Starved Rock State Park is located, one mile south of Utica, Illinois along the Illinois River. Here, at the end of the last Ice Age, glacial melt cut through soft, sandstone bluffs, carving over a dozen deep, narrow canyons.
In May of 1673, Louis Jolliet, Father Marquette, and five French voyageurs in two canoes, were the first Europeans to travel through the Starved Rock area. They were returning to St. Ignace (located on the upper peninsula of Michigan) from an exploration of the upper Mississippi River.
Father Marquette returned to the area in 1675 to establish a Mission in the large Kaskaskia Indian village located across the Illinois River from Starved Rock.
In time, New France claimed the entire Mississippi Valley and all of the Great Lakes. To defend their claim, the French built a chain of rough-hewn forts throughout the Great Lakes and along important river routes. As the Illinois River was the quickest route from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, a southern defense, named Fort St. Louis, was contructed atop Starved Rock in the winter of 1682-83. The new fort commanded a strategic position high above the last rapids on the Illinois River.
In February 1684, 500 Iroquois warriors attacked the new log fort. Command of the fort was shared by explorer Henri Tonti and French army officer, Chevalier Baugy. Their command consisted of a tiny army of twenty-two French soldiers, traders, trappers and craftsmen along with twenty-four Shawnee, Miami and Loup warriors and their families.
Perched high above the river, Fort St Louis could not be taken by direct attack. The Iroquois tried, several times, and failed. The Iroquois warriors had no other choice but surround and starve the people in the fort. The French were short of food and gunpowder. . . but so were the Iroquois who had just traveled from their homelands east of Lake Erie . . . on foot! The food supplies and equipment they carried were minimized to gain speed. Now their supplies were gone and the Iroquois were forced to rely on local food sources. As you can imagine, 500 hungry men could quickly deplete local food sources. For eight days the Iroquois attackers hung on, sniping, probing the forts’ defenses, torturing a few captives. As the days passed, it became obvious to the Iroquois that they had no choice but to return home.
By the early 1700s, the French had abandoned Fort St Louis and moved to what is now called Peoria, where they built Fort Pimitoui. Over the next twenty years, the remains of Fort St. Louis, now a haven for trappers and traders, slowly disappeared.
The diorama pictured was researched and built by the History/Social Science Department and students of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois. This reconstruction is based on descriptions of the fort by LaSalle, Henri Joutel, property deeds, business and French army documents. These sources describe the fort of 1684 as upright logs and earthworks of about 600 feet in circumference which protected housing for up to fifty men, contained seven bastions, a storehouse, forge, officers’ quarters, a chapel and at least three traders’ log cabins.
