Slough Award

Capital of the State of Illinois, just after it was admitted to the Union in 1818, was the town of Kaskaskia, picturesquely perched on an island in the Mississippi River, which divides Illinois from Missouri. Kaskaskia had lost its chief distinction long before 1881, when the meandering Mississippi changed its channel from the west of Kaskaskia Island to the east, washing away part of the town and leaving a willowy, uninhabited slough which now stretches west between Kaskaskia's 107 inhabitants and the old Missouri shore. Kaskaskia proper still belongs to Illinois. Whether the slough, known as Kaskaskia Commons, belongs to Illinois or Missouri is a question which neither State has troubled to settle, but which last week came to the puzzled attention of Judge George Moore in U. S. District Court in St. Louis.

Four years ago Farmers Archie Clark and Oliver Lankford of Kaskaskia, involved with a group of Missouri farmers in a title dispute over a pasture in the Commons, were arrested for trespassing by Sheriff Henry Drury of Ste. Genevieve, Mo., clapped into his jail for seven days. Farmers Clark and Lankford, charging the complainants and Sheriff Drury with false arrest on the ground that they were arrested in Illinois and jailed in Missouri, last week got their $200,000 damage suit before Judge Moore. The defendants produced some witnesses old enough to recall how the river had changed its course, an Army map which assigned the Commons to Missouri. The plaintiffs countered with a map made by the U. S. Geological Survey in 1915 assigning the Commons to Illinois. After three days of testimony Judge Moore ruled that there was insufficient evidence to show that the Commons belonged to Illinois, tacitly awarded it to Missouri by dismissing the suit.

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