ost was re-established by adventurers shortly after its
abandonment and was used as a trading centre pure and simple, but
the once lively little foundation of Juchereau and Mermet was not
again conspicuous in the events of that border until the French and
Indian War of 1756-63.

During this time it was a rendezvous for the French on the Ohio
River and was their last defence in the campaign of the English
which finally wrested La Belle Riviere from the lilies of France.
In 1756 French soldiers landed here in force, threw up earthworks
and erected a stockade with four bastions mounting eight cannon.
Henceforth in French records the site was known as Fort Massac. In
1763, by the terms of the Treaty of Paris, Massac became an English
possession together with all of the rest of the French strongholds
in North America, but it was not until the spring of 1765 that the
troops of France finally marched out from the fort. The English
during the thirteen years that they held the Illinois country never
occupied the point with troops.

The event in which Fort Massac played a part, which was to have
the greatest influence in its section, took place, however, not
during its French and Indian days, but later, when the American
colonies were asserting their independence of the Mother Country.
All of the Illinois country was held then by His Majesty’s troops,
but it was common information that the French inhabitants of the
conquered country were not extraordinarily well disposed to their
rulers and that the garrisons of the English strongholds here had
been largely reduced to aid the fight on the eastern sea-coast.
Accordingly it entered the head of one George Rogers Clark, a
daring borderman of twenty-six years, Virginian by birth, that it
would not be an impossible task to take from the English by force
the country which they had in this manner seized from the French.
June, 1778, saw him landing at Fort Massac, then ungarrisoned, with
a small body of men, and this same day probably saw the American
flag unfurled for the first 