During the American Revolutionary War, the town, which by then had become an administrative center for the British Province of Quebec, was taken by the Virginia militia during the Illinois campaign.

[3] This resulted from deforestation of the river banks during the 19th century, due to crews taking wood for fuel to feed the steamboat and railroad traffic.

The site of Kaskaskia near the Mississippi River was long inhabited by varying Native American indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

The Kaskaskia, part of the Illiniwek peoples, colonized this area in the 1600s,[6] and lived there at the time of European encounter and traded with the early French colonists.

In the same year they imported the first enslaved Africans, shipped from Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, to work as laborers in the lead mines.

Writing of Kaskaskia about 1715, a visitor said that the village consisted of 400 Illinois men, "good people"; two Jesuit missionaries, and "about twenty French voyageurs who have settled there and married Indian women.

One devout Catholic, full-blooded Indian woman disowned her mixed-race son for living "among the savage nations".

[15] Many of the Canadiens and their descendants at Kaskaskia became voyageurs and coureurs des bois, who would explore and exploit the Missouri River country for fur trading.

The Canadien goals stimulated the expedition of Claude Charles Du Tisne to establish trade relations with the Plains Indians in 1719.

[16] During the years of French rule, Kaskaskia and the other agricultural settlements in the Illinois Country were critical for supplying Lower Louisiana, especially New Orleans, with wheat and corn, as these staple crops could not be grown in the Gulf climate.

Frontier settlers throughout Woodland North America often built such redoubts for defense during times of threat from Native Americans.

The British did not use the redoubt but from 1766 through 1772, maintained a rotating detachment of around 25 men under a junior officer, from Fort de Chartres.

Rather than live under British rule after France ceded the territory east of the river, many French-speaking people from Kaskaskia and other colonial towns moved west of the Mississippi to Ste.

In May 1772, when the British abandoned Fort de Chartres, Kaskaskia continued to survive as a primarily French-speaking village on the Mississippi River frontier.

During one of the westernmost military campaigns of the American Revolution, the city fell on July 4, 1778, to George Rogers Clark and his force of 200 men, including Captains Joseph Bowman and Leonard Helm.

The brick church, built in 1843 in the squared-off French style, was later moved to the restored village of Kaskaskia on the west side of the Mississippi.

[17] The treaty specifically provides for a house on a lot of "no more than one hundred acres" for Jean Baptiste Ducoigne and that a "suitable sum" of all material and monetary payments to the tribe would be reserved for the chief and his family.

Through this rapid, man-made erosion, river banks became unstable, resulting in massive amounts of soil to collapse into the flowing water.

[20] In 1832, during the era of Indian removal, the Peoria tribe, speaking for Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Mitchigamia, and Tamarois, signed a second treaty.

The treaty was signed two months after the end of the Black Hawk War in northwestern Illinois, between the Sauk tribe and the United States.

In the late 19th century, the town was cut off from the Illinois mainland and mostly destroyed by repeated flooding and a channel change by the Mississippi River.

As the Mississippi continued to flow through its new bed, earth was deposited so that the village land became physically attached to the west bank of the river, which primarily lies within the boundaries of the state of Missouri.

[23] However, the village comprises only a small part of Kaskaskia Precinct, which includes all of Randolph County's land west of the Mississippi.