Top photo caption: Father Jacques Marquette, Jesuit missionary and Mississippi River explorer, was born in Laon, France, in 1637. At the age of 17 he entered the Jesuits and after years of study and teaching, he was summoned in 1666 to labor among the Indian missions in Canada. He is pictured in an 1869 painting in the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Milwaukee. OSV News photo/Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain, background Getty image
By Jeremy Beer, OSV News
OSV News – The waters of the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan present themselves in beautifully variegated blues. Dark indigo, rich cobalt and bright turquoise greet the passenger ferries as they sail toward the pebbled shoreline of Mackinac Island. As the boats near the docks, the well-kept, sloping green lawn of Marquette Park comes into view.
There, in stoic dignity, stands a tall, handsome bronze statue of the man for whom the park is named. The ferry passengers generally ignore it, for the fudge shops beckon.
By the time he took charge of the island’s Catholic mission, Father Jacques Marquette had been serving in New France for five years. Born to a noble family in 1637, Marquette had left his hometown of Laon for the Jesuit novitiate in 1654. Spiritually speaking, this was a golden age for French Catholicism. The lives and reforming zeal of figures like St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louise de Marillac and Abbé Jean-Jacques Olier inspired profound devotion, while the exploits of Jesuits serving in the New World aroused intense interest in the mission field.
Marquette caught the fever. He arrived in Quebec in 1666, and after serving at Trois-Rivières, Sault Ste. Marie and Chequamegon Bay (near today’s Ashland, Wisconsin), he arrived on Mackinac in 1671.
A small, reconstructed bark chapel stands to the west of the Marquette statue. It is the only other significant reminder of the island’s role in the French effort to evangelize the region. No one seems to know exactly where the mission stood, and anyway it lasted only a year on Mackinac – the soil was bad and the game limited – before Marquette and the Christian Hurons who were with him moved to the placid mainland harbor a few miles to the west.
This new mission, where the town of St. Ignace, Michigan, stands today, prospered, but Marquette would not serve there long. He was soon assigned to a different kind of mission: finding and exploring the rumored great river to the west, the river called by the natives Mississippi.
There was a time in American history when every schoolchild – certainly every Catholic schoolchild – was taught that story, just as they were taught the stories of Champlain, De Soto, Coronado and the other adventurers who made the land that would one day become the United States known to their fellow Europeans. Those stories were not always taught fully or fairly. The violence that accompanied them was too much downplayed, Native American points of view too much ignored. But there is little in the story of Father Marquette’s peaceful explorations for which to apologize – and much to inspire American Catholics.
Father Marquette left St. Ignace with Louis Jolliet – a Quebec-born former seminarian and experienced voyageur – and five other Frenchmen on May 17, 1673. Their objective, in Marquette’s words, was “to visit the nations who dwell along the Mississippi River.”
Precisely who those nations were, what that region was like and where the river went they did not know. The Mississippi might flow west to the Pacific Ocean or Gulf of California. That would be the happiest outcome, for the French, like their European rivals, wanted badly to find a water route across the continent. Or it might flow south, to the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever the case, they needed to document everything about the river and to win the friendship of the people who lived along it.
That was the geopolitical point of view. For the earnest and energetic Marquette, it was even more important to preach the Gospel to unreached native peoples. After all, that was the entire point of the Jesuits’ enterprise in New France, and one for which many of their number had died – Father Isaac Jogues, for instance, whose excruciating torture by, escape from, return to and ultimate martyrdom at the hands of Iroquoian-speaking tribes was well known throughout the France of Marquette’s youth.
It says much about the era that the grisly end met by Jogues and the rest of the North American martyrs, including Jean de Brébeuf, only increased the desire of passionate priests like Marquette to come to the New World.
Traveling in two birchbark canoes, the Marquette-Jolliet expedition paddled to Green Bay along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. From Green Bay, the men ascended the Fox River to Lake Winnebago. Two Miami guides escorted them from there to the Wisconsin River. Here, Marquette wrote in his journal, they left east-flowing streams “to float on those that would thenceforward take us through strange lands.”
The west-flowing Wisconsin took them through a beautiful, rolling panorama filled with tall trees, grassy prairies and shaggy, massive “cattle” – bison – to the Mississippi. Marquette was a keen observer of the landscape, and it is worth reading his journal simply to get a glimpse of how he and his companions experienced the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Valley before those regions were transformed by Europeans.
The expedition’s encounters with Native Americans were sometimes as inspiring as the landscape. On June 25, Marquette and Jolliet entered a village of Illinois Indians, not at all sure that they wouldn’t be killed on the spot. They were instead treated as honored guests. “How beautiful the sun is, O Frenchman, when thou comes to visit us!” said an old man who greeted them at his cabin.
The “great captain” to whom they were next taken repeated the sentiment. He also requested – after Marquette explained that among the reasons for their journey was that God had sent him “to make Himself known to all the peoples” – that Marquette “have pity on me, and on all my nation. It is thou who knowest the Great Spirit who has made us all. It is thou who speakest to Him, and who hearest His word. Beg Him to give me life and health, and to come and dwell with us, in order to make us know Him.”
We have only Marquette’s word, of course, that such words were spoken. But, perhaps surprisingly, there is little reason to doubt it. Although contemporary scholars tend to downplay the fact, openness to Christian teaching about God and the supernatural world was not infrequently encountered by early American missionaries.
So was another Illinois practice reported by Marquette. “When one speaks the word ‘Illinois,'” he reported, “it is as if one said in their language, ‘the men’ – as if the other savages were looked upon by them merely as animals.” The same was nearly always the case across language groups continent-wide. The idea that there was a trans-tribal or transethnic human nature – or, better put, personhood – common to all homo sapiens seems not to have been held by, or perhaps to have been an idea even available to, America’s aboriginal peoples.
Having met several other native tribes as they continued downstream, not all of them as warmly welcoming as the Illinois, and having ascertained that the Mississippi clearly flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, the Marquette-Jolliet expedition, fearful of Spanish capture, turned around at the Arkansas River. The men were back in Green Bay by the end of September. With their 2,500-mile journey of discovery, they became the first Europeans to map the northern Mississippi River and prepared the continental heartland for deeper French penetration.
Marquette again led the way. Although he was suffering from a debilitating gastrointestinal disorder, he left Green Bay in November 1674 to fulfill his promise to the Illinois that he would return to instruct them about the Great Spirit. Winter trapped him in today’s Chicago, where he and two voyageurs endured a miserably cold and damp three months in camp.
At the end of March, the ice finally broke. A little while later, Marquette planted the cross in the village of Kaskaskia, located along the Illinois River between today’s Peru and Ottawa, Illinois.
Although thousands of Illinois crowded around to hear his preaching, his health would not permit him to stay. Marquette died May 19, 1675, while returning to the Straits of Mackinac and was buried by his two companions on a hill near Ludington, Michigan. Two years later, a band of Christian Ottawa Indians disinterred his body and brought it to the mission of St. Ignace. A small monument to Marquette stands there today, little visited and utterly incongruous with his significance.
Jeremy Beer is the author of “Beyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest” (University of Oklahoma Press).
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