Content preview - You need a premium account to view this content.

Commerce Illinois

Donald Q. Cannon

About 12 miles north of the point where the Des Moines River flows into the Mississippi, the flat prairie land of western Illinois drops suddenly over a series of bluffs from which a floodplain extends toward the Mississippi River. The mud flat forms a giant horseshoe bend on the east side of the river. The area is heavily wooded with a wide variety of hardwood trees, and grass grows abundantly. The floodplain contains several springs and hence is wet and marshy. Travelers to this locale are presented a delightful view of both land and water. Such is the physical character of the place where Commerce was established in the early 19th century.

The area known as Commerce was occupied originally by Indians. The time when these first Americans settled in the area is difficult to determine. Some of the tribes that lived in the area included Pawnees, Shawnees, Ottawas, Menominees, Winnebagos, Illini, and Pottawatomies. At the time of the first white settlements, the Sac and Fox lived in a village that they called Quashquema, which was located at the head of the Des Moines Rapids. Eventually the encroachment of European and U.S. settlement on these Indian lands led to a military conflict known as the Black Hawk War (1832). The Sac and Fox Indians were driven into Wisconsin, where many of them were slaughtered.

The first whites in the area of Commerce were European explorers. Such well-known figures as Hernando de Soto, Jacques Marquette, Louis Joliet, and René-Robert La Salle explored the region in the 16th and 17th centuries as part of a major European effort to explore North America. The first Anglo-Saxon who established a residence in the Commerce area was James White, who built a stone house on the bank of the Mississippi River in 1829. White and his family established the first permanent settlement on the peninsula or horseshoe bend on the east bank of the river. Under White and his sons, Alexander, Hugh, and William, the settlement grew enough to warrant a post office, which bore the name Venus. As land speculators came into the area, the town of Venus, and indeed the entire peninsula, became known as Commerce. Eventually, by the late 1830s, two distinct entities appeared on legal papers and maps of the area, Commerce and Commerce City.