American immigration which rolls around them.

Illinois remained under British rule till the year 1778, when George
Rogers Clarke, with four companies of Virginia rangers, marched from
Williamsburg, a distance of thirteen hundred miles, through a hostile
wilderness, captured the British posts of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, and
annexed a territory larger than Great Britain to the new Republic. Many
of Colonel Clarke's rangers, pleased with the beauty and fertility of
the country, settled in Illinois; but the Indians were so numerous and
hostile, that the settlers were obliged to live in fortified stations,
or block-houses, and the population remained very scanty for many years.

In 1809 Illinois was made into a separate Territory, and Ninian Edwards
appointed its first Governor.

During the War of 1812, Tecumseh, an Indian chief of remarkable ability,
endeavored to form a coalition of all the tribes against the Americans,
but with only partial success. He inflicted severe losses upon them,
but was finally defeated and slain at the Battle of the Thames, leaving
behind him the reputation of being the greatest her