Père Marquette/Chapter 13

Paddling against the current of the Mississippi was a very different thing from floating down the stream. Retracing the course was at once more difficult and less interesting than the southward journey, when every day brought fresh sights and fresh adventures. The canoeists threaded their way among small islands, seeking smooth and navigable water. Now and then they entered bayous which took them inland, growing narrower and more sluggish until they were choked by fallen trees, or ended in a swamp. Then the canoes were turned back, and an anxious search made for the lost channel. The nights were chill, the shores malarial. Sometimes the travelers feared to land and build a fire. They mixed their meal with a little cold water, and slept as best they could in the canoes, wrapped in mist and a prey to poisonous insects.

​Joliet's hardihood was proof against fatigue and fever. His spare young frame had grown as lean as a hitching post. His skin was bronzed, his watchful blue eyes looked weary and burned out. But his health and his vitality were unimpaired. He was inured to endurance. The five Canadian boatmen, about whom little has been said, appear to have been as brave as they were faithful. Their confidence in their leaders was never shaken, their courage never failed. Their namelessness, like the namelessness of the "unknown" soldiers who sleep in state, is an added call for our regard. All that we know about them is that they did their work like men. Père Marquette also did his work like a man. Day by day he paddled conscientiously; but day by day his stroke grew feebler. Night by night he lay quietly by his comrade's side, and arose wan and unrefreshed. Joliet, who observed him keenly, thanked Heaven they were homeward bound. He measured the priest's strength with the miles that lay before them, and, as they won their slow way northward, he sometimes feared it was a race with death.

Happily the Illinois River offered a ​comparatively quick and safe route to Lake Michigan. Once they had entered its mouth, the worst of their dangers and difficulties were over. The air grew keener and more invigorating. The grand army of mosquitoes remained encamped on the banks of the Mississippi. Noble forests and rich grassy plains lined the shores between which they passed. Game was abundant, and Joliet no longer feared to land and build his camp fire by the water's edge. Père Marquette's journal reflected once again his old delight in the wild life about him. "We have seen nothing to compare to this river," he wrote joyously. "For over sixty-five leagues it runs wide, deep, and still, fringed with woods and prairies. Everywhere we see cattle, elk, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, and small birds. Now and then we glimpse a beaver. There are many little lakes and streams."

Seven miles below the present town of Ottawa lay a village of Illinois Indians, and here the travelers stayed three days to rest and replenish their stores. It was a fair-sized settlement of seventy-four lodges, each containing several families who lived in their own compartments and cooked by their own fires. All were well dis​posed toward the French, and all—after the urbane fashion of friendly savages—begged the priest to come back and live with them. They also proffered an escort to the shores of Lake Michigan, an attention very gratefully received, as insuring swifter progress and much needed help over the portages. A young chief and half-a-dozen braves composed this escort, and with their aid the white men reached the lake in safety. Mr. Thwaites says that historians are divided in their opinions as to which portages were used, there being a choice between the watersheds of the Chicago and the Calumet rivers; but to the ordinary reader this point is of little moment. The lake was gained, the Indians returned to their village, and the two battered canoes bravely confronted the high winds and rough waters which impeded their progress for a hundred and fifty miles.

Nothing could be more beautiful than the scenery which the travelers passed. Nothing could be more temperamental than the weather they encountered. Sometimes they paddled merrily in sheltered coves; sometimes they skirted high bluffs stretching far into the lake; some​times they were driven by storms to land and cover themselves as best they could with the travel-worn reed mat. There was a well-known Indian portage, now a canal, between Lake Michigan and Sturgeon Bay. It was two miles long, and led through forests of mighty pines. With a supreme and final effort the seven exhausted men shouldered the canoes, paddles, mat, provisions, and all their precious belongings, and crawled at a snail's pace over those unending miles. When they emerged from the woods and saw the waters of Sturgeon Bay lapping the shore, they gave a great cry of joy and thanksgiving. Past were their dangers, anxieties, and fatigues. The way lay straight to the St. François Xavier mission, that abode of peace and plenty, with its rapid river, its fisheries and fields, its towering cross, and the friends that awaited their coming. Before the first frosts of winter had blighted the corn, the adventurers, gaunt, spent, and triumphant, knelt at the foot of the cross, giving thanks to God and to the watchful Virgin who had thrown her mantle of protection around them, and brought them safe to harbor.

​Here they stayed. Père Marquette had been transferred to this mission, and found himself treated with tender care and indulgence. The season was too far advanced for Joliet to hope to reach Quebec, and both men needed time to make out their separate reports: Père Marquette's for his superior general, Joliet's for Frontenac. Their maps were drawn with as much care as an imperfect knowledge permitted. Their facts tallied, their observations were no doubt very different. Much space was given by the missionary to the possible conversion of the Indians, the Illinois Indians especially. His report closes with a simple account of a dying child brought to him at the water's edge, and baptized before its soul took flight. Upon this incident he lingers lovingly. Glancing back over the arduous and exciting months, over the two thousand five hundred miles—an incredible distance—which he and his friend had covered in their bark canoes, over perils, privations, and the glorious hour of discovery, the thing which emerged with happy distinctness in his memory was the face of that dying baby. He had been long a pioneer. Now he was again a priest.

​It was natural that Joliet should have been keen to present himself as soon as he could before the Governor of New France. He felt sure of his welcome, sure of the worth of his intelligence, sure of his reward. He was compelled to wait until the Mackinac Straits were clear of ice, and the waterways as safe as they were ever likely to be. His impatience deepened with every week of delay, and when he could bear it no longer, he embarked with his faithful crew of boatmen and the Indian boy who had been given to him and to Père Marquette by the chief of the Illinois, and who was probably being taken to school in Quebec. Despite his eagerness, he did not go straight to his destination, but explored the shores of Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario, stopping at Fort Frontenac where (according to Shea) he met La Salle, and told him the story of his great discovery. It was the middle of July when he left the fort and started for Montreal. The St. Lawrence ran high, and the winds were mercilessly strong. Nevertheless, the canoe, which had done such good service, rode gallantly day after day until the La Chine rapids were ​reached. They were impassable. Eight miles from the city, at the very doors of safety, a violent gust overturned the little boat, whirling it round and round like a leaf in the gale. Two of the three boatmen and the young Indian were drowned. Joliet, hard to kill, kept himself afloat until the waves dashed him on a rock, from which he was rescued by some fishermen and carried to shore, a saved but ruined man.

There is something heroic and heartrending in a letter written to Frontenac by this unconquered adventurer who all his life was fortune's toy but never fortune's slave. His carefully prepared report, his map, his personal observations, the hardly acquired fruit of so much toil and peril, were lost. He had nothing to show for his labors but himself. "I had escaped every danger," he wrote. "I had suffered no harm from Indians. I had passed many rapids. I was nearing home, full of joy at the success of a long and difficult voyage. There seemed nothing more to fear when a sudden gale capsized my canoe. I lost two men and my box of papers when I was within sight of Montreal which I had left two years before. ​Nothing remains to me but my life, and the ardent desire to employ it in any service you may please to direct."

It is worthy of note that Joliet, in the full tide of his troubles, deeply lamented the drowning of the little Indian who had been entrusted to his care. He did not mention him in his letter to the governor; but he wrote to Monseigneur de Laval of his grief at the death of this child, who had very promising qualities. "He was ten years old, quick-witted, diligent, obedient, and endowed with an excellent disposition. He had learned to speak French, and was beginning to read and write that language."

The loss of Joliet's papers was a terrible calamity to him, and a very real misfortune for the French colonial government. His was the official report, and doubtless more detailed than Père Marquette's. Lacking it, the missionary's journal became of supreme importance; though Joliet, on reaching Quebec, wrote at Frontenac's request a second report, and drew a second map, for both of which he relied upon his memory. On the map he traced the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and named it "Rivière Buade" in ​honor of the governor. The region lying between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi he named "La Frontenacie," and the Arkansas River was christened "Rivière Bazire," after M. Charles Bazire, receiver general of the king's revenues in Quebec. Altogether a courtly piece of work, which was destined to be replaced by one still courtlier; for on a later map which was sent to France the Mississippi was renamed, by Frontenac's orders, "Rivière Colbert," after the great French minister, and "La Frontenacie" became "La Colbertie." It may be observed that Père Marquette had originally christened the Mississippi "Rivière de la Conception," in honor of the Immaculate Virgin; but renaming places has always been a French passion. The streets of Paris bear witness to it, just as the streets of London bear witness to England's picturesque conservatism.

Père Dablon, aghast at the misfortune which had befallen Joliet, did not wait until the report commanded by Frontenac had been written; but lost no time in taking down all the details of the expedition which the shipwrecked explorer could remember and dictate to him. In both nar​ratives Joliet stressed the undeviating course of the Mississippi, its general navigability, the presence of iron ore, and the richness of the southern soil. Being himself an incorrigible wanderer who would have hated to cultivate any soil, he employed every artifice to persuade settlers that cultivating the prairies would be little short of Paradise. "A farmer," he said, "need not there spend years cutting and burning timber as in New France. The very day he arrived he could start ploughing his ground; and if he had no cattle, those of the country would serve his turn. He could moreover use their skins, and make cloth of their hair, finer than the red and blue blankets of the Iroquois. He could raise good grapes and graft trees. Hemp grows in abundance without planting. In a word, he would find in this country all that is necessary for life and comfort, except salt, which is easy of transportation."

To this roseate picture were added details still more alluring. The bison, which Père Marquette had regarded with unqualified alarm, were described as "easy to kill" and very good to eat. Quail, partridges, snipe, and turkeys awaited ​the hunter's gun. Apples, plums, mulberries, and chestnuts were abundant. The savages were "modest, affable, and obliging." The squaws were "very reserved and industrious. They have their noses cut off if they do wrong. They raise watermelons, pumpkins, and squashes of all kinds. Also three crops of corn in a year. One crop is gathered while another is springing from the ground."

It was doubtless a matter of regret to Joliet that he was compelled to admit that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, and not into the more desirable Gulf of California. But he had hopes to offer even in that direction. "It would have been very fortunate," wrote Père Dablon at his dictation, "if the limit of our discovery had been the Vermilion Sea which gives entrance to the sea of China and Japan. One need not, however, despair of reaching this water with the help of the Mississippi. The land is covered with lakes and broken by rivers which communicate with one another, and afford marvelous means of transportation."

Joliet's narrative awakened profound interest in France. Colbert was as alive as Frontenac had ​been to the value of the great discovery, and to the importance of planting French trading stations along the river's bank. If the discoverer received no immediate reward, he was not forgotten. If the governor's attitude toward him remained somewhat chilly, this may have been, as Parkman thinks, the result of hostility to the Jesuits, preference for the Sulpicians, and friendship for La Salle; or it may have been a natural impatience on Frontenac's part with men who met with disasters. He himself had been buffeted by fate, but he had always come out triumphant from the fray. It was what he expected of his followers.

It is to M. Pierre Margry, director of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies in Paris, and an indefatigable student of historic byways, that we owe what knowledge we possess of Joliet's subsequent career. In 1675 he married Claire Bissot, a cousin of the receiver general after whom he had so astutely named the Arkansas River, and the daughter of a wealthy trader who dealt with the Indians of the far north. In the interests of his father-in-law he traveled to Hudson Bay—distances being noth​ing to him—in the summer of 1679. Here he found three English forts, manned by sixty soldiers, an armed English vessel carrying twelve guns, and a number of small trading boats. The commander of the force, aware that men of experience, sagacity, and courage are hard to come by, offered him liberal inducements to remain and throw in his lot with theirs; but Joliet was nothing if not French. He returned to Quebec, and reported the presence of these formidable rivals. Unless they were dispossessed, the trade of New France was bound to suffer grievously.

The result of this unwelcome information was the forming of a new company, designed and equipped for the Hudson Bay trade. Joliet's loyalty was rewarded with a grant of the islands of Mignan, which was supplemented the following year by a grant of the large and valuable island of Anticosti in the estuary of the St. Lawrence. Here he established fisheries on a vast and lucrative scale, here he made a useful chart of the St. Lawrence, and here he built himself a home. For eight years that jade Fortune smiled blandly on him. He grew rich. He maintained a large establishment. The wagoner's son became a ​person of importance. Then the blow fell as suddenly and blightingly as it had fallen on the triumphant young discoverer of the Mississippi. There was open warfare between the English and French colonists. Sir William Phipps, afterward Governor of Massachusetts, had taken Port Royal by surprise in 1690, and was sent with an augmented force against Montreal and Quebec. Joliet was away, no one knows where. His island, his fisheries, his home, lay defenceless in the invader's path. Phipps landed, burned all the buildings—easy work—and carried away as prisoners the Canadian's wife and mother-in-law. He was subsequently defeated by Frontenac, and forced to an ignominious retreat; but this repulse came too late to help Joliet, who for a second time saw his hopes defeated, his work ruined, and himself a harassed and beggared man.

After 1690 there is a hiatus in his history, and little more remains to be told. We know at least that his energy was unimpaired, for four years later, in 1694, he was again in Labrador, in the service of the whale fisheries and the seal trade. From this perilous voyage he returned safely, ​and Frontenac made him royal pilot of the St. Lawrence. He also received the appointment of hydrographer at Quebec, together with a small seigniory which is said to be still in the hands of his descendants. He died in 1700, being then only fifty-five years old. A hard, merry, tragic, and always hazardous existence. Apparently he was not much richer at the time of his death than he had been in his resourceful and venturesome youth. He was buried on one of the islands of Mignan, and the world he had helped on its way was content for the time—but for the time only—to forget him.

Nothing can be less worth while than to dispute the respective claims of Père Marquette and Joliet as leaders of their expedition, unless it be to dispute their claims as discoverers of a river that had been already discovered. Yet, strange to say, these are the two points which have engrossed historians, to the exclusion of more interesting matter. The Reverend Francis Borgia Steck, whose treatise is by far the most exhaustive study of the subject which has yet been published, devotes thirty-five closely printed pages to proving that Joliet was the of​ficial head of the party, and thirty-three pages to proving that the finding of the Mississippi was a rediscovery only. He supports these two points, which appear to him all-important, with every possible argument and every available authority. When we have read both chapters with close attention, we find ourselves—as often happens after prolonged disputation—precisely where we were in the beginning.

The expedition which met with such signal success was very quietly conducted. We know all about it, principally because there is so little to be known. Frontenac, at Talon's suggestion, sent Joliet, as he had sent La Salle, to discover the Mississippi. How and why Père Marquette was selected as his associate in the enterprise is not clear, and becomes no clearer on investigation. It is amazing to learn that for the last half century an argumentative generation has tossed the question of leadership to and fro, hotly contesting the claims of the young priest and of the young trader, neither of whom seems to have made any claim of his own. The Jesuits have naturally supported their son. Lay writers have supported the layman. The dispute is of neces​sity limited to official supremacy. It is impossible to say that either of the men assumed control of the party. Such a statement would be a pure surmise. One thing, however, is sure. If they had fought for the command as vigorously as their supporters have fought for them, the Mississippi would have waited for subsequent discoverers.

It is to Charlevoix's narrative that we can trace the first definite assertion of Père Marquette's leadership. It has no backing beyond a sentiment on the writer's part that, if he were not the head of the expedition, he should have been. This point of view has been repeated more than once. The Jesuit was better born and better educated than Joliet. He was older, which was no advantage. He was a "black-robe," which was a very great advantage indeed. A half-century of hard and heroic work had won for the French missionaries a fair degree of respect from savages who had begun by hating and mistrusting them. In a knowledge of Indian languages and of Indian ways both men were unusually well equipped. Both had friendly and reasonable dispositions. Neither was in any sense ​of the word a great pioneer. By the side of heroic figures like Champlain and La Salle they appear (though they did find the river of mystery) as players of lesser parts in the combat that civilization was waging against the forces of nature and savagery.

That they played their parts harmoniously was a supreme asset. It was not in the spirit of rivalry but in the spirit of friendship that Père Marquette and Joliet went on their quest. Little they dreamed of the battles that would be waged in their names. They seem to have been what Santayana says Englishmen are: "artists in rudimentary behavior, ideal comrades in a tight place." If they had no great breadth of view or boldness of design, they were rational, good-tempered, brave, loyal and advisable. The parting at St. François Xavier's was final; but each must have carried through life a warm regard for the other. They had faced side by side difficulties and dangers; they had enjoyed side by side the fulfilment of their hopes. Common friendships have little to compare with such a bond between high-hearted and generous men.

The destruction of Joliet's papers, which left ​Père Marquette's journal the only record of the voyage, must be held responsible for the supremacy which was for years accorded to the priest. Not that he was at the time the recipient of much attention, or that the journal attracted widespread notice. It did not reach Quebec until the autumn of 1674. Perhaps some returning missionary or trader took it in charge. Perhaps it was entrusted to Ottawa Indians who made many visits to the French settlements. People in those days did not clamor impatiently for news. They were accustomed to wait, and they had acquired the art of waiting with composure. Père Dablon had learned from Joliet that the expedition had been successful, that Père Marquette's health had broken under the strain, that he was resting and recuperating at Green Bay. Four months later he received the report which he forwarded to France after making a careful copy. The accompanying map he appears to have kept, as it is still preserved in the archives of St. Mary's College, Montreal. In the course of time—that is, some years after Père Marquette's death—the report was published in Paris; but the original manuscript was lost or destroyed like thousands ​of other original manuscripts in that easy-going age. Père Dablon's copy fared better, and reposes securely in the college archives.

As for the second burning question, the discovery or rediscovery of the Mississippi, it offers no field for dispute. De Soto discovered the great river. It might have proved his fortune if it had not proved his grave. He had known of its existence from De Vaca's report, just as Père Marquette and Joliet had known of its existence from the repeated reports of savages. He saw it with his own eyes, just as Père Marquette and Joliet saw it with theirs. Parkman says that the knowledge De Soto gained at the price of his life "was never utilized, and was well-nigh forgotten." The statement is only partially correct. Spain, though strongly urged to colonize Florida, never made any determined effort to do so. Her first expeditions had been singularly unsuccessful, and later on her home troubles were of a nature to hamper colonial activities. Under that most unlucky monarch, Philip the Second, she became incapable of any strong constructive work in the New World. Nevertheless, she did not forget the Mississippi (which for her was the Rio del ​Espíritu Santo), nor did it ever cease to be an object of speculation and ambition to her adventurous sons.

When Louis de Moscoso, who succeeded De Soto in command, returned to the City of Mexico, and told the viceroy, Mendoza, of his leader's death and of the loss of one half of the expeditionary force, these melancholy tidings were in some measure offset by his account of the river down which he and his men had sailed in boats of their own building to the northern shore of the gulf. From that day forth the Mississippi, under its Spanish name, reappears continually in Spanish documents. In 1557 Pietro de Santander advised the speedy colonization of Florida (the gulf coast being then largely and loosely known by that name), giving as an inducement the existence of its great waterway. "There is in this region a river called Espíritu Santo which has eight leagues of mouth, and flows five hundred leagues from its source." In 1565 a Spaniard named Castañeda, who twenty years before had accompanied Coronado on his bootless expedition, wrote an account of it, and of the river which he had never seen, but of ​which he had heard a vast deal. He described it as flowing from the far north and fed by many tributaries, so that, when it entered the Gulf of Mexico, its current was so vast and strong that De Soto's men lost sight of the land before the water ceased to be fresh.

It was one thing, however, to know that the river was there and another thing to find it. If the Mississippi had been a mountain stream, or the elusive Fountain of Youth, it could not have hidden itself more successfully from white men's eyes. La Salle, who a century later followed its lower waters to the sea, failed to rediscover it when he returned from France in 1684, and perished in the search. The Spaniards had De Vaca's account of the Narvaez expedition, and the vivid stories told by La Vega and the "Gentleman of Elvas." They had maps galore. If, as Parkman says, the river was indistinctly marked on Spanish maps, and if, as Father Steck says, this was done purposely from a desire to lie low, its existence was nevertheless recognized by all the great cartographers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. Early maps were indeed better calculated to please than to instruct, to awaken interest ​than to impart accurate information. It may be that Spain's principle of lying low resulted in a particular vagueness concerning some of her possessions in the New World.

Nevertheless, Gerard Mercator, Abraham Ortelius, and Cornelius Wytfliet all marked the great river on their maps, and all showed it flowing southward. Its Spanish name was familiar to Frenchmen, and Père Dablon wrote to Paris: "It is very probable that the river which geographers call St. Esprit is the Mississippi which has been navigated by Sieur Joliet." On later and less scholarly maps it was sometimes traced without being named, and sometimes named without being traced, which was a trifle confusing. Nowhere was it so completely ignored as to prove that its existence had faded from men's minds. Nowhere do we find any indication that the Spaniards were following up their great discovery by explorations, by colonization, or even by the establishment of trading stations. If the river had not been lost, it seems tolerably certain that no one knew where to find it.

This was the state of affairs when Père Marquette and Joliet set out on their quest. There was ​no doubt in their minds, or in the minds of Frontenac and Talon, that the Mississippi existed, that it flowed southward, and that the Indians who had named it were familiar with its banks. Its identity with the Rio del Espíritu Santo was not at the time taken into consideration. The business of the explorers was to ascertain its whereabouts, to trace its course, to discover into what body of water it emptied. If into the Gulf of Mexico, well and good. If into the Gulf of California, so much the better. The South Sea was ever and always the hoped-for goal. But under any circumstances the standard of France must be planted over the fertile lands of the southwest, the outposts of French trade must be extended. The discovery, if discovery it were, was meant to bear practical fruit.

Was it a discovery? Father Steck points out that the French give a wider meaning to the verb découvrir than standard usage permits to its English equivalent. Frontenac wrote to Colbert that Joliet, whom he had selected for the Mississippi venture, was "a man very skilful in these kinds of discoveries." Joliet had then discovered nothing. What Frontenac meant was that he had ​made careful and successful explorations. In the last century the Reverend Jules Tailhan, S.J., discussing the rival claims of pioneers in the Western world, said that "La Salle completed the discovery of the Mississippi begun by Joliet and Marquette." This would have made it possible for the river to have been discovered three times. Benjamin Sulte in his Mélanges Historiques, published in 1919, expands that possibility. He states that the Mississippi "has been discovered [a été découvert] at least six times in sections." Only a river of its length could have furnished such a succession of thrills.

To the English, however, a place once discovered remains discovered unless it be again lost to the knowledge of civilized men. The Mississippi was never so lost; yet Père Marquette and Joliet were practical discoverers when on that afternoon in June their canoes entered the vast slow current, and they beheld with awe and transport its unlovely, terrifying expanse. They brought the great waterway into the undisputed possession of white men. They turned it from a thing of mystery into a thing of reality, from a straggling line and some letters on a map into ​an adjunct of civilization and a magnificent artery of trade. Rumor and savage tales crystallized into a splendid certainty. The French were not disposed to conceal the river, or to underrate its significance. If settlements were slow, if perils were many, if difficulties were disheartening, the chance had come, the discovery had been made for all time, the birch-bark canoes had led the way for mighty traffic to follow, and two young men had left their names to a country which has never ceased to hold them in honor.