In 1703, Illini tribes established a village on the Kaskaskia River seven miles north of its confluence with the Mississippi, and Jesuits and other French people settled there with the natives, giving rise to the historic French colonial village of Kaskaskia. In 1718, the center of French colonial rule over this portion of the Louisiana Territory moved from Canada to Kaskaskia, remaining there until 1720, when it moved 18 miles up the Mississippi River to Fort de Chartres. After the French and Indian War, the British took control of Fort de Chartres in 1765, and in 1778 George Rogers Clark and his men captured Kaskaskia from the British during the Revolutionary War; residents celebrated by ringing the church bell, which became known as the Liberty Bell of the West. In 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark came to Kaskaskia for supplies for their Pacific expedition and recruited 12 U.S. soldiers from Fort Kaskaskia to accompany it. In 1818, Kaskaskia became the capital of the newly established state of Illinois, and its population peaked at 7,000. A state historic site and shrine on Kaskaskia Island was built in 1948 to house the now cracked Liberty Bell of the West. The Kaskaskia Lock and Dam Channelization Project was authorized in 1962 and completed in 1974. In 1993, the Mississippi River record flood crested at 49.74 feet, 22.74 feet above flood stage. In 2003, the 3000 anniversary of the establishment of the Village of Kaskaskia was observed, marking it as the oldest permanent community in Illinois. The confluence of the Kaskaskia and Mississippi rivers was not always at its present location: before 1881, the Kaskaskia entered the Mississippi about seven miles downstream near present-day Chester, Illinois, but flooding and ice dams in 1881 redirected the Mississippi and shifted the confluence to its current site. The rivers long served as highways, first for Native Americans using dugout and birch bark canoes, then for colonial settlers using log rafts, flatboats, and keelboats; the first steamboat reached the Mississippi in 1817, steamboats briefly served the Kaskaskia River beginning in 1837, and today tow boats push large groups of barges carrying millions of tons of cargo on navigable rivers.