Fort Massac

The company's reward was the letter A, of which we were justly proud.

After two weeks of hard work, we marched to Fort Massac on the Ohio River near Metropolis, Illinois, about twelve miles below Paducah, Kentucky, where we arrived on September twenty-fourth and encamped for ten or twelve days, during which time we did some scouting up the river.

From Fort Massac we were transferred to Bird's Point, Missouri, opposite Cairo.

From there we went to Cairo for a short time and then back to Bird's Point, from whence we did some scouting, but nothing of special interest occurred until December, when, in a scouting expedition after Jess Thompson's command, the regiment met with its first loss.

Josiah Clark of Company B was killed in a skirmish and was carried off the field by Lew Blake of the Eleventh Illinois Infantry.

Thomas P. Howard of Massachusetts went through.

At Fort Massac of Illinois, by Captain Clark.

Soldiers.

Silas Goodrich of Massachusetts went through.

Glad was Captain Clark to spend the months at La Charette.

Daniel Boone had been his boyhood friend in Kentucky, had taught him much woodcraft.

But when in mid-December Captain Clark, the redhead, anxious to push on to La Charette seventy miles up the Missouri before the ice closed with York and his nine Kentuckians and five other recruits whom he had enlisted from Fort Massac at the mouth of the Ohio, tied his keelboat at the St. Louis levee, he was met by disagreeable information.

"We'll have to winter here," informed Captain Lewis.

Again, that project located in Wood River in the Metro East.

The popular Fort Massac Encampment, which has drawn thousands of visitors to Southern Illinois every fall for decades, will return to Fort Massac State Park in Metropolis October 17th and 18th.

Since 1974, the Encampment Festival has provided visitors with a chance to experience what life was like at Fort Massac during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The fort served as a frontier outpost along the Ohio River for personnel from France, Britain, and the early years of the US from 1757 to 1814.

Event times are 10 AM to 5 PM Saturday, October 17th, and 9 AM to 4:30 PM Sunday, October 18th.

The Fort Massac Encampment is hosted by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and sponsored by the Greater Metropolis Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Hundreds of military re-enactors and other participants wearing period clothing will present the roles of explorers, traders, settlers, and soldiers on the early Illinois frontier.

The encampment features an opening Posting of the Color ceremony at 10 AM Saturday and Sunday.

Did you always have an interest, I mean, in politics or service? I, I say this because I know your husband, Tom, and I worked with him when he was at Secretary of State, and then he moved, uh, into the governor's office and ended up a career, very successful at DNR, and they still use him.

He was incredibly good at running Conservation World during the fair and the Conservation World at DuQuoin State Fair and Fort Massac down to Metropolis and so on.

Was that always interested? Did you have that interest in public service or politics before he did?

Uh, we, I'm, I'm from the Quincy area.

But as the river grew wider and deeper, the trip became easier.

We stopped at Fort Massac, where I was fortunate enough to meet George Drouillard.

He was known to be an experienced man among the Indians, a good woodsman and boatman, a crack shot.

I engaged him as an interpreter, since he didn't particularly want to enlist as a soldier.

Stately Solitudes.

Old Fort Massac.

Dead Towns in Egypt.

The Last Camp.

These always interest us from the generosity of their height and girth and from their great variety of color tones induced by the patchy scaling of the bark, soft grays, buffs, greens, and ivory whites prevailing.

When sufficiently refreshed in this cool bower, we ventured once more into the fierce light of the open river and two miles below shot into the broader and more inviting Massac Creek, 928 miles, just as, of old, George Rogers Clark did with his little flotilla when en route to capture Kaskaskia.

Clark, in his journal written long after the event, said that this creek is a mile above Fort Massac.

His memory failed him.