| Sometime around 1825 a French-Canadian fur trader, Francis Bourbonnais, arrived in Illinois. He married a Pottawatomie squaw who had been given 640 acres as a reservation along the Kankakee River. As a result of the marriage, the town of Bourbonnais was founded. Noel LeVasseur, a voyageur who had set up a trading post among the Pottawatomie Indians, settled at Bourbonnais in 1832. Sometime after 1837, LeVasseur returned to Canada to encourage the emigration of his compatriots to Illinois. Several families came in 1844, and more in 1848 and 1849. The new arrivals settled in Bourbonnais, buying or renting from fifteen to forty acres of farmland, some of which they purchased from LeVasseur. Reference |  |