Jacques Marquette was born in Laon, France, on June 1, 1637. He joined the Society of Jesus at age 17, and studied and taught in the Jesuit colleges of France for about 12 years before being assigned to be a missionary in the New World.
Father Jacques Marquette had long wanted to do missionary work. His original hope was to be assigned to the Orient. But as the years past, he thought it more likely he would be assigned to a mission in New France. Finally, in 1666, his prayers were answered and he was sent to New France.
France expanded its influence in the New World by sending Jesuit missionaries to make contact with Indian tribes. The Dutch and English were not happy with the success the French had with this method.
The missionaries were often sent on Expeditions with explorers and also participated in mapping missions. Jacques Marquette set out on such a mapping mission on May 17, 1673 with Louis Jolliet. The Jesuit missionary and the fur trader-explorer, left St. Ignace in two canoes with five men. They traveled along the west shore of Lake Michigan, entered Green Bay, then the Fox River to a portage to the Wisconsin River. By June 17, they were on the Mississippi River.
Marquette and Jolliet’s assignment from France was to map the northern Mississippi region. They were to determine whether the great river flowed west to the Vermilion Sea or south to the Gulf of Mexico. The hope of the French was that it flowed west and would provide a passage through the New World to China.
Father Jacques Marquette was proficient in six Indian languages, and had established missions along the St. Lawrence River in the western Great Lakes region.
The Jolliet-Marquette expedition traveled to within 435 miles of the Gulf of Mexico but turned back at the mouth of the Arkansas River. They realized they were nearing Spanish colonists and explorers because some of the natives they were meeting carried European trinkets. The pair had no desire to come into conflict with the Spanish. So they decided to return.
Natives told them about a shorter route back to the Great Lakes. They took it and reached Lake Michigan near the site of modern-day Chicago. In September Marquette stopped at the mission of St. Francis Xavier, located in present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, while Jolliet returned to Quebec to relate the news of their discoveries.
In the spring of 1675, Marquette traveled westward and celebrated a public mass at the Grand Village of the Illinois near Starved Rock. A bout of dysentery during the Mississippi expedition had effected his health. He died at age 37 near the modern town of Ludington, Michigan.
A Michigan Historical Marker at this location reads:
“On May 18, 1675, Father Jacques Marquette, the great Jesuit missionary and explorer, died and was buried by two French companions somewhere along the Lake Michigan shore of the lower peninsula. Marquette had been returning to his mission at St. Ignace which he had left in 1673 to go on an exploring trip to the Mississippi and the Illinois country. The exact location of Marquette’s death has long been a subject of controversy. Evidence presented in the 1960’s indicates that this site, near the natural outlet of the Betsie River, at the northeast corner of a hill which was here until 1900, is the Marquette death site and that the Betsie is the Rivière du Père Marquette of early French accounts and maps. Marquette’s bones were reburied at St. Ignace in 1677.”
Marquette and Jolliet’s expedition confirmed that the Mississippi River could be taken by future travelers south to the Gulf of Mexico.
A statue of Jacques Marquette was contributed by Wisconsin in 1896 to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol. A portrait of Father Marquette by an unknown artist was discovered in Montreal in 1897, however that was too late to be of use to the Wisconsin selection committee which chose for Statuary Hall sculptor Gaetano Trentanove’s purely imaginary figure with flowing locks and well-kempt beard.
Diana Erbio is a freelance writer and author of “Coming to America: A Girl Struggles to Find her Way in a New World”. Read more in her series Statues: The People They Salute visit The Table of Contents and the Facebook Page. (I’ll be adding to the Substack Table of Contents as I transfer the Blog Posts. Please subscribe to this Substack 😊🇺🇸🤓)