Père Marquette/Chapter 19

When Bancroft said of Père Marquette: "The people of the West will build his monument," he could have had no conception of the scale on which his prophecy was to be fulfilled. Literally and figuratively the people of the West have built that monument over and over again, and they are building it still. In 1887 the state of Wisconsin was authorized to place a statue of the explorer in the Hall of Fame in Washington. The work was done and well done by an Italian sculptor, Signor Trentanove. A bronze replica was erected in the town of Marquette, Michigan. A few years ago Chicago honored Père Marquette with an imposing monument, the work of Mr. Hermon A. MacNeil. It represents the missionary with upraised cross and outstretched arms, as though in the act of preaching. On one side of him stands the rugged figure of Joliet; on the ​other a North American Indian carrying heavy burdens. The bronze reliefs which embellish the Marquette Building in Chicago, and which tell the tale of the discovery of the upper waters of the Mississippi, are also the work of Mr. MacNeil. They have a highly decorative quality, and serve to keep the memory of the expedition and of its glorious results before the minds of men.

If all these representations appear a little dramatic, a little florid and robust, it is because no one could hope to reproduce in bronze or marble, or in the pages of any narrative, the simplicity which characterized the Mississippi voyage, the meagerness of its accessories, the directness of its procedure, the unassuming behavior of its leaders. Seven men in two birch-bark canoes traveled twenty-five hundred miles in unknown waters and amid unknown lands, with no accurate knowledge of their course, and no outfit that would be considered an outfit in these days. Of all the tributes that have been paid to Père Marquette, the most striking to my mind is the giving of his name to a railway system in Michigan. The mere sight of this road's time tables, ornamented with a picture of a particu​larly snorty and smoke-blowing engine, makes one think anew of the two little boats threading their slow and difficult way through the dangerous currents of the Mississippi. Had the priest been granted a prophetic vision of this iron monster, it could not have amazed him more than the hearing of his own name on travelers' lips. Yet one of the clearest images which Mr. Guedalla carried away with him from the West, and inserted into that kaleidoscope medley of impressions and reflections which he calls Conquistador, is the picture of a "big friendly Père Marquette train filling the entire perspective, as its tall polished sides took the level light of a winter afternoon." How little perspective a small battered canoe would have filled! The "Père Marquette Railway Company"! What strange combinations and contrasts our speeding world presents!

Two counties, five towns and villages, and one river bear the missionary's name. They are scattered through five states. The river is a little one, as American rivers go, and the villages have space and time for spreading. But the city of Marquette in Michigan combines the allure​ments of a summer resort with big docks on the south shore of Lake Superior, and a spirited export of iron ore. In Milwaukee the Marquette University plays an important rôle, not only in the education of youth, but in social service, and the "welfare" projects that keep a busy city humming. It gives every year a Certificate of Distinctive Civic Service to the man or woman who has most benefited the community; and this honor, though carrying with it no medal, no money, and no notoriety, is highly prized by its recipient.

Finally, there seems to be an increasing desire to erect mementoes on the sites sacred to Père Marquette's last journey and last hours. After the handful of bones had been disinterred from their grave at St. Ignace, a marble monument—pronounced tasteless by most visitors—was reared over the spot where they had lain. This, however, is far from satisfactory to Marquette University, which has resolved to build a more imposing memorial on the shore of Lake Michigan. The exact locality of Père Marquette's grave was long a matter of dispute, being the kind of thing which people dispute about; but it ​now seems tolerably certain that the priest died and was buried near the present city of Ludington on the eastern shore of the lake. Here will be erected a granite shaft overhanging the expanse of water upon which his tired eyes rested day after day as the little boat bore him to his appointed grave.

If Joliet has fewer monuments and no railway system to his credit, his name is just as familiar to our generation. It is borne by half-a-dozen towns and villages in the United States and in Canada, and by at least one city progressive enough to provide reading matter for earnest Americans. The capital of Will County, Illinois, and only thirty-seven miles from Chicago, Joliet manufactures everything from tin plates to steel. Its limestone is among the best of limestones, its prison is one of the handsomest in the state, and more barbed wire (horrid stuff!) is made there than anywhere else in the country. It has articles written about it in serious periodicals: "Joliet Recognizes its Boy Problem"; "History and Social Science Curriculum in the Joliet Township High School"; "Practical Religion in Joliet: Church Sponsors Athletic Association." ​It has enlightened newspapers that lay the blame for all youthful misconduct upon the city's shoulders. It has a "Greater Joliet Recreational Bureau," which sees to it that boys and girls are taught "life recreational activities," with efficiency scores and efficiency prizes. It is so modern and up-to-date that even to read about its educational system makes one's own serenely neglected childhood appear as remote as the childhood of little Louis Joliet playing robustly in the snowdrifts of Quebec.

It is typical of the hold that Père Marquette has taken upon the popular mind that when in June, 1926, the sumptuous "Red Special" carried the bishops and cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church to the great congress in Chicago, more than one newspaper and periodical seized the occasion to harken back to the first white man's dwelling raised on the city's site—the forlorn cabin which sheltered the missionary and his two boatmen in the winter of 1675. The contrast between the bare-legged and bedraggled fisherman who let down his nets in the Lake of Gennesaret, and the Roman basilica which bears that fisherman's name, is no sharper than the con​trast between the shabby priest in his patched and stained cassock saying mass in a windowless, chimneyless hut, and the pomp and splendor which characterized the Chicago ceremonies. A cross marks the spot where those early masses were said, and where the long grim winter passed "very pleasantly" for the sick man to whom spring was bringing a last release.

Just as indicative of the tenacity with which we bear in mind our early adventurers was the sending of American and French boys (winners of oratorical contests on "The French Pioneers of America") into the far Northwest to follow the trail of those brave and hardy men. Jean Nicollet, interpreter and peacemaker, who lived eight years among the Algonquins; Radisson and Groseilliers, who may have looked unwittingly upon the Mississippi; Père Allouez, who explored the shores of Lake Superior; La Salle the great; Tonty of the iron hand; Père Marquette and Joliet, discoverers of the unknown river; the names of these men, and of many more, were beacon lights to the boys who read with delight of their adventures, and who were made to understand the nature of the debt we owe them.

​M. André Maurois, who has told us—and shown us—how to write biographies, says that in every life there is a hidden rhythm. The biographer's business is to discover this mysterious music, and to note its correspondence with outward circumstances, its response to any influence, seen or felt, which strikes an impelling note:

M. Maurois's conception of this command and submission goes deeper than do Walt Whitman's beautiful lines. He sees natural, spiritual, and social forces play their part in coercing the human soul. Throughout Shelley's life, for example, there is the silver sheen, the permeating power of water, which allures, threatens, provokes, and finally prevails, freeing Ariel from bondage.

In the annals of Père Marquette, short and simple as those of the poor, the rhythm of life beats evenly and with uniform steadiness. It is true that only a few years of this life are exposed to our gaze. Of his childhood and youth we know ​nothing. Of his early manhood in the Jesuits' schools of France we know nothing. Of his first missionary labors in Canada we have the imperfect record of a few letters which grow longer and more detailed as the work expands. Of the two years into which were crowded his one great adventure, his one supreme triumph, his one defeated desire, and his final surrender, we know enough to satisfy us. The letters, the narrative of the Mississippi voyage, and the last journal are very much alike. None of them reveal the grace of authorship. None of them show the faintest trace of humor. The North American woods were better set for tragic than for comic happenings; but here as elsewhere there were contrasts and absurdities at which other missionaries were only too glad to laugh. In fact, the need of laughter, and consequently the habit of laughter, deepens with deepening discomfort and danger. The humor of the trenches, when the world was at war, amazed those only who were unacquainted with this salutary truth.

The letters, the narrative, and the journal of Père Marquette are the work of an eager, yet sedate and scholarly man, patiently and minutely ​observant, gentle with the gentleness of understanding, wise with the wisdom of sobriety. Above and beyond all, they are balanced and composed. They show a soul at peace with itself because of its unquestioning acceptance of God's will. This docility corresponded with the docility of nature, so that his life's rhythm was one with the rhythm of the forests that engulfed him and the vast river that bore him to his fate. It also lifted him to the heights of pagan, as well as of Christian, philosophy. Père Marquette may never have read Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius; yet both these masters would have recognized their pupil. The sweet surrender of the soul which made Epictetus say, "My impulses are one with God's; my will is one with his," was the keynote of the Christian priest's serenity. And day by day he followed unconsciously the counsel in which Marcus Aurelius sums up the whole worth and contentment of living: "Take pleasure in one thing and rest in it, in passing from one act to another, thinking of God."