Edwards Trace

The Edwards Trace was an overland trail that served the frontier region that became Central Illinois. The trail is usually described as extending from Cahokia in the south, to Peoria in the north. During the 1810s and 1820s the trace played a decisive role in the settlement of Central Illinois by Euro-Americans.

The Native Americans had, by 1492, developed a complex skein of roads, trails, and traces over most of North America. While most of these trails are lost to written history, the trail from Cahokia to Peoria remained in active use during the late 1600s and early 1700s, the time of intensive activity by French-speaking missionaries. Bearers of the Catholic faith won some converts among the Natives of the Illinois Confederation, and Cahokia and Peoria were the sites of two large semi-urban agricultural settlements of the clans of this group. French records mention the trace from 1711 onward.

With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States of America acquired nominal sovereignty over the land that would become Central Illinois. The young country was unable to exercise effective control over the frontier territory until the War of 1812, when many Native American tribes of the Illinois Territory, hoping to maintain their culture and way of life, allied themselves with the fur traders of British Upper Canada. The frontiersmen of the so-called American Bottom, grouped around Cahokia, saw this alliance as a threat and determined upon action. A local leader, territorial governor Ninian Edwards, recruited 350 frontiersmen into a troop of Illinois Rangers. Striking northward from the American Bottom on the Trace, the rangers penetrated into what was then territory occupied by the Kickapoo people, winning military control over the Sangamon River and the region around Peoria. Ninian became a hero to his fellow frontiersmen and, when Illinois achieved statehood in 1818, the ranger leader was promptly elected to the U.S. Senate. In 1826, Edwards was elected Governor of Illinois.

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