(majestic music) (majestic music continues) (majestic music ending) - [Narrator] Along the Illinois River where Peoria rises today, the water has long carried people, trade, and stories.

Before distilleries, factories, and city streets, this was a meeting place.

First for Native nations, and later for French explorers, missionaries, traders, and settlers who entered a landscape already rich with meaning and life.

In the 17th century, French travelers followed the rivers of the interior continent, seeking routes, alliances, and opportunities for trade.

Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet passed through the Illinois River country in 1673.

Within a few years, Robert Cavalier La Salle and Henri de Tonti would bring French ambitions even deeper into the region.

In 1680, near present-day Peoria, La Salle and Tonti established Fort Crèvecoeur, the Fort of the Broken Heart.

Though the fort was short-lived, its name remains attached to one of the earliest European efforts to build a permanent presence in what would become Illinois.

Over time, French-speaking traders and families formed a small settlement near the lake, remembered as La Ville de Maillet, after Jean-Baptiste Maillet, who had moved trading operations a mile and a half south of the original trading village.

Today, Peoria's French past survives less in monuments than in memory.

In the river corridor, in historic accounts, and in the layered identity of a place where many cultures met.

The French chapter is only one part of Peoria's history, but it helps explain why this stretch of the Illinois River became so important.

To understand Peoria is to look to the river and to the people who moved along it, built beside it, and left traces of their lives in the current of history.

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