La Salle's successor in the Illinois country was Henri Tonti, an Italian
in the French army. He had lost a hand in some battle, for which he
substituted an iron one, which so impressed the Indians that he became
famed as the man with the Iron Hand.
He served as guide to the Seminary Fathers who founded Cahokia, today
the oldest permanent settlement in the Mississippi valley. This party
stopped overnight at the mouth of the Illinois River on December 5,
1698.
In 1717 the Regent of France was influenced by John Law, a Scottish land
speculator, to draw a line from the mouth of the Illinois River,
extended east, which created New France (Canada) to the north and
Louisiana to the south. Law's scheme to colonize Louisiana waxed until
1720 when the "Mississippi Bubble" burst, nearly wrecking France.
On October 9, 1721, Pierre Francois de Charlevoix, a Jesuit college
professor, sent by Louis XV's Regent to search for the still
undiscovered route to the Pacific Ocean passed this way. "For at this
place," he wrote in polished prose, "The River of the Illinois changes
its course.... One might say, out of regret to its being obliged to pay
the tribute of its waters to another river, it endeavors to return back
to its source."