Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition

Mark Walczynski

There are two natural corridors into the interior of North America from the Atlantic and its marginal seas, the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes from which it flows, and the Mississippi River, which rises from diminutive Lake Itasca in northwest Minnesota. For more than half a century, France claimed both. Had French policies and priorities differed even slightly, the history of North America over the last 220 years would have been vastly different from what it is.

For most Americans, the period of French colonization in North America is a blur that begins with Jacques Cartier or Samuel de Champlain and ends with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Yet over the previous 130 years, French missionaries, traders, and officials had established permanent settlements in what are now eleven different states from Minnesota to Alabama, explored three others, and claimed the territory of all or part of ten more.

The French first learned of a great river the Odawa called the Messi-Sipi from Illinois they preached to at their La Pointe mission (near Ashland, Wisconsin, founded in 1665). News of this spread and discovery of the river—and whether it flowed to the Pacific—became an imperative for officials in Quebec and France. In 1672, the Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet were dispatched to explore the Mississippi and trace it to its mouth.

An accomplished linguist, Marquette had arrived in Quebec in 1666 and was soon sent west where he visited La Pointe and helped found missions at Sault Ste. Marie (1668) and at St. Ignace, Michigan, and Green Bay (1671). Jolliet, the first French explorer born in North America, had studied for the priesthood at the Jesuit college before turning to business.

Former park historian for the Starved Rock State Park in Illinois and professor at Illinois Valley Community College, Mark Walczynski attributes the choice of Jolliet to his willingness to fund the expedition coupled with a possible case of mistaken identity: authorities may have confused Louis with his brother Adrien, an experienced and well-known explorer of the Great Lakes who had died in 1669.

The known facts of the expedition are fairly straightforward: Marquette, Joliet, and five others left St. Ignace in two canoes on May 17, 1673. Hugging the shore of the Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin, they arrived at the head of Green Bay. Ascending the Fox River through country already familiar to the Jesuits, they came to a narrow portage between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers. The latter carried them into the unknown, and on June 17 they reached the Mississippi and turned south.

Eight days later, they visited a village of Illinois at the mouth of the Des Moines River. Fearing for the Frenchmen’s safety, the chief tried to dissuade them from continuing. Two more weeks brought Marquette and Jolliet to the mouth of the Arkansas River, between Memphis and Vicksburg. The Arkansas they met there warned them that hostile tribes made the way south hazardous. They were further deterred by the possibility of being imprisoned by the Spanish if they reached the Gulf.

On July 17 they began the arduous journey upstream. Instead of returning to the Wisconsin River, they ascended the Illinois River to the native village of Kaskaskia, just upstream from Starved Rock (not the modern Kaskaskia, an Illinois exclave west of the Mississippi). From there they continued across the Chicago Portage, and then up Lake Michigan to Green Bay, having covered nearly 2,800-miles in about four or five months. Marquette remained there to resume his work among the Illinois the next year. Jolliet went on to winter at his trading post at Sault Ste. Marie.

Much of the written record of the voyage was lost when Jolliet’s canoe capsized en route to Quebec. Marquette died in 1675, aged 38, and Jolliet turned his attention to Lower Canada. Walczynski makes up for the scant records by situating the expedition in the context of the French engagement with Native American tribes—chiefly sub-clans of the Illinois Confederacy—which were under pressure especially from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy).

He also examines competing interests of French evangelism, trade, and the desire to find a route to the Pacific, and their efforts to thwart English and Spanish expansion both before and after 1673. Poorly documented though it is, the Marquette-Jolliet spurred further exploration of the Mississippi. In 1681, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the mouth of the river and claimed the whole watershed for France. His subsequent effort to plant a colony in 1684 ended with the loss of all four ships and all but about 20 of the 280 people who sailed with him. La Salle was murdered by one of his own men while trying to reach the river overland from Texas.

Despite better organization and greater success by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and others along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, the colony never achieved its potential. Walczynski’s lucid account of French activities in North America helps explain why.

Walczynski, Mark. Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023.