Cahokia is a settlement and former village in St. Clair County, Illinois, United States, founded as a colonial French mission in 1689.

Located on the east side of the Mississippi River in the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area, as of the 2010 census, 15,241 people lived in the village.

[3] The name refers to one of the clans of the historic Illiniwek confederacy, who met early French explorers to the region.

Early European settlers named the nearby (and long-abandoned) Cahokia Mounds in present-day Madison County after the Illini clan.

The area was part of an extensive urban complex, the largest of the far flung Mississippian culture territory through the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys.

Archeologists ascribe the earthwork mounds Cahokia complex to the Mississippian culture, an earlier indigenous people who are not believed to have been ancestral to the Illini.

Father Pinet founded a mission in late 1696 to convert the Cahokian and Tamaroa Native Americans to Christianity.

Father Pinet and the Seminary of Foreign Missions of Quebec built a log church and dedicated it to the Holy Family.

The 50-mile (80 km) area of land between the two villages was cultivated by farming settlers, known as habitants, whose main crop was wheat.

In the treaty ending the war, France ceded large parts of what it called the Illinois Country east of the Mississippi River to the British, including the area of Canada.

Many French-speaking residents of Cahokia and elsewhere in what had been Upper Louisiana moved west of the river to territory still controlled by the French rather than live under British rule.

Many moved to Lower Louisiana, where they founded new Canadien villages on the west side of the Mississippi River, such as Ste.