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As the Jolliet expedition paddled down the Mississippi ever so easily and swiftly a marvellous panorama unfolded itself before the Frenchmen's fascinated gaze. Immense herds of bison occasionally appeared on the river banks, flocks of turkeys flew up from the glades and roosted in the trees and on the river bank.
"So the chief says; but he broke up the council, and will set us safely on our journey up river to-day." "I am glad of that," said Pierre. "Father Marquette hath not the strength of the Sieur Jolliet for such rude wanderings. These southern mists, and torturing insects, and clammy heats, and the bad food have worked a great change in him." "We have been gone but two months from the Mission of St.
Unfortunately, the canoe in which Jolliet travelled was upset in the Lachine rapids and the papers containing his charts and the account of his journey were lost; however, he was able to piece out from memory the story of his Ulysses-like wanderings.
Though the missionary exhorted them as seriously as he did their gentler neighbors, he could not help remarking to Jolliet that "the Miamis were better made, and the two long earlocks which they wore gave them a good appearance." It was the seventh day of June when the explorers arrived in this country of cabins woven of rushes; and they did not linger here. Frenchmen had never gone farther.
The question arises, when Radisson discovered the Great Northwest ten years before Marquette and Jolliet, twenty years before La Salle, a hundred years before De la Vérendrye, why has his name been slurred over and left in oblivion? The reasons are plain. Radisson was a Christian, but he was not a slave to any creed.
"Monjolly," wrote the same adventurer, "or Mount Jolliet, is a mound of earth on the prairie on the right side of the Illinois River as you go down, elevated about thirty feet. The Indians say at the time of the great deluge one of their ancestors escaped, and this little mountain is his canoe which he turned over there." La Salle had learned from the Iroquois about the Ohio River.
Being a branch of the great Algonquin family, which embraced nearly all northern aboriginal nations, with the notable exception of the Iroquois, these people had a dialect which the missionary could understand. The name Illinois meant "The Men." Marquette and Jolliet were led to the principal lodge. Outside the door, waiting for them, stood another old Indian like a statue of wrinkled bronze.
Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had followed the trail that Radisson had blazed and explored the valley of the Mississippi; but like a will-o'-the-wisp beckoning ever westward was that undiscovered myth, the Western Sea, thought to lie like a narrow strait between America and Japan.
He had descended the river as far as that expansion now called Peoria Lake. The Illinois, after their first panic at the appearance of strange white men, received La Salle's party kindly, fed all with their own fingers, and, as they had done with Jolliet and Marquette when those explorers passed them on the Mississippi, tried to coax their guests to go no farther.
They had traveled over twenty-five hundred miles, and accomplished the object of their journey. Jolliet, with his canoe of voyageurs, his maps and papers, and the young Indian boy given him by the Illinois chief, went on to Montreal. His canoe was upset in the rapids of Lachine just above Montreal, and he lost two men, the Indian boy, his papers, and nearly everything except his life.
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