at Vincennes, Indiana, Clark and his men used Kaskaskia as their jumping-off place to capture Vincennes in early 1779. The Americans controlled Kaskaskia and its redoubt throughout the rest of the war, and won legal control of the territory in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Kaskaskia, Illinois Following the war, Kaskaskia was part of the United States and the large, French-speaking population became slowly Americanized. Lewis and Clark stopped here in 1803 and recruited many of the professional hunters and sharpshooters that accompanied them to the Pacific Ocean in their fateful 1804-06 expedition. The village served as the only capital of Illinois Territory in 1809-1818, and briefly (1818–1820) as the first capital of the new U.S. state of Illinois following Illinois's admission to the Union on December 3, 1818. Pierre Menard, a wealthy fur trader who lived across the Kaskaskia River from Kaskaskia at the bottom of the Fort Kaskaskia redoubt, was elected the new state's first Lieutenant Governor. Disaster and new life During much of the 19th century and especially after the American Civil War, the Mississippi River cut through many of its former oxbows and shortened its channel considerably. In 1881, during a flood, the moving water of the Mississippi "discovered" a much smaller, parallel riverbed, the mouth of the Kaskaskia. Kaskaskia's bed was a few feet lower than the Mississippi's bed, so the whole river shifted to the new watercourse, cutting across the head of a former oxbow to do so. For the village of Kaskaskia, the river's new course was disastrous. Their village had been by the waterfront of the much smaller river; now the mighty Mississippi was swallowing the town up. Even the village cemeteries were at risk. In an emergency operation, 3,000 graves of the departed of Kaskaskia were exhumed and the remains reburied atop the bluff to the east, at the site of old Fort Kaskaskia. The state of Illinois agreed to maintain the site forever as a memorial to the vanished historic village. The fort today Fort Kaskaskia is a campsite and picnic area overlooking the Mississippi River. The remains of the 18th-century redoubt can be vaguely traced in the earth. The prominent Kaskaskia cemetery recalls the 1881 flood. The site was named one of the contributing properties to the new French Colonial Historic District in 1974, along with other area French-influenced sites such as Fort de Chartres, the Creole House, the