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Updated: June 2, 2025
Count Frontenac, the governor of Canada, thought the matter of sufficient importance to send Louis Jolliet with an outfit to join the missionary in searching for the stream. The explorers took with them a party of five men. Their canoes, we are told, were of birch bark and cedar splints, the ribs being shaped from spruce roots.
Leaving this village, they pressed southward twenty odd miles to another Arkansas village. The attitude of the Indians here alarmed them, and this, with the apprehension that the mouth of the Mississippi was much farther away than they had been led to believe, decided them to return. Jolliet and Marquette were now satisfied with what they had achieved.
Ange de Bellerive looked at the dejected chief and thought of Le Moyne de Bienville, now an old man living in France, who was said to have wept and implored King Louis on his knees not to give up to the English that rich western domain which Marquette and Jolliet and La Salle and Tonty and many another Frenchman had suffered to gain, and to secure which he himself had given his best years.
The moose planted its forefeet and stared stolidly, its broad horns set in defense. "Sieur Jolliet," said the missionary, once when the canoes drew together, "we have now left the waters which flow into the great lakes and are discharged through the St. Lawrence past Quebec to the sea. We follow those that lead us into strange lands."
Marquette and Jolliet held the boats together while they consulted. "Do you think it wise to pass by without searching what this may mean, Father?" "No, I do not. We might thus leave enemies behind our backs to cut off our return. Some Indian village is near. It would be my counsel to approach and offer friendship." "Shall we take the men?" debated Jolliet.
So startling was this sight, which seemed a banner held aloft heralding unseen dangers, that the men felt threatened by a demon. But Marquette laughed at them and beckoned for the canoes to be brought together. "What manner of thing is this, Sieur Jolliet?" "A pair of manitous, evidently. If we had Indians with us, we should see them toss a little tobacco out as an offering in passing by."
When they had gone about two leagues, the path drew near the wooded bank of a little stream draining into the Mississippi which they had scarcely noticed from the canoes. There they saw an Indian village, and farther off, up a hill, more groups of wigwams. They heard the voices of children, and nobody suspected their approach. Jolliet and Marquette halted.
The first time they met near Niagara, when both were exploring; the second time, Jolliet is said to have stopped with his maps and papers before they were lost at Fort Frontenac, on his return from his Mississippi voyage. La Salle, then master of Fort Frontenac, must have examined these charts and journals with interest. It does not appear that the two men were ever very friendly.
On their first meeting with the Mississippi Indians, the French explorers were not only offered the natives' pipes to smoke in token of peace, but an old man amongst the latter uttered these words to Jolliet: "How beautiful the sun is, O Frenchman, when thou comest to visit us.
The wonderful cascades of Niagara, where the St. Near the western end of Lake Ontario the two Sulpician missionaries met another Frenchman, Jolliet, who had come down to Lake Superior by way of the Detroit passage, which is really the portion of the St. Lawrence connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie.
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