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Updated: May 15, 2025
From the first thread of the Kankakee oozing out of swamps to the Indian town on the Illinois River where Marquette had done his last missionary work, was a long canoe journey. It has been said the rivers of the New World made its rapid settlement possible; for they were open highways, even in the dead of winter guiding the explorer by their frozen courses.
Ice formed upon the margin of the water, and several snow-storms impeded their march, adding greatly to their discomfort. But not a repining word escaped the lips of Father Marquette. It was but a dismal shelter they could rear, for the night, on the bleak shore. Through this exposure his health began rapidly to fail. It took them nearly four weeks to reach the mouth of the Chicago River.
Two years after, he was followed by Father James Marquette, a noble man, whose name will never die. As the explorations of Marquette opened the way for the still more wonderful excursions of La Salle, I must here introduce a brief account of his adventures. There is something in blood. The Marquette family had been illustrious in France from time immemorial.
Jolliet was too easily satisfied to please La Salle; he had not the ability to spread France's dominion over the whole western wilderness, and that was what La Salle was planning to do before Marquette and Jolliet set out for the Mississippi. St.
"Beginning with Illinois at the coming of Joliet and Marquette in the seventeenth century, we have rapidly followed its thread of history for a century and a half, until it became a State of the American Union. We have seen it under the rule of the Frenchman, the Briton, the Virginian, under its various territorial organizations, until eighty-nine years ago it reached the dignity of statehood.
It is amusing, as well as instructive, to observe how little importance the travellers gave to the river Ohio, in their geographical assumptions. In the map published by Marquette with his "Journal," the "Ouabisquigou" as he denominates it, in euphonious French-Indian, compared to the Illinois or even to the Wisconsin, is but an inconsiderable rivulet!
With the coming of firearms and the rifle the buffalo passed rapidly away. In the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries the buffalo ranged as far east as western New York and Pennsylvania, and as far south as Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. Father Marquette, in his explorations, declared that the prairies along the Illinois river were "covered with buffalos."
'Tis called the Des Plaines, and leads into the Illinois. De Artigny says it is two miles inland, across a flat country. 'Twas Père Marquette who passed this way first, but since then many have traversed it. 'Tis like to take us two days to make the portage." "And way up here is Port du Morts, where we crossed the opening into Green Bay, and we have come since all this distance.
As I have already intimated, few of all the hundreds of thousands there in that great city have had any consciousness of the background of French heroism and suffering and prevision in front of which they were passing daily, but I found that the policemen and the watchmen on the railroad near the river knew at least of the great black cross which stands by that drab and sluggish water, placed there in memory of Marquette and Joliet.
These exiles from Huronia still remembered the Jesuits and retained 'a little Christianity. St Esprit was not only a mission; it was a centre of the fur trade, and to it came Illinois Indians from the Mississippi and Sioux from the western prairies. From these Marquette learned of the great river, and from their description of it he was convinced that it flowed into the Gulf of California.
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