Chapter III

JOLIET, MARQUETTE AND THE RIVER OF A HUNDRED THOUSAND STREAMS.

“The first French followers of the river courses were devotees
of a religion for the salvation of others, bearers of advancing
banners for the glory of France, and lovers of nature and
adventure.”

—PRESIDENT J. H. FINLEY.

JOLIET AND MARQUETTE.

Frontenac landed at Quebec in 1672 as governor of New France, full of plans for the development of the country, the extension of its boundaries, and the exploration of “the fabled West that is charted dim but certain in the volume of the breast,” as our own Bliss Carman phrases it. He found among the coureurs des bois (runners of the woods) a native Canadian, Louis Joliet, the son of a wagon-maker in Quebec, a man reputed to be courageous, enterprising, of good nature and endowed with common sense. Him he commissioned to go up to Sault Ste. Marie and thence explore for the great South Sea. This was an exceedingly wise choice and due to the advice of the Intendant, M. Talon, a very able man, who knew of Joliet’s previous exploits.

Some three years previously the governor of the time, Courcelles, sent Joliet to learn the truth about the reputed copper deposits on Lake Superior. He went by the great highway of the Ottawa river, Lake Nipissing and French River to Georgian Bay, and thence to the Sault. On his return he went down Lake Huron from the Sault through what we now call St. Clair and Detroit, and then along the north shore of Lake Erie and up the Grand River. The reason for leaving the lake at this point was the fear of his Indian guide for the warlike tribes at the end of the lake.

Joliet was the first white man known to have passed through Lake Erie and this lake was the last of the Great Lakes to be discovered. Leaving the Grand River he was making his way eastward when in an Indian village in what is now known as the Beverley Swamp, near the present city of Galt, he met La Salle, Galinée and his Sulpician companion, Father Dollier. La Salle, greatly impressed by the dashing Joliet, who was much more to his taste than his priestly companions, turned back with him.

It was to this seasoned explorer that the commission was given and he left for the Sault, near which he was told he would find Father Marquette, who would be his companion. Marquette was of a noble family of Laon, a city of Northern France, associated with nearly all the epoch-making incidents in the history of France, and which has been one of the great centres of fighting on the Western Front in the Great War of to-day. His mother was Rose de la Salle of Rheims. Marquette had been in the country about five years, and after two years of training in the mission at Three Rivers had been sent to the remnants of the Huron nation driven north-westward by the Iroquois, until near the western end of Lake Superior they established themselves in a village where they hoped to be far enough away from their great enemy to recover themselves. Hither in the summer came wandering Indians of a tribe called the Illinois, who told Marquette of the great river which flowed through their country, of the fertile lands, and how glad they all would be if he would visit them. After the village was broken up by the Sioux Indians, the Hurons determined to go back to more familiar haunts and settled at Michillimackinac, fifty miles to the south-west of the Sault. Marquette accompanied them and there he was found by Joliet.

They spent the winter making their plans for the journey, and in May, 1673, they started westwards with their party of Frenchmen and Indians, through Lake Michigan to Green Bay. Thence up the bay they went and up the Fox River to its source. A short portage over a narrow strip of prairie and they dropped their canoes into water flowing southwards, now the Wisconsin River, and after about 40 leagues they glided out into the great river, the Mississippi, first christened by a religious name, then called by a statesman’s name and finally back to its Indian name, with the significant meaning of “great water.”[9]

Down they floated through the land of the buffalo and the wild turkey, until seeing upon the bank traces of men, they landed and came to the villages of the Indian tribe who had invited Marquette to visit them. The Black Gown, the distinctive garb of the Jesuit brotherhood, was at once recognized and here they stayed for some days, exchanging gifts and courtesies and making enquiries about the further reaches of the river.

Before leaving these friendly Indian villages the Illinois Indians gave them a calumet, or pipe of peace, as a safeguard for them in their passage through hostile savages, probably just to show to the savages by using their own sign that they were coming in friendship. The calumet used by these Indians was made of a bowl of red stone with a long stick as a stem. This stick was covered along its whole length with heads of birds all coloured like flame, while a bunch of red feathers shaped like a great fan adorned the middle of the stick.

Southwards again they went as far as the Arkansas, where, fearing the Spaniards, who were in that part of the country, they turned northwards, and following the advice of the Indians, they entered the Illinois River. Marquette was greatly impressed with the fertility of that wonderful valley, and well he might be, for his experience hitherto in New France had not been in very fertile regions. “I have seen,” said he, “nothing like this river for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, wild cats, bustards, swans, ducks, parrots and even beaver, its many little lakes and rivers.”

On that river, in the great Indian village of Kaskaskia, seven miles below the present city of Ottawa, Illinois, Marquette was so kindly treated that he promised to return to them as soon as he could. Following up one of the branches of the river they portaged across only about 1,000 paces and put their canoes into a little stream that emptied into Lake Michigan. That portage is where stands to-day the city of Chicago, the great city of the State called after the Indians for whom Marquette had made the journey. Along the shore they went, across the portage at Sturgeon Bay, and at the end of September reached the mission at Green Bay, where they spent the winter.

Early in the spring they separated, Marquette to return to his mission to recruit his strength that he might redeem his promise to his Indian friends at Kaskaskia, Joliet to report to Frontenac the result of his voyage. Unfortunately, Joliet’s canoe was upset in the Lachine rapids and all his papers, including the map of the discovered region, were lost. In his report he said, with the insight of the prophet: “We could easily go to Florida in a ship, and with very easy navigation. It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through but half a league of prairie to pass from the foot of the lake of the Illinois (Michigan) to the River St. Louis (Des Plaines),”—and we have lived to see that done in the great sanitary and ship canal connecting the Chicago River with the Des Plaines River at the present city of Joliet. Joliet held minor positions until 1680, when he was granted fishing rights in the lower St. Lawrence and later the island of Anticosti was included. But in 1690 the English invasion under Phips destroyed his establishment and ten years later he died in poverty.

Marquette, weak in body but with a giant spirit, was preparing himself to fulfil his promise and in the fall of the next year, 1674, he started for Kaskaskia. Bad weather and his physical weakness made him halt so many times that it was April before he reached the village. Here he was welcomed as an angel from heaven, and on the Easter Sunday, before an altar erected on the prairie at the edge of the great wood, he preached to thousands of the Indians as they squatted in a semi-circle, chiefs, young men, women and children, to hear the impressive words of the black-robed missionary.

Leaving them that he might get treatment for his ailment and promising that he never would forget them, he started for home, but he succumbed on the banks of the Great Lake on May 18th, 1675. In compliance with his request, he was buried there, but a year later the Ottawa Indians, finding the grave, opened it, and took the remains to St. Ignace in a great procession of canoes and buried under the chapel the great priest with solemn ceremonies. Early in the next century the chapel was destroyed by fire. In 1877 the remains of a burned building were discovered at the site of the old mission and the remains wrapped in birch bark were discovered.

Small wonder it is that his name lives throughout that great fertile valley, drained by the river of a hundred thousand streams, the man of courage, kindliness of heart and speech, of unselfish devotion and high ideals, a fitting hero for a land that becoming fabulously rich in material wealth needs the inspiration of the life of the simple, zealous priest who put the good of others above his own pleasure and comfort.