French colonists. Historically this name was referred to with many spelling variations, as Kasklas, Kaskasky, Cas-caskias, Kasquskias, and Kaskaskias. During the Beaver Wars, Kaskaskia grew as people sought common defense against Iroquois raids. The numbers swelled to around twenty thousand people by the 1680s. Kaskaskia aligned with the French to aid in defense against the Iroquois. The French also gave them trade goods, which Kaskaskia merchants used to trade with nations too far South or West for French traders to reach. Kaskaskia became heavily involved in the slave trade, capturing and selling people from neighboring nations. By the 1690s, Kaskaskia was in decline. This was in part due to an epidemic that hit the large town particularly hard. By this time, it had also become harder to obtain sources of wood and bison near Kaskaskia. The Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, which ended the Beaver Wars, also reduced the need for mutual defense. French settlement In 1703, French Jesuit missionaries established a mission with the goal of converting the Native Americans to Catholicism. The congregation built its first stone church in 1714. The French also had a fur trading post in the village. Canadien settlers moved in to farm and to exploit the lead mines on the opposite side of the river (now in Missouri). Favorably situated on a peninsula on the east side of the Mississippi River, Kaskaskia became a large settlement center attracting a large proportion of the region's Native American population. It became the capital of Upper Louisiana and the French built Fort de Chartres nearby in 1718. In the same year they imported the first enslaved Africans, shipped from Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, to work as laborers in the lead mines. From the years of early French settlement, Kaskaskia was a multicultural village, consisting of a few French men and numerous Illinois and other American Indians. In 1707, the population of the community was estimated at 2,200, the majority of them Illinois who lived somewhat apart from the Europeans. Writing of Kaskaskia about 1715, a visitor said that the village consisted of 400 Illinois men, "good people;" two Jesuit missionaries, and "about twenty French voyageurs who have settled there and married Indian women." Of 21 children whose birth and baptism was recorded in Kaskaskia before 1714, 18 had mothers who were Indian and 20 had fathers who were French. One devout Catholic, full-blooded Indian