Mississippi River Floods Destroy Original Kaskaskia

The Mississippi River shifted its channel in the catastrophic floods of 1881, cutting through the narrow neck of land separating the Kaskaskia River from the Mississippi and isolating the original town site on an island entirely surrounded by the Mississippi. Subsequent floods eroded and submerged most of the island, taking with them the physical remains of the town Clark had captured in 1778 — the church, the fort site, the French Creole houses.

The destruction of Kaskaskia by the river is one of the more melancholy facts of American historical preservation: the most significant town of the western theater of the Revolutionary War literally no longer exists on solid ground. What remains — the Kaskaskia Bell in its small chapel, the Pierre Menard Home nearby, Fort de Chartres a few miles north — are fragments and survivals of a world that the river reclaimed.