The Chemin du Roi is an historic road along the American Bottom and adjacent upland connecting Kaskaskia and Cahokia. As an infrastructure of empire, the road facilitated movement of people and goods in the French colonial period in a vector of material and money. Clearly depicted on 1778 Hutchins map of the Illinois Country, the Chemin followed the bluffs connecting towns such as Kaskaskia, Fort Chartres, and St. Philippe in the southern bottomlands to a point near present-day Fults where it followed a draw—Le Grande Passe—out of the floodplain. Continuing north on the upland, the Chemin again descended into the floodplain near present-day Columbia, at which point it cut across the floodplain to the villages of Prairie du Pont and Cahokia. Contemporary Stringtown Road, a stretch of Highway 3, and the southern portion of Bluff Road approximate this historic right-of-way.