. >- Clarence W. Alvord. The Old Kaskaskia "Records: An address read before the " Chicago Historical Society, 2.2.1906 The Old Kaskaskia Records CLARENCE WALWORTH ALVORD UNIVERSITY OF UJLINOIS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY mums WSTORICAL SURVEY The Old Kaskaskia Records AN ADDRESS READ BEFORE THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY, FEBRUARY 2, 1906 BY CLARENCE WALWORTH ALVORI> UNIVERSITY OF U/LESTOIS THE OLD KASKASKIA RECORDS, I have an announcement to make to you to-night; an announcement of great interest to students of Illinois his- tory, and one which could be made in no more fitting place than the home of the Chicago Historical Society, which has accomplished more for the history of our commonwealth than any other institution, and with which have been as- sociated men, whose industry and scholarship have blazed the road over which their successors are traveling. The announcement is this : the Kaskaskia records, long sup- posed to be lost, have been found. At the present time when the waters of the Mississippi are crumbling away the last walls of the old village, there has been brought to light the records of her romantic past, reaching back to the time when she was one of the most hopeful supports of a French king's world-policy, to the time when hardy frontiersmen snatched her from a British king's hands and established a form of democratic government. The records, therefore, . date from a period of seventy years, during which time Illinois was under three distinct governments. The announcement of the discovery of such a collec- r tion naturally calls forth a series of questions in regard to the origin, the hiding place, the condition, character and - contents of the papers, which it is my purpose to answer -5 to-night. The subject of the address is, therefore, the his- tory of the Kaskaskia records. Kaskaskia was founded in the year 1700 by the Jesuit missionaries, but there is no evidence of an orderly govern- ment in the district until twenty years later. Records and legal instruments for the years 1700 to 1720 are totally lack- ing in the Kaskaskia collection and it may be inferred that there was no regular place of deposit for such documents, so that whatever papers may have been drawn up have been lost. But with the year of the erection of Fort de Chartres or rather three years later, 1723, such haphazard and irre- sponsible rule came to an end. We find, from that date, the civil officials of an orderly French government, perform- 35 ing their duties with a regularity and ptecision that re- minds us of the system and care of their contemporaries in a royal jurisdiction of France. Their minutes and records were carefully kept and, when law demanded it, deposited in the archives of the fort. Here then is the beginning of the Kaskaskia collection of records. The archives, wherein were deposited the earliest of the papers, were situated with- in the circle of the walls of the fort, which stood for so many years as the most western sentinel of the French king's domain. But Fort de Chartres was not the only post in Illinois, where French officials resided and legal papers were re- dacted. As early as 1737 a clerk of the French court dwelt at Kaskaskia and even earlier a royal notary practised his calling there. Here also came the judge from the fort to hold sessions of his court. There are reasons for believing that for a few years Kaskaskia was made the seat of govern- ment. 1 At any rate the archives of the village must have slowly filled with important documents, some of which have been preserved to our day. In 1765 a change came to the villages on the bottom lands of the Mississippi ; the lilies of France were replaced by the standard of the English, and British regulars guarded the fort where once paced the soldiers of the French marine. Until the year 1772 the British commandants made their headquarters at Fort de Chartres and all governmental and legal papers were deposited there; but that curse of these bottom lands, the Mississippi floods, finally compelled the commandant to abandon the fort and remove the seat of government to Kaskaskia. 2 Therefore in the year 1772 the two archives of Fort de Chartres and Kaskaskia were united and the recently discovered collection contains records from both places. We know that the British commandants made their headquarters in the Jesuit buildings ; and from the legend of the hiding of some of the despatches by Madame de Rocheblave, we may infer that the official papers were kept within this temporary fort ; but there must have been, previous to the British occupation, another place of deposit for the purely legal documents, which continued to be used throughout the succeeding years. "For a discussion of the site of the seat of government under the French, see Bulletin of the Illinois State Hist. Lib., Vol. I., No. 1, p. 12. 2 Moses, Illinois, Historical and Statistical, I., 142 ; Mason, Illinois in the Eighteenth Century, 42. 36 In 1778 occurred thai famous exploit of George Rogers Clark, which won for the United States this great North- west. Virginia established three centers of government in the conquered territory, at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vin- cennes, so that from this time there were three important depositories for documents in Illinois; but from the first Kaskaskia was considered the county seat of the county of Illinois and here were drawn up and deposited those papers which were of common interest to all three communities. 1 From this review of the history of the French records throughout the eighteenth century, it is seen, that, at the coming of Governor St. Clair in 1790 to establish the ter- ritorial government over these regions, the majority of the Illinois papers from the French, British and Virginia periods had been collected in Kaskaskia and were transferred at that time to the custody of the officials of the newly established county of St. Clair. When five years later this county was divided, no change was made in their place of deposit, Kas- kaskia, as county-seat of Randolph County, still keeping them. There is no 'evidence that there was ever a division of the documents between Kaskaskia and Cahokia, as has been sometimes stated. Each village retained the papers, which were at the time in her archives, and the officials of Cahokia copied such of the Kaskaskia records as were of interest to the northern county, which copies may be found in "Record A" of the recorder's orfice at Belleville. When Vandalia was made the capital of the State, the eighteenth century records, no longer of any legal value, were not carried to the new capital; but remained in the custody of the officials of Randolph county, in Kaskaskia, where they still were in the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury. Poetic justice would have been satisfied, if these old records could have always remained in the archives of Kaskaskia as a monument of her romantic past ; but Nature herself intervened. The Mississippi frequently flooded the town, driving away the inhabitants, until relatively few voices were left to protect her traditional rights. Finally the great inundation of 1844 proved to the people of Ran- dolph county that their own county records were not safe in the town of the bottom lands. In 1847 the vote was taken. The county-seat was removed to Chester. There had been "The County of Illinois," in Amer. HM. Rev., IV., No. 4, passim. 37 great opposition to this change and charges of fraud were freely made against the people of Chester for illegal voting. On account of these charges the county officials at first re- fused to remove their offices ; but finally yielded, the county- clerk in December of 1847 or soon after, the recorder de- laying until March of 1848. Temporary quarters were pro- vided for the records of the various offices in the second story of a frame building, until the new court-house could be finished, which was in the summer of 1850, when the records were transferred to safer quarters. Since the office of the circuit court and recorder was too small to accom- modate all the documents, the old French papers with other court and county records, old ledgers, day-books ar-1 rub- bish such as accumulates in a court-house were left in uhe dry goods boxes, in which they had been brought from Kaskaskia. For about ten years these stood in the hall of the building, exposed to the depredations of the passer-by. About 1868 they were placed on the landing of the stair- case. Some time prior to 1878, the deputy circuit clerk packed the old papers in sacks and packages, which he placed on top of the bookcase in his office, where they re- mained until their discovery last summer. 1 My own interest in Illinois history began about a year ago, when I was sent by the Illinois State Historical Library to report on an old French record in Belleville, in the St. Clair court-house has been preserved what is left of the Cahokia records, which have proved very valuable for the period following the conquest by George Rogers Clark ; but of earlier date a record-book from the French period is all that remains. 2 The mission to Belleville was so successful that the trustees of the Historical Library decided to send me into the field for a month last summer. Naturally all those interested in the undertaking thought of the Kaskaskia records ; but we were confronted by a very well established tradition that they had been destroyed, a tradition which was believed by the most painstaking of his- torians of Illinois, E. G. Mason of your society, and to which he gave currency in his account of John Todd's "Rec- 'From information furnished me by Mr. Harry W. Roberts and Supt. Maurice Mudd of Chester. See, also, History of Randolph, Munroe and Perry Counties, Philadelphia, 1883, pp. 121 et seq. 2 Perrin, "The Oldest Civil Record in the West," in Transactions of the 111. State Hist. Soc., 1901, p. 64 ; Bulletin of the 111. State Hist. Lib., Vol. I., Nc. 1, pp. 1 et seq. orcl-Book." 1 In his two publications on that subject he tells substantially the same story : "The original record-book kept by Col. Todd during his residence in the County of Illinois has been preserved to our time by the merest chance. In No- ., vember, 1879, a visitor at Kaskaskia learned that the old doc- uments formerly kept there had been removed to the neigh- boring town of Chester, when it became the county-seat of Randolph County, Illinois. Upon inquiry at the latter place, he was informed that several chests of these papers had stood for years in the hall of the court-house, until the greater part of their contents had been destroyed. A small box had been filled with those that remained a few years before, and placed in one of the rooms of the building. These had also disappeared, and it was ascertained that they had been distributed among the different offices to be used as kindling, and all had been burned except one old book, which w r as found in a receptacle for fuel in the county-clerk's apart- ment. And this upon examination proved to be Col. John Todd's Record-Book, which subsequently by vote of the commissioners of Randolph County, was deposited with the Chicago Historical Society for safe-keeping." Mr. Mason does not tell us the name of this visitor, who found the record, and it does not appear on the records of your society, of April 27, 1880, when action was taken on the reception of the record-book ; but it is probable that Mr. Mason thus modestly conceals his own action. The tradition of the loss of the documents was strength- ened and given wide currency in Chester in 1883 by the publication of a "History of Randolph, Monroe and Perry Counties." In it occurs the following paragraph : "We have A f / - ? spent days in search of those election returns (i. e. the elec- tion returns for the court established by John Todd in 1779) which would have furnished a list of names of the voting population of the territory and been equivalent to a census. The search was in vain. The documents had been lost or destroyed. An effort to save them, made by Hon. W. C. Flagg, while senator of Madison County, in 1869, proved abortive, for the officer in custody of those documents per- emptorily refused to let Mr. Flagg have them. The latter, fully aware of the historical value of many of those docu- ments, pledged himself to return them, arranged in chrono- , John Todd, CJiictjfjo Historical Society Collections, Vol. IV., p. 288 ; see also his Illinois in the Eighteenth Century, 49. 39 logical order and substantially bound at his own expense, as soon as he had copied the most interesting documents. All was in vain. S. St. Vrain would listen to no proposals of the kind, although the county authorities had made an order to transmit those documents to Mr. Flagg. Was it a sense of duty that prompted St. Vrain to disobey? Who knows? The result of his refusal is in any event to be deplored." 1 Another account of the finding of John Todd's record- book is contained in this same volume and since it differs slightly from that given by Mason, it is worth quoting: "This Record-Book was found among a number of docu- ments removed from Kaskaskia to Chester in 1847, an d is now in possession of the Historical Society of Chicago. Robert G. Detrick, Esq., of Chester, took the precaution of making* a complete copy of the contents of said r?cord- book, before placing it in the custody of said society." 2 It is to be noticed that the writer speaks of "a number of docu- ments," as if Todd's book was but one of a collection. These may be the French documents in your library, which I sup- pose must have been obtained at the same time tliat Todd's book was deposited here ; but it is strange that three other books of record, which as far as I know, have never been hidden from view, but have always had their place on the shelves of the office of the circuit-clerk, were not at the same time acquired for your library by Mr. Mason. When I arrived in Chester last summer, this well estab- lished tradition was told me with further embellishments. For years the records had been kept in boxes on the stair- landing of the court-house; until a janitor of the building, named McMillan, who had been a publisher of a newspaper, sold them to a St. Louis paper factory. But this did not occur, before many had been destroyed in the way sug- gested by Mr. Mason's story. The basis for the tradition of the destruction of these records rests on two facts. The officials of Chester were generally ignorant of the transfer- ence of the papers to the circuit-clerk's office and they did know that the janitor used old papers, such as assessors' schedules, for building fires. The inference was simple. The disappearance of the French records from the dry goods boxes on the staircase was due to the carelessness of the 91. 2 Ibid, p. 89. janitor in choosing his kindling paper. The story was re- peated, was put in print by Mr. Mason, grew in detail with the passing of years and came to be the official story in Chester. In spite of the tradition there are many who knew that in Chester there were some old French records. Before starting, two of my colleagues informed me that they had seen such there, and one has told me the same, since my return. Also Mr. Mudd, Superintendent of Schools in Ran- dolph county, wrote that there were three record-books in the court-house. Many others probably possessed the same knowledge. The actual discovery required no occult science, for the three record-books were taken from the shelves of the office of the circuit-clerk. When asked about other records, the story of their total destruction was told by gentlemen, who were in the office. However, search was made. The book- shelves of the office do not reach to the ceiling, and their top is surmounted by a cornice, thus forming an easily sus- pected hiding place. Here were found, if the word can be used in regard to that which was never really lost, three large sacks and four packages of papers, marked, "Old French Records." Upon examination only part of them proved to be French records, for over half were court writs of every kind from the last decade of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Very few of these latter had either legal or historical value. After picking out the old French papers and those English ones that appeared to be of interest, the county commissioners were petitioned to loan them temporarily to the University of Illinois, that they might be arranged and studied. This petition was granted and the papers are at present in the library of the State university. The number of documents thus found according to the committee appointed by the county commissioners of Ran- dolph county to count them, before sending them to the University of Illinois, is 2,950 ; but since many of the papers University of Illinois, is 2,950. Considering the vicissitudes through which they have passed, their condition is excellent. Some of them show the effects of the wear of time, others have been exposed to water and are almost illegible, others have suffered from the ravages of insects and mice, and others from the careless handling of clerks and the curious, 41 but on the whole the great majority of them are uninjured and easily decipherable. That the old records have passed through the numerous changes of government and the other dangers to which they have been exposed, seems almost miraculous. Serious loss they have unquestionably sustained, but on the whole a very large number have been preserved. Many of the papers and record-books w r ere carried to New Orleans by the French officials, Commandant Villiers and Judge Valen- tine Bobe Declauseaux, before the territory was surrendered to the British, and some of them may be in that city to-day. Others may have been carried to St. Louis at the same time. I have traced the trail of one such record and since the story of its wandering illustrates the life history of others, which may have been lost, I will repeat it for you. In the Belle- ville archives there has been preserved a "Record of the Registrations of Donations" kept by successive clerks of the French government during the years 1737 to 1769. Until the year 1754 the registrations were made in Kaskaskia; from that date till 1765, i. e. till the end of the French re- gime, in Fort de Chartres ; and after that date in St. Louis. Remember the book was found in Belleville. The explana- tion of the wandering of this record is as follows: The last clerk of the French regime was Joseph Labuxiere, who went with St. Ange to St. Louis, after Fort de Chartres had been delivered to the British. Being a prudent man and knowing well that he could collect five livres from each person requiring a copy of any will or donation in this record-book, he took it with him ; and I suspect that he car- ried other books of record from his office for the same rea- son. Not enjoying life under the Spanish rule, perhaps, or seeing better opportunities for a trained French notary and clerk on the American side, he went to Cahokia to settle in 1782; and still with an eye to future profits tucked the volume under his arm, when he crossed the river. Later he was appointed clerk of the Virginia court at Cahokia, and evidently deposited the book in the office, whence it was car- ried to Belleville, when that city was made the county-seat. 1 Other records may not have been so fortunate as this and, as I said before, still others may be in New Orleans. At any rate considering the number of books of record required l BuUetin of the 111. State Hist. Lib., Vol. I., No. 1. to be kept by the French government, very few have come down to our time. In spite of the story of the concealment of the British papers by Madame Rocheblave at the time Kaskaskta was captured by Clark, we prefer to believe the account of Cap- tain Bowman, Clark's lieutenant, that all the instructions to Rocheblave from the British governors were captured. 1 Of the legal papers no mention is made and there seems no rea - son to believe that any were lost at that time. Since the United States took possession of the territory, in 1790, in a peaceful manner, there could have been no loss of docu- ments from the archives on account of the change. Therefore we conclude that the only serious loss due to change of government was in 1765, when the French left the country. With this exception, which was unquestionably a very costly one, there was no disaster to cause the loss of any document from the beginning of the regular govern- ment under the French till the time when Governor St. Clair took possession for the United States in 1790. Unfortunate- ly for us disasters were not needed. The carelessness of clerks, the Mississippi floods and the fraudulent and crim- inal purposes of men have destroyed much that the fortunes of war had spared ; for when these documents were handed over to the keeping of a United States official, their condi- tion was only less worse than at present, as we shall learn. Since 1790 the principal damage to the papers may be charged to the carelessness of clerks and the vandalism of the curious and others. Although the story of their total destruction by the janitor has fortunately proved false and although no such act of barbarism is known to have oc- curred in Chester as did in Belleville only a few years ago, when large numbers of old records were burned ; still the loss from this cause must have been great, as is proved from the condition of the record-books. Probably the bundles of papers have suffered relatively less, since they are less easily torn. I ought to say in justice to the officials in Chester that Mr. Roberts of that city, who has made a very careful study of the history of the French records since they were brought there, has been unable to find any evidence of wanton de- struction, or even of extraordinary carelessness. The second source of loss to the collection has been of a different character and at times has resulted in a posi- 1 Mason, PJiiHppe de Rochelncc, Chicago Hist. Soc. Collections, Vol. IV., p. 373. 43 tive gain to historical knowledge. Many visitors to Chester upon showing an interest in these documents have been al- lowed to carry away some of them. Many of these have found their way into libraries, where they have been pre- served. For instance in your own library there are fifty such papers and among them the famous John Todd's Rec- ord-book, the principal source of our present knowledge of the period following the conquest by George Rogers Clark. Also in the Wisconsin Historical Library there is a record book dating from the British period. Of all the records drawn up in the French communi- ties during the eighteenth century, how many have been preserved? For this calculation there exist data of two kinds, neither of which will give exact results ; but upon which may be based an estimate sufficiently near the truth to give an idea of the loss which the collection has suffered. In Record-book A. in the recorder's office of the St. Clair court-house is the copy of a receipt given by the first territorial recorder of St. Clair County, William St. Clair, to Frangois Carbonneaux of the Virginia court at Kaskaskia. It is dated at Kaskaskia, June 12, 1790. In part it reads as follows: "Received from the hands of Francois Caboneaux the following Public Papers relative to the Recorder's office which were in his hands as acting Recorder. Three Bundles of papers stitched entitled papier Terrier one 'ditto ditto One Book Called a Register wanting at the beginning sixteen pages also pages fifty three and four which appears to have been fraudulently torn out, ends as it is numbered with page three hundred and seventy-nine. Book the second also stiled a Register pages twenty-four twenty-five twenty- six and twenty-seven are the greatest part Cut away for what purpose I know not The beginning and end of the Book also stiled a Register being two quire paper stitched containing in the first part sixteen pages second part ten pages third part eighteen pages fourth part wanting pages three and four containing as it is numbered thirty four pages another Book which is called a Register from page twenty two to seventy five has been torn out of the Book and others Visibly substituted in their stead also pages seventy five seventy six seventy seven and seventy eight are torn away from page seventy nine to eighty six is also wanting and at page Ninety as numbered. A book part of 14 which is torn away and the pages all false numbered so that I have not thought proper to examine it as it never can be produced as an authentic record One book I have re- ceived from his Excellency the Governor which appears to be in tolerable good condition ends with page four hundred and fourty four." There follows a list of papers which he calls sales and which are arranged according to the year of redaction. The earliest is dated 1722 and the latest 1790. Their total num- ber is 1,308. The remembrance of copying this receipt of William St. Clair was a source of gratification to me, when later the Kaskaskia papers came into my hands ; for I expected to learn easily how many of them had been preserved; but alas ! the information is after all very meagre. In no case does St. Clair mention the nature of the registers, so that the only basis of a comparison is the general make-up of the books. Unfortunately hard usage during the last century has left them in a worse condition than when delivered to the United States government. St. Clair describes either five or six books, his enumeration and description being in- definite, so that it is difficult to determine which is the cor- rect number. Among the Kaskaskia papers there are three registers and loose sheets of some others. Only one of these can I identify with any described by St. Clair. It is the last one, which he says he received, "from his excellency the Governor," and which contains four hundred and forty-four pages. There are exactly four hundred and forty-four pages in one of the Kaskaskia record-books, or rather were; for some few leaves are missing from the middle of the book. The two others are so imperfectly preserved that identifica- tion is impossible, although one may be part of St. Clair's third register, and the other was probably not included in his list at all, for it is not a register but an alphabetical in- dex of notarial acts, of which he, as recorder, took no notice. It is hopeless to attempt any identification of the loose sheets. He mentions four bundles of papers stitched entitled "Papier Terrier," which contained a list of the land-holdings, drawn up when Louis XV. still controlled the destinies of the Mississippi valley. Only a few torn pages of these papers remain, which is strange, since they were the oldest titles to land and were found of the greatest value by the 45 United States land commissioners. That papers, which were so important at one time to the colonists, have totally dis- appeared I can scarcely believe, and hope that they may some time be found in their forgotten depository. St. Clair's list of notarial instruments was the greatest disappointment to me ; for he confines himself to listing what he calls sales and even describes these as not all "sales as ex- pressed in the catalogue, but as they have references to some sale made I have put them under the head of Sales." What has he thus classified as sales ? I may use my Yankee priv- ilege of guessing, which may become after careful compari- son almost a certainty; for to the class of notarial acts known as sales, he has probably added that of contracts in regard to a future sale. But these two classes do not ex- haust the lists of French notarial acts. St. Clair has listed 1,308 documents, whereas the Kaskaskia papers, the great majority of which were drawn up by notaries, number about 3,000. In the course of time I may be able to make some- thing out of the receipt of St. Clair ; but at present I can do little more than indicate the difficulties of the problem, due largely to the information, which he has given. There is a second means of making an estimate of the number of documents that were originally deposited in the archives of Illinois during the three periods of the eighteenth century history ; but since my study of the Kaskaskia papers is so very incomplete, the result is only the roughest kind of a guess. It is possible, however, that even after a more detailed study a more satisfactory result will not be obtained, since the data are at best meagre. One of the books of record found in Chester is an index of notarial minutes drawn up at different periods. Original- ly it was much more complete than at present, for many pages have been lost and others torn. The index was evidently carefully kept from 1720 to 1756, from which time the clerks of the successive courts were very careless, although sporadic attempts were made to keep it up to date. The earlier index is alphabetical and was made by Bertlor Barrios, clerk and notary, the most careful and best trained man holding these offices in Illinois during the eighteenth century. Since his index of the minutes of his predecessors is badly mutilated, it cannot be used for our purposes ; but fortunately the index of the acts deposited in his bureau either by himself or others during the years 1737 46 to 1756 is in perfect condition. The number thus indexed is 2,029, which gives an average of 106 a year. Since very few were drawn up in 1720 and 1721, I shall reckon from 1722. If this average of 106 was maintained from 1722 to 1790, there were 7,208 notarial instruments redacted during those years. Two serious objections may be made to this estimate. In the first place, the years from 1737 to 1756 were the most prosperous in the history of the French district and in fact of the whole eighteenth century, so that such a high aver- age for this kind of document was not maintained through- out the period. In the second place, the index includes only notarial acts and leaves out court-records, depositions, pa- pers drawn up by the other officials, letters of instruction, official correspondence, etc. Possibly these two errors may approximately offset each other; but the total is too small rather than the reverse, I am inclined to think. Another part of the index is of a somewhat different character and makes possible another estimate. It is the list of- papers, received by the clerk of the court, arranged by years. In this case the clerk has not separated his duties as notary and clerk, so that the index includes papers of all kinds, such as ordinances, papers in both civil and criminal trials, and acts of other officials as well as those of the notaries. Only a few years of this record have been pre- served, but since these represent different periods, we have data upon which to base an average. By years, the number of instruments is: 1737, 180; 1752, 105; 1758, 85; 1783, 85; 1784, 82. The average is 105 papers each year, being only one less that was obtained from the other data, which gave a total of over 7,000 for the entire period from 1722 to 1790. But even after this confirmation of the calculation, the total must be regarded as too small, since the official correspondence of the commandants and judges, military papers of all kinds, and all the documents drawn up by the numerous officials of the governments are not included. Therefore one or two thousand must be added to the total, making it eight or nine thousand. Since the papers found at Chester will not exceed 3,000, I estimate that between 60 and 70 per cent of the Kaskaskia papers have been lost. The loss of record-books has been actually greater. Lamentable as is this loss of over sixty per cent of 47 the papers, it will be far more profitable to rejoice over the preservation of so many than to waste vain regrets over the unrecoverable. These old records were little fitted to survive the trying times of frontier life. Their only defence against the rough handling by backwoodsman clerk was their antiquity and that mystery which lurks in the indecipherable page, weapons little respected by the strong and dauntless men who first won the prairie from the Indian, and then conquered the soil itself. To such men the silent appeal of these old papers written in a foreign language was unin- telligible ; to them the past of which the papers spoke was nothing; and yet the frontiersmen spared them, and even their immediate successors gave them room in the court- house. Therefore, I repeat, let us rejoice over what has been found rather than lament over the losses, for through the preservation of these papers the gain to our knowledge of eighteenth century Illinois history has been great; how great, it is my purpose to indicate to you in the latter half of this address. "He who excuses, accuses himself," says the French proverb, and it is without any intention of asking your for- bearance for the incompleteness of this report, that I desire to call your attention to its limitations. I am not in a posi- tion to pass final judgment on the information contained in the Kaskaskia records, because I have not yet even finished the first stage of my work, namely, that of arranging and cataloguing them. The bundles, in which they were bound by the last person who opened them, are without order, each generally containing papers not only of different char- acter, but also from various years. I am at present ar- ranging them according to chronological order and to sub- ject matter. The work progresses slowly, because in so many cases it is necessary to read the greater part of a docu- ment in order to classify it. Although not yet possessed of full knowledge in regard to the papers, the invitation, which you so kindly sent me, induced me to try to give you at this time some information regarding them by which you may be able to judge of their importance. Before starting for Chester I had been told that I should find there some old French records, which were worthless. My informant, needless to say, was not an historian. Still they are, for the most part, private instruments with a fair sprinkling of court papers and other documents. Surely the 48 layman may be excused for regarding them as worthless, however curious they may be. Even for the historian they are not the most attractive material with which to work, for the information acquired from a given amount of time spent upon them is far less in quantity than that from historical sources of another kind. The quality, however, is excel- lent, and the certainty attained is refreshing to any one who has worked much with annals, letters or histories. In this lies the charm of studying documents like these, the cer- tainty of the results ; for if you can only interpret them, their testimony is as positive as the strata of rock on the mountan side to the geologist. As the paleontologist re- constructs a strange world with still stranger flora and fauna from the traces and remains of organism embedded in the rock, so the historian from these survivals of actual life Ueberreste the Germans call them can recall to life a past society, as it actually existed. These records are nnt ac- counts by some more or less capable person of what he thought occurred in the past ; but the records of those occur- rences themselves ; in fact, if we maintain our simile, the footprints and bones of past organisms. But what are the old Kaskaskia records? The great majority of them are notarial minutes of instruments drawn up in Fort de Chartres or Kaskaskia between the vears 1720 and 1790. These are for the most part in the French language and follow the formulae of the French law. The royal French notary, like his successor the notary of modern France, was a far more important official than the notary public of English law, for his acts had all the legal lorce of the judgment of an American court. In all the affairs of life he was as frequently present as the parish priest. He, in fact, played the counterpart in civil life to that of the priest in ecclesiastical. Like the latter he participated in marriages and was found almost as frequently at the side of the dying. Then, his assistance was required at the formation of partnerships, at the loan of money, at the re- turn of the same, for drawing up leases, at the settlement of estates, at the taking of inventories, at auctions, at all contracts, whether for the delivery of goods or for labor and this last includes apprenticeship. Thus his points of contact with the business and social community in which he moved were almost limitless, and his was one of the *nost familiar figures in anv Frenchktown or city. In the K"is- 1 kaskia collection are examples of almost every kind of in- strument written by these officials. No great addition to the sum of our knowledge of Illi- nois history has been made by the finding- of hurdreds of such documents as these notarial instruments. Relatively little is to be made out of their tiresome repetition of, "Be- fore the royal notary in the Illinois." Still they are not to be neglected ; for careful study will reveal mucn of inter- est. First of all comes their genealogical information, not so important here in Illinois as is that of a like collection in Canada ; for the French have not played such a part in building up the state as have their cousins *n the country over the border. Nevertheless many families in southern Illinois and in St. Louis will be glad to glean information from these records in regard to their ancestors. Perhaps in the future these, old notarial acts will be even more valuable, for from one of these French families may be descended our future Shakespeare or Oliver Cromwell. But the genealogical interest is not the <~>nly one. The information in regard to business methods, prices of goods, in short about the whole business and social life of these French is by no means small. These long inventories of household articles will enable us to control certain extrava- gant statements about the magnificence of the homes of the settlers, made by writers whom the romance of these French colonies has partially blinded by its glamour. The notarial instruments, although the most numerous, are by no means the most important. The palm must be given to the court records, whether in books or loose papers. With the aid of these, and they are fortunately numerous, may be traced the changing forms of government in this region as has never been done up to this time. Among the papers are many petitions for justice and for the assignment of land, dating from every period of the eighteenth century. Depositions before the various magistrates, reports of trials and the final execution of the decision of the court are not lacking. There are twenty pages of a record of the sessions of the court under the French regime, very fragmentary in character, so many pages having been lost. The first record is of a session in the year 1737, the last in 1765. For the English period there is no similar document in the col- lection ; but in the Wisconsin Historical Library are records of co'