sentences:  Indigenous peoples lived along the Mississippi River and related waterways for thousands of years before European contact.French Jesuit priests in the Illinois Country encountered the Kaskaskia and Cahokia, bands of the Illiniwek confederacy.The first European settlement in this area was St. Philippe, founded in 1723 by Philippe François Renault, a French courtier, on his concession about three miles north of Fort de Chartres along the Mississippi River.