CAN YOU PRONOUNCE CAIRO?

I'm referring to the one in Illinois, which I have passed through.  I have also passed through East Dubuque, Savanna, Nauvoo, and Quincy; but not all as part of the same road trip.  A Chicago writer did so, searching for something to say about the longest stretch of the Father of Waters all in one state. "Illinois is little associated with the river’s lore — not as much as Missouri, which produced Mark Twain, or Mississippi, which produced the Delta blues, or Louisiana, where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico, just past New Orleans."  He initially planned to hire a pontoon boat, but no rental agency wanted to risk having to retrieve a broken-down one somewhere south of Cahokia, or if it got away all the way to Memphis.  Along the way, he finds the grave of a circus elephant, struck by lightning, and suggests Nauvoo is "both a holy city and a tourist trap."

The article offers speculations on what France retaining possession of the Upper Mississippi might have meant for North America.

The French were attracted to the American Bottom for the same reason as the Mississippians. French settlers began migrating to the area in the late 17th century, making the Illinois Country the linchpin of a fur-trading empire that formed a great crescent from Montreal to New Orleans. (That’s why the s in “Illinois” is silent.) The military outpost of Fort de Chartres contains the oldest stone building in Illinois, a powder magazine. The French surrendered the fort to the British in 1763, after losing the French and Indian War. Fort de Chartres was partially reconstructed by the state in the 1930s; its museum’s guest book is usually signed by “two or three visitors a day,” says Jennifer Duensing, president of Les Amis du Fort de Chartres, and the only other living being on the parade grounds when I wander through the limestone gate. The exception is the annual Fort de Chartres Rendezvous, held the first weekend in June, when 2,000 people — perhaps the entire subculture of French colonial buffs — gather to reenact the French and Indian War and peddle baskets or pots. Had the French won that war and held on to their North American possessions, the Mississippi River valley and the Great Lakes would have become a Gallic nation with a large Native underclass. The French traded with Natives, converted them to Catholicism, and married them to build relations with the local tribes. The British dispossessed Natives to make room for settlers.

The French legacy in Illinois consists mostly of mispronounced place names: Versailles, Des Plaines. French culture remains alive only in one very small town on the Mississippi: Prairie du Rocher, which was founded in 1722. Every New Year’s Eve since then, it has celebrated La Guiannée, a medieval French caroling festival in which locals dress something like characters from a Victor Hugo novel and travel from house to house, fiddling and singing a begging song that dates back to the druids: “Bonsoir, le maître et le maîtresse et tout le monde du logis / Pour le dernier jour de l’année la Guiannée vous nous devez.” Quite a few are drunk by midnight. (I can report this because, in my lifelong pursuit of Illinoisana, I attended the 2002 “Geoney,” as Rocherites call it.) Cahokia used to celebrate La Guiannée. But its celebration died out as the town and others like it were overrun by Americans. With a population of 500, Prairie du Rocher is so small, and so isolated, that most residents can still trace their ancestry back to France, and French was still spoken here up until the mid-20th century.

The article includes a fair number of local stories, including the real origins of Popeye, not a sailor man: and decide for yourself whether bartenders in East Dubuque ever heard of Cairo, or the other way around.