Fort Kaskaskia was built to protect the French settlement at Kaskaskia at the southern end of the Illinois Country. It is best described as an earthen redoubt. It was constructed circa 1759. It appears to have been unfinished. France ceded the Illinois Country to Britain as a result of the French and Indian War (1754-1763). A British officer who passed by the old Fort Kaskaskia described it this way: “dilapidated buildings and collapsed wooded gun platforms … the Ditch, Parapet, and Ramparts entirely overgrown…” It is a fascinating site to visit as the photos below reveal.

The grass-covered mounds and the ditches (from which that building material was taken) still remain. An artist’s reconstruction (based on what the British officer wrote) gives a fair impression of what this fort would have looked like.

A tremendously important discovery was made recently at Fort Kaskaskia by a team from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale led by Dr. Mark J. Wagner, Director of the Center for Archaeological Investigations at SIUC. Better said, the discovery is not “at” Fort Kaskaskia but rather is located one hundred yards north of it because that is where Dr. Wagner discovered the remains of an American (!) Fort Kaskaskia, separate from the French fort. It was historically known that Lewis and Clark had an outpost at Fort Kaskaskia, but everyone thought the men were at the well known French fort. They were not. Dr. Wagner and his students have been excavating at the American Fort Kaskaskia since 2017. Watch this fascinating interview with Dr. Wagner: CLICK HERE

Please also read Dr. Wagner’s article about his Fort Kaskaskia work, published in February 2021 in We Proceeded On, which is the journal/newsletter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation (LCTHF).

And here is another of Dr. Wagner’s summaries of his work, presented at a professional conference in 2023:

The name “Fort Kaskaskia” has been applied to two adjacent colonial forts in Illinois, one French (11R326) and one American (11R612). Through time the separate identities of the two forts became conflated into one (11R326), whose still visible remains have served as a focal point for American commemorative activities up until the present day. The very existence of the American fort (11R612), in contrast, was forgotten as was the association of both forts with the eighteenth and early nineteenth century African-American and Native American peoples of southwestern Illinois. Archaeological investigations by Southern Illinois University since 2017 are serving to challenge these and other conventional historical narratives of the two forts as being solely Euro-American installations  through the recovery of artifacts and features that provide evidence that the two forts served as nodes of cultural interaction between peoples of different ethnicities and status through time.