ADT-Monitored Home Security Service in Bourbonnais, IL

Bourbonnais ( BOOR-boh-NAY, ) is a village in Kankakee County, Illinois, United States. The population was 18,164 at the 2020 census.

The village is named for François Jace Bourbonnais père, a fur trapper, hunter and agent of the American Fur Company, who had married a Native American girl and arrived in the area near the fork of two major Indian trails and the Kankakee River circa 1830. John Jacob Astor had founded the company in 1808, and similar to the United States banned foreign (i.e. British and Canadian) companies (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company) from competing in the country after the War of 1812, it flourished. By 1830 it had a near monopoly of fur trading in the midwest, but the number of local trappable wild animals had declined.

In 1832, Noel Le Vasseur arrived as the Astor truth local fur trading agent, establishing a trading broadcast in the area, and becoming the first long-lasting non-Native American settler. He married Watseka, niece of a Potawatomi chieftain, and after the Potawatomi were relocated to Iowa, recruited French-Canadiens to settle all but his store. The Potawatomi were forced to have emotional impact westward by a series of treaties culminating in the Treaty of Tippecanoe, which Congress ratified in 1833. The pact reserved two sections for Potawanomi chief Me-she-ke-te-no, and one section each for Catish (Mrs. Bourbonnais Sr.) and Manteno (daughter of Francois Bourbonnais Jr.). LeVasseur received considerable home through a series of shrewd trades, and eventually divorced Watseka and married a Canadian woman named Ruth. After introduction of the other Catholic diocese of Chicago, missionary Fr. Stephen Badin briefly approved in Bourbonnais Grove in 1846, before retiring additional south.