USA > Illinois > Chapters from Illinois history > Part 2
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It appears from it that he was already under orders
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from his Superior, Father François Le Mercier, to go and begin an Illinois mission, as soon as his place could be filled at La Pointe. It is evident that his heart was in the plan, and that he was most carefully collecting information about the tribe and its abiding place. He wrote that they were thirty days' journey by land by a very difficult road from La Pointe, whence, after passing through the territory of other nations, and traversing great prairies one could arrive at the country of the Illi- nois, who were principally gathered in two villages con- taining more than eight or nine thousand souls. They were well enough disposed to receive Christianity, and after Father Allouez exhorted them at La Pointe to adore one God, they began to abandon their false deities, which were the sun and the thunder; and they promised Marquette that they would embrace Christianity and do all that he required in their country. To this end, the Ottawas gave him a young man, who had recently come from the land of the Illinois, who taught him the rudi- ments of their language which he could scarcely compre- hend, but he hoped, by God's grace, to understand it, and be understood, if God by His goodness led him to that country.51
He learned, perhaps from the prisoners who had been so presented to him, that the Illinois always traveled by land; and he added, in unconscious prophecy of the harvests of the prairies, that they sowed Indian corn which they had in great abundance. They also had pumpkins as large as those of France and a plenty of roots and fruits. The hunting there was very fine for buffalo, bear, turkey, duck, bustard, wild pigeon and crane. During certain seasons of the year they left their villages, and all went in a body to their hunting grounds,
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the better to resist their enemies who came to attack them. They believed that if Marquette would go there, he would make peace everywhere; they could always dwell in the same place, and only the young would go hunting. They told him that when they came to La Pointe they passed a large river, almost a league in width, which ran from north to south and so far, that they, as they did not use canoes, had never yet heard of its mouth. They only knew that very great nations dwelt upon it below their territories.52 This doubtless was the Mississippi, and it is Father Marquette's first allusion to the mighty stream. As the Illinois crossed it on their way to the mission station on Lake Superior it would appear that at this period they had been obliged to withdraw into what is now Iowa, probably to escape their relentless enemies, the Iroquois. It is evident that Marquette's heart was strongly stirred by this account of the grand water way which might lead him to great con- quests for the church. He concluded that it could hardly empty in Virginia, and rather believed that its mouth was in California. He assured his Superior that if the Indians who promised to make him a canoe did not fail to keep their word, he would go into that river as soon as he was able, with a Frenchman and the young man given to him, who knew some of their languages and had an aptness for learning others. Then, rejoicing in the great future which opened before him, he pledged him- self to visit the peoples who inhabited those regions, in order to open the way to so many of the missionary priests, who had so long awaited this happiness, and by this discovery to obtain a complete knowledge of the southern or western sea.
He was told also, that six or seven days' journey below
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the Illinois villages, there was another great river on which were very numerous nations who used canoes of wood. This was the Missouri, which also his party was destined to discover, and each new account only made him the more eager to commence his great undertaking, and to verify the tales which the Indians brought him. He said he could not write more until the next year, when his pen would tell what he himself saw, if God did him the grace to lead him to the land he longed for. But reluctant to abandon his theme, he resumed it to speak again of his favorite tribe, the Illinois, and to record with a certain pride that they were warriors, who made many of their enemies slaves. They formerly were at war with the Nadouessi or Sioux, but Marquette had made peace between them, in order that it might be easier for the Illinois to come to La Pointe, where he was going to await their coming, in order to accompany them to their country.53 He sent a present to the Nadouessi with a message not to kill the French or the Indians with them, and that he was going that fall to the Illinois, whither they should leave the way open. They assented to his request and promised to come to La Pointe in the autumn to hold a council with the Illinois, and to speak with him. He uttered the pious wish that all these nations loved God as much as they feared the French, in which case Christianity would soon flourish.54 This coun- cil it seems, was never held, for war broke out between the Nadouessi and the Ottawas and Hurons, who deter- mined to abandon La Pointe du St. Esprit, and all the fields they had so long cultivated there. Father Marquette accompanied them in the summer of 1671 in their flight to Michillimackinac, and remained in charge of the Mission of St. Ignace for the two years following,
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obliged for a time to abandon his favorite scheme of a mission to the Illinois. 55
Jolliet arrived at St. Ignace December 8, 1672, with the orders of the Governor to make the expedition. Mar- quette, who joined him there, rejoiced that this happened to be the day of the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, whom, he says, he had always invoked since he had been in that country to obtain of God the favor of being able to visit the nations on the Mississippi River.56 He was enraptured at the good news as he saw his designs on the point of being accomplished, and himself in the happy necessity of exposing his life for the salvation of those nations, and particularly for the Illinois, who had, when he was at La Pointe du St. Esprit, very earnestly entreated him to carry the word of God to their country.57 Jolliet and Marquette passed the win- ter in preparing their outfit and making a map, from information derived from the Indians, of the new country which lay before them, marking down the rivers on which they were to sail, the names of the nations and places through which they were to pass, the course of the great river, and what direction they should take when they reached it, adopting all possible precautions that their enterprise, if hazardous, should not be foolhardy. They embarked from St. Ignace May 17, 1673, in two bark canoes, Jolliet, Marquette and five other Frenchmen, with a stock of Indian corn and dried meat. The good father put their voyage under the protection of the Blessed Virgin Immaculate, promising her, that if she did them the grace to discover the great river, he would give it the name of Conception, and that he would also give that name to the first mission which he should establish among these new nations. 58 He loyally redeemed
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his promise, although this name which he gave to the great river is found only in his narrative and on his map. But the name of the Immaculate Conception which he gave to the mission among the Kaskaskias on the upper waters of the Illinois, was its designation as long as it remained there, and when it was removed to the banks of the Mississippi, this title was still retained. And to this day, in the little village of Kaskaskia, the oldest permanent settlement of white men within the limits of the State of Illinois, the church and parish bear the name of the Immaculate Conception, the perpetual reminder of the vow of Marquette with which he commenced this famous voyage.
He tells us that their joy at being chosen for this expe- dition roused their courage and sweetened the labor of rowing from morning until night. They made their pad- dles ply merrily over a part of Lake Huron, and of Lake Michigan, then called the Lake of the Illinois, into what is now Green Bay. Marquette preached to the Menomi- nees on their river, and they warned him in vain against the perils of his route and the frightful monsters of the Great River who swallowed up men and canoes together. They visited the mission of St. François Xavier at the foot of the Bay, then passed up the Fox River to the town of the Mascoutens, situated upon an eminence from which the eye saw on every side prairies spreading away beyond its reach, interspersed with thickets or groves of lofty trees. This, he says, was the limit of the discoveries made by the French, for they had not passed beyond it,59 and to these people Father Allouez had preached. Immediately upon their arrival here, as Marquette re- cords, they called the chiefs of the tribe to an assembly at which Jolliet addressed them, stating that he was sent by
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the Governor of Canada to discover new countries and that Marquette was sent by the Almighty to illumine them with the light of the gospel. This clearly defines the relative positions and duties of the two men. The Mascoutens gave the party two Miami guides, who led them safely to the portage to a river emptying into the Mississippi, and helped them transport their canoes, after which they returned, leaving them alone in an unknown country in the hands of Providence. For seven days they floated down the broad Wisconsin, with its vine-clad islets, and fertile banks diversified with wood, prairie and hill, until on June 17, 1673, they safely entered the Mississippi with a joy which they could not express. Following its mighty current southward they came to the land of the buffalo, and having advanced more than sixty leagues since entering the river, they perceived footprints of men by the waterside, and a beaten path entering a beautiful prairie on the western shore.60
Jolliet and Marquette, leaving their canoes in charge of their people, followed the path about two leagues when they discovered three Indian villages. Halting, they raised a cry at which the Indians marched out of their cabins, and seeing the strangers, deputed four old men to go and speak with them. The ambassadors approached slowly, two of them carrying ornamental tobacco pipes, which they raised occasionally towards the sun, and when near they stood still. Marquette, noticing that they wore goods of European manufacture, and considering their ceremonies to be friendly, asked who they were. They answered that they were Illinois, and in token of peace offered their pipes to smoke. These pipes for smoking, says Marquette, are called in that language calumets. This is probably the origin of the word in our
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language. They were welcomed at the door of the cabin in which they were to be received, by an old man, who said; "How beautiful, O Frenchman, is the sun when thou comest to visit us. All our village awaits thee, and thou shalt enter all our cabins in peace." And they heard from the throng of people about occasionally the words; "Well done, brothers, to visit us!" They were then invited to the village of the great sachem of all the Illinois where Marquette addressed those assembled, say- ing, that they came in peace to visit all the nations on the river, to make God known to them, to tell them that the great chief of the French had spread peace everywhere and had overcome the Iroquois, and to ask for all the information they had of the sea and of the nations on the route to it. Then the sachem spoke thus; "I thank thee, Blackgown, and thee, Frenchman," addressing Jolliet, "for taking so much pains to come and visit us; never has the earth been so beautiful, or the sun so bright as to-day; never has our river been so calm, or so free from rocks, which your canoes have removed as they passed; never has our tobacco had so fine a flavor, or our corn appeared so beautiful as we behold it to-day. Here is my son that I give thee, that thou mayest know my heart. I pray thee to take pity on me and all my nation. Thou knowest the Great Spirit who has made us all; thou speakest to him, and hearest his word, ask him to give me life and health, and come and dwell with us that we may know him!" Then presenting them with a little slave and with a mysterious calumet to serve as their safeguard among the nations they had to pass, he begged them not to proceed further on account of the great dan- gers to which they exposed themselves. A high festival followed; they were laden with presents, and the next
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day took their leave, promising to return in four months. Marquette personally assured them that he would return the next year, to stay with them and instruct them. Digressing from his narrative to speak of these the most promising of all the tribes, he proudly adds, "to say Illi- nois is in their language to say 'the men,' as if other Indians compared to them were mere beasts. And it must be admitted that they have an air of humanity that we had not remarked in the other nations that we had seen on the way." This village of which he speaks he calls Peouarea, and on his map he places it and another named Moingwena on the west side of the Mississippi and on the river now called the Des Moines. As they coasted the base of cliffs, frightful for their height and length, they saw two monsters painted on one of the rocks which startled them at first, and on which the boldest Indian dared not gaze long. "They are," he says, "large as a calf, with horns on the head like a deer, a fearful look, red eyes, bearded like a tiger, the face somewhat like a man's, the body covered with scales, and the tail so long that it twice makes the turn of the body, passing over the head and between the legs, and ending at last in a fish's tail. Green, red, and a kind of black, are the colors employed. On the whole these two monsters are so well painted that we could not believe any Indian to have been the designer, as good painters in France would find it hard to do as well; besides this, they are so high up on the rock, that it is hard to get conveniently at them to paint them. " 61
As they were discoursing of these marvelous represen- tations, sailing gently down the beautiful still clear water of the upper Mississippi, suddenly the air was filled with the noise as of a rapid, like those with which they had
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become familiar upon the St. Lawrence, and they seemed about to fall into its foaming current. Then, as they rounded the point, whence the Mississippi, after flowing eastward for twenty miles along the rocky bluffs on the Illinois shore, which early explorers called the Ruined Castles, 62 resumes its southward way, they saw another mighty stream, the sound of whose pouring waters they had heard. From its mouth there came rushing a mass of large trees entire, with branches, real floating islands, so impetuously that they had seen nothing more frightful, and could not without great danger pass across its junc- tion with the Mississippi, and thenceforward the water was all muddy and could not get clear. This was their introduction to the great Missouri, which they called the Pekitanoüi. They learned from the Indians that it came from very far in the Northwest, and that from its head- waters another river could be reached which emptied into the sea, and they hoped by its means to make the discov- ery of a route to the Gulf of California. They judged now by the direction the Mississippi was taking that it had its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico; and they followed its course, thankful for their escape from the terrors of the Missouri, and perhaps from those of the painted rocks as well. They floated on past the fine plateau, where almost a hundred years later the city of St. Louis was to be founded, and the sites on which, within the next thirty years, the little French villages of Cahokia and Kaskaskia were to spring up; and midway between them the lonely island opposite the spot on the river bank above which within the succeeding half century the flag of France was to fly over the walls of Fort Chartres.
And soon they came to the place dreaded by the Indians, because they thought there was a manitou there,
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that is, a demon who devours all who pass, and of this it was that those had spoken who had wished to deter thein from their enterprise. This dismal place which sent fear throughout the tribes, even to the dwellers by Lake Mich- igan, was the same of which they had been told by the Menominees and by the Illinois, who believed that there was a demon there who could be heard from afar, who stopped the passage and engulfed all who dared approach. Says Marquette, "the devil is this-a small bay full of rocks some twenty feet high, where the whole current of the river is whirled, and hurled back against that which follows; and checked by a neighboring island, the mass of water is forced through a narrow channel; all this is not done without a furious combat of the waters tumbling over each other, nor without a great roaring, which strikes terror into the Indians, who fear everything." 63 The turn of the Mississippi around the headland of Grand Tower and the tall rock of that name rising from the bed of the river, so well known in the after days of emigrant and steamer travel, are the scenes which had so weird an early fame.64 They did not present difficulties sufficient to prevent the passing of the travelers, who, after coast- ing the whole western boundary of what is now the State of Illinois, reached the river which the natives called the Ouaboukigou, that is, the Ohio, then bearing the name which ultimately became that by which its principal trib- utary, the Wabash, is known.
Thence they continued to descend the Mississippi, see- ing less prairie land because both sides of the river were lined with lofty woods; and came to a warmer region, where thick groves of cane lined the banks, and inos- quitoes filled the air. They encountered a band of hos- tile Indians armed with bows, arrows, axes, war clubs
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and bucklers, prepared to attack them by land and by water in large wooden canoes. In vain Marquette showed the calumet and made gestures to explain that they had not come as enemies. They were about to pierce them from all sides with their arrows when the old men, doubt- less at the sight of the calumet, which at a distance they had not distinctly recognized, restrained the ardor of their youth and brought them to the shore in peace. These people were of the tribe of the Mitchigameas, who sub- sequently became part of the Illinois nation. The trav- elers finding there, and lower down the river, an occasional person who spoke the Illinois tongue, arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas River, at the end of a month's navigation down the Mississippi. Being satisfied from the native accounts and their own observations that the great river flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, and fear- ing that they might fall into the hands of the Spaniards if they reached the sea, they decided to return. Ascend- ing the Mississippi, and with great difficulty stemming its current, they left it about the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude, and entered another river, which greatly shortened their route, and brought them on their way with little trouble. And they "had seen nothing like this river," says the good Father,65 "for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, parrots, and even beaver; its many little lakes and rivers." This river was the Illi- nois, and at last for a certainty the very land of the Illi- nois had been reached. This account is the first printed description of its beauties and characteristics, its wealth of fertile soil and living creatures, by an eye-witness. And thus Father Marquette becomes its first historian.
Somewhere upon their return voyage the travelers met
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again the Indians of the Peoria village, and spent three days in their cabins; Marquette announcing the faith to them, and baptizing a dying child which was brought to him on the water's edge as they were embarking. He felt that if the voyage had caused the salvation of that innocent soul, all his fatigue was well repaid. At what point they fell in with these roving tribesmen we cannot be certain, but possibly not far from the modern town which bears their name, and upon the banks of the Illi- nois. Pursuing their journey upon this broad, deep and gentle stream, Jolliet and Marquette found an Illinois town called Kaskaskia, composed of seventy-four cabins, which was situated probably not far from the eminence now called Buffalo Rock. The natives received them well, and persuaded them to promise to return and instruct them. One of the chiefs with his young men escorted them by a portage half a league in length, doubtless between the streams now known as the Des Plaines and the Chicago, to the lake of the Illinois, since called Lake Michigan. And Jolliet, Marquette and their party said farewell to their kindly Indian hosts on the lonely prairie, which was to be the site of the city of Chicago; and went on their way, in the mild autumn weather, paddling their canoes northward along the lake, and in the last days of September arrived again at the mission of St. François Xavier on Green Bay. It was a wonderful four months' journey, but full of hardships, and it is not strange that Marquette should have been obliged to remain at this haven of rest to recruit his exhausted strength, for more than a year.66 Jolliet also stayed at the West until the season after his return from the Mississippi,67 and it has been suggested that he spent the following winter upon the upper waters of the Illi-
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nois. 68 However this may be, it is certain that at some period after leaving the mission at Green Bay he visited that at Sault Ste. Marie, and probably while there pre- pared his official map and report, as he left copies with the priests at that station.69 His map was drawn with great care, and his report was very full, embracing all that was curious and interesting in that famous voyage.70
In the summer of 1674 Jolliet set out for Quebec to present in person to the Governor of Canada the formal documents which would entitle him as the commander of the expedition to the honor of the discovery of the mighty Mississippi and of the long-sought land of the Illinois. It might seem that he followed the route of the Detroit River and Lakes Erie and Ontario, and so down the St. Lawrence; since Frontenac, writing to Colbert of Jolliet's return, says he found a navigation so easy that a person can go from Lake Ontario and Fort Frontenac in a bark to the Gulf of Mexico, there being only one portage, half a league in length, where Lake Ontario communicates with Lake Erie;71 and yet, as Jolliet himself speaks of passing forty-two rapids on his return voyage, this de- scription better suits the route by Lake Nepissing and the Ottawa River.72 All went well with him until he was within a quarter of an hour's journey of Montreal, and in sight of the very houses he had left almost two years before to commence his expedition, when the good for- tune which had so far attended his way suddenly deserted him. His canoe upset in the foaming billows of the Sault St. Louis; his box of papers, containing his map and report, was lost; he himself was rescued with diffi- culty by some fishermen after he had been four hours in the water and had lost consciousness, and two of his com- panions were drowned. One of these was the slave pre-
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sented to him by the great chief of the Illinois, a little Indian lad, ten years of age, whom he deeply regretted, describing him as of a good disposition, full of spirit, industrious and obedient, and already beginning to read and write the French language. And all this happened to him, he says, after he had avoided perils from sav- ages, had passed forty-two rapids, and was about to land full of joy at the success of so long and difficult an enter- prise, and when all danger seemed over. 73
To this accident it is due that Marquette's report to the Jesuits becomes the history of the expedition, although this was never the expectation of any of those concerned. In his retirement by the quiet shores of Green Bay, while slowly regaining his health, Marquette, at the request of his Superior, prepared and sent to Quebec copies of his journal concerning the Mississippi voyage," and doubtless one of them was accompanied by a map drawn by him. Father Claude Dablon, then Rector of the College of Quebec, made use of one of these copies in preparing his "Relation of the Discovery of the South Sea made by the rivers of New France," sent from Quebec August 1, 1674, and transmitted a transcript of Marquette's man- uscript to Paris.75 This came to the hands of the pub- lisher Thevenot, by whom it was made, with some change and abbreviation, a part of his Rescueil de Voy- ages, printed in 1681.76 To it was annexed a map drawn by the Jesuits about that time, to which Marquette's name was attached, and which passed as his work for almost two centuries, although a very inaccurate per- formance and inconsistent with his narrative.77 For many years the genuine map and one copy of Marquette's account, prepared for publication in 1678 by Dablon, who wrote the introduction, lay unnoticed in the archives of
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