The stories Fr. Jacques Marquette heard fired his imagination. They gave him hope that he might partake in the kind of missionary enterprise he dreamt of as a youth in Laon, France, where he was born in 1637. Marquette’s narrator was a young Native boy, a slave he had received from another Native, an Odawa (Ottawa), in gratitude for the care Marquette provided him while ill.

Two decades earlier, the Odawas fled as refugees to Madeline Island, one of the Apostle Islands around Chequamegon Bay of Lake Superior. The missionary priests of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, had established a Roman Catholic mission station, the Mission of Saint-Esprit (Holy Spirit), at La Pointe on Madeline Island in 1665 to minister to the Odawas as well as the Wendats (Hurons), who also fled the warfare that engulfed their homelands around Lake Huron in the 1640s and 1650s. Marquette arrived at the Mission of Saint-Esprit in September 1669.

His work there was difficult. The Jesuits had ministered to the Wendats two decades earlier when they lived at Lake Huron, and many of them had embraced the new religion. Even after two decades as refugees, they welcomed Marquette, and sought to renew their Christian faith, but this sentiment was not universal.

Before their western diaspora, some Wendats had expressed indifference, even hostility to the new faith. Most of the Odawas at the Mission of Saint-Esprit rejected Christianity, although Marquette, through his patience, brought some of them to the faith during his two years there.

Nevertheless, Marquette labored alone; the winters were long and cold. Most worrying were the Dakotas (Eastern or Santee Sioux), who lived in present-day northern Minnesota. The Dakotas became embroiled in conflicts with the Odawas at Chequamegon Bay, conflicts that threatened to erupt into warfare.

Marquette’s young slave hailed from the Illiniwek people. Commonly called the Illinois Confederacy, the Illiniwek nations (from which the state of Illinois takes its name) was a loose alliance of at least fourteen different groups that spoke the same language or mutually comprehensible dialects and included the Peorias, Kaskaskias, Tamaroas, Coiracoentanons, Chinkos, Cahokias, Chepoussas, Amenakoas, Ooukas, Acansas, Moingwenas, Tapuaros, Maroas, and Ispeminkias. They lived in sixty villages that stretched from central Illinois into present-day Iowa.

Their homeland was bisected by a great river, about which Marquette and his fellow French in North America had heard only scattered bits of information—the Mississippi.

Slavery was common among the Native peoples with whom the French had contact. Marquette’s young slave had likely been traded several times between several Native nations as a chattel for items of European manufacture such as metal knives and firearms.

From the boy, Marquette not only learned about the homeland of the Illiniweks; he learned about the Mississippi. Marquette was not the first Jesuit to learn of the great river or the Illiniweks. Fr. Claude Allouez had spent two years between 1665 and 1667 ministering to the Native peoples of Lake Superior and mapping the contours of this great inland sea.

In the course of that extended journey (during which he founded the Mission of Saint-Esprit), Allouez learned from the Dakotas of “the great river named Mesippi.” Allouez also met Illiniwek trading parties that visited Chequamegon Bay.

Later, after establishing the Mission of Saint-François-Xavier (Saint Francis Xavier) at present-day De Pere, Wisconsin in 1669, Allouez met another Illiniwek party that told him about the Illinois River and how it flowed into the Mississippi.

The Illiniweks journeyed as far as 500 miles from their homeland to trade at places such as Chequamegon Bay and De Pere. Much of the distance was covered on foot when rivers were not available for transportation.

Marquette’s young slave also taught him the Illiniwek language, and Marquette’s earlier experiences in the colony of New France had prepared him for this task. He arrived at Quebec in September 1666. The great French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, only a year after the founding of the first permanent English settlement, Jamestown in Virginia.

Quebec in Marquette’s time had grown from a small trading post into a bustling settlement on the St. Lawrence River. In October 1666, the Jesuit superior in New France sent Marquette to Trois-Rivieres (Three Rivers) eighty miles upstream from Quebec on the St. Lawrence.

The Native peoples at Trois-Rivieres included the Innus (Montagnais) and the Omamiwininiwaks (Algonquins). Both spoke languages within the Algonquian language family. The language of the Omamiwininiwaks was one of the most widely spoken tongues within this great family of Native languages, and mastering it allowed one to travel as far west as Lakes Superior and Michigan.

It also provided a foundation to learn related Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa, and Illiniwek. Marquette demonstrated a marked proficiency with languages. Within a year and a half, he spoke fluent Omamiwininiwak and Innu. He ultimately achieved fluency in six Native languages.

In 1668, Fr. Claude Dablon, supervisor of the missions west of Lake Huron, established the Mission of Sainte-Marie-du-Sault (Saint Mary of the Rapids) at present-day Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan along with Marquette. The Jesuits pushed westward out of necessity.

In the 1630s and 1640s, they had established several missions among the Wendats of Lake Huron. The Wendats, who numbered about 30,000, were sedentary and agricultural, growing so much corn they often traded it for meat and peltries with other Native groups. The Wendats’ world was destroyed beginning in 1647 when the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois League) of present-day upstate New York unleashed a near-genocidal war against them and other Native nations in the eastern Great Lakes.

This was the beginning of the Iroquois Wars, a series of conflicts that only ended in 1701, although long stretches of peace separated the various skirmishes. The Wendats practically ceased to exist as a people.

Along with the nearby Odawas, Wendat survivors fled into the western Great Lakes. The Haudenosaunee made other Wendats captives and adopted them into their five constituent nations: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas.

The fact that both the Wendats and Haudenosaunee spoke mutually intelligible languages within the Iroquoian language family facilitated these forced adoptions.

In 1667, the French negotiated an uneasy treaty of peace with the Haudenosaunee that allowed the Jesuits to venture into the western Great Lakes and minister to those refugee populations that fled to places like Chequamegon Bay.

Marquette spent about a year at Sault Ste. Marie during 1668 and 1669. There, he met Ojibwes and quickly mastered their language, which was closely related to the Odawa language. Thus, when he arrived at the Mission of Saint-Esprit in 1669, he could easily communicate with the Odawas.

Along the way, he picked up the Wendat language, although by his own admission, he never completely mastered it. This should not be surprising, for Iroquoian languages were as different from Algonquian languages as English is from Mandarin Chinese.

The threat of the Dakotas to the Mission of Saint-Esprit forced the Odawas and Wendats to journey eastward to yet another home, the Strait of Mackinac, where Dablon founded the Mission of Saint-Ignace (Saint Ignatius) in 1671. The Wendats and Odawas decided the Strait of Mackinac was safer than Chequamegon Bay, and, with Marquette in tow, they journeyed that year to the Mission of Saint-Ignace and settled into their new location.

Marquette’s motives for establishing yet another mission among the Illiniweks were multifaceted. Examining them provides a window into the mind of a seventeenth-century Jesuit.

Most significant were Marquette’s personal motivations. He dreamt of becoming a missionary priest as a young boy, perhaps as early as nine years of age. Initially he hoped to serve in Asia, either in China or Vietnam. In a 1665 letter to the leader of the Jesuit order, Superior General Giovanni Oliva, Marquette noted that he desired nothing more than to be a foreign missionary, “which I have been thinking about from my earliest years and the first light of reason.”

The Catholic Counter-Reformation of the 1500s and 1600s resulted in a wave of Roman Catholic renewal in response to the Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther in 1517. The Jesuit order, founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, was a product of this movement, as was the spiritual fervor exhibited by Marquette throughout his lifetime. In his writings, he frequently expressed a willingness—even a desire—to die the death of a Christian martyr.

Members of the Jesuit order certainly experienced this fate in North America. The Haudenosaunee killed Fr. Isaac Jogues with a hatchet blow to the head in 1646. Three years later, after they had destroyed another Wendat town, the Haudenosaunee captured Fr. Jean de Brébeuf and Fr. Gabriel Lalemant and subjected them to torture by fire.

Some Wendat prisoners who loathed the presence of the Jesuits in their country joined the Haudenosaunee and poured boiling water over the heads of Brébeuf and Lalemant in a mock imitation of baptism.

Among the Native societies, particularly the Wendats and Haudenosaunee, the torture and killing of war captives was common. Torture was even considered a sacred ritual. Brébeuf’s captors ate his heart and drank his blood after he died as a mark of respect since he had born his tortures stoically. By this act, the Haudenosaunee believed they would gain the strength of their victims.

While this demise might seem shocking from the perspective of the twenty-first century, a young Jesuit like Marquette believed such a fate would reap a great eternal reward. Indeed, when warned in 1673 of the dangers that awaited him on the Mississippi River, Marquette boasted, “I regarded no happiness as greater than that of losing my life for the glory of Him who has made all.”

Claude Allouez also exerted influence on Marquette. After his two-year sojourn around Lake Superior, Allouez arrived at Trois-Rivieres in July 1667 while Marquette was there studying the Innu and Omamiwininiwak languages. He regaled the younger Jesuit with stories of the Native nations of which the French were only vaguely aware: the Thakiwakis (Sauks), the Meskwakis (Foxes), the Boodewaadamiigs (Potawatomis), and most significantly, the Illiniweks.

Allouez described the Illiniweks in glowing terms. They were agriculturalists who grew two crops of corn per year. They were also populous and presented an untapped field from which many souls could be harvested for the greater glory of God. Moreover, they seemed amenable to the Gospel.

Allouez wrote, “I find all those [Illiniweks] with whom I have mingled affable and humane … whenever they meet a stranger, they give a cry of joy, caress him, and show him every possible evidence of affection.”

Marquette, like Allouez, encountered Illiniweks who traded at Chequamegon Bay. He noted they made a journey of thirty days to reach Lake Superior, and their disposition confirmed what he had learned from Allouez.

In 1669, Marquette wrote a letter to Dablon summarizing his activities at the Mission of Saint-Esprit. In addition to detailing his frustrations, particularly with the Odawas, he noted his contacts with the Iliniweks, who had a population of between 8,000 and 9,000 and seemed eager to receive a missionary.

Marquette wrote, “These people [Illiniweks] are fairly well inclined toward Christianity; since Father Allouez spoke to them … about worshiping the one God, they have begun to abandon their false Divinity.”

Marquette employed bold rhetorical flourishes to make his case for sending them a missionary when he wrote, “They [Illiniweks] are lost sheep, that must be sought for among the thickets and woods, since for the most part they cry so loudly that one hastens to rescue them from the jaws of the Wolf,—so urgent have been their petitions to me during the Winter.”

His tenure at the Strait of Mackinac from 1671 to 1673 was less stressful than his time at Chequamegon Bay; nevertheless, he continued to yearn for the opportunity to establish a new mission among the seemingly more accommodating Illiniweks.

Thus, Marquette’s reasons for establishing a new mission among the Illiniweks included his difficulties at Chequamegon Bay and later the Strait of Mackinac. The Illiniweks, he believed, would be more accepting of Christianity than the Native peoples at the Mission of Saint-Esprit and the Mission of Saint-Ignace.

The climate to the south was less severe than in the upper Great Lakes. He would also fulfil his boyhood dream of being a great missionary priest in the service of Christ. His wish came true in 1673.

Famous journey

Marquette’s famous 1673 voyage to the Mississippi River is largely shrouded by myth in the public mind. While it is often called the Marquette-Jolliet Expedition, Marquette was not in charge of its organization or conduct. Louis Jolliet commanded the expedition; Marquette simply served as its chaplain.

However, all the maps and documents produced by Jolliet during the expedition were lost in a canoe spill as he made his way to Montreal in 1674. Marquette’s records became the only surviving documents of the expedition, and these, of course, have served to give Marquette an exaggerated role that he never claimed for himself.

The impetus for the expedition came from Jean Talon, the intendant of New France. While the governor general was the king’s representative and commanded the colony, the intendant managed its civil administration. Talon wanted to discover what Champlain had sought almost seven decades earlier: a water route through North America that would make possible navigation between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Champlain realized by 1624 that the Great Lakes flowed only eastward and did not offer any kind of passage to the Pacific. Contrary to popular belief, he did not send Jean Nicolet westward in 1634 to find such a passage; Champlain had largely abandoned that effort in the 1620s.

Intelligence concerning a great river in the west, the Mississippi, offered a new possibility for such a passage, but Talon first had to determine where it flowed. In a 1669 letter to Dablon, Marquette expressed the hopes of many of the French, including Talon, when he wrote, “It is hard to believe that the great River [Mississippi] discharges its waters in Virginia, and we think rather that it has its mouth in California.”

If Marquette was correct, the Mississippi (via the Great Lakes and a few portages) might offer passage to the Pacific and ultimately the rich trade in Asia.

Talon appointed Jolliet the commander of the expedition. Jolliet, unlike Marquette, was born in New France and grew up learning several Native languages. He enrolled in the seminary at Quebec, but he abandoned his studies and became a trader among the Native peoples. Indeed, the trade in furs, particularly beaver, was the lifeblood of New France’s economy.

Talon defrayed expenses for the expedition by granting Jolliet a license so he could finance the costs through the fur trade. On 8 December 1672, Jolliet arrived at the Mission of Saint-Ignace, where he gave Marquette a letter from Dablon approving his service as the expedition’s chaplain.

Marquette enthusiastically wrote, “I was all the more delighted at this good news, since I saw that my plans were about to be accomplished; and since I found myself in the blessed necessity of exposing my life for the salvation of all these peoples, and especially of the Illinois [Illiniweks].”

The remainder of the winter was taken up with preparations. In addition to Marquette and Jolliet, five other Frenchmen accompanied the expedition. Various documents record the names of four them, one of whom, Jacques Largillier, also accompanied Marquette on his 1674-1675 expedition.

The seven men departed the Mission of Saint-Ignace on 17 May 1673. They made their way south through Green Bay and visited the Menominees who lived on its shores. The Menominees warned the expedition that many of the Native nations along the Mississippi were hostile.

According to Marquette, “They also said that the great River [Mississippi] was very dangerous, when one does not know the difficult Places; that it was full of horrible monsters, which devoured men and Canoes Together.” As Marquette would learn, this was not a tall tale; it was deeply rooted in Native beliefs about the spiritual world.

The members of the expedition made their way through the upper Fox River, Lake Winnebago, and the labyrinthine twists and turns of the lower Fox River. Local Natives known as the Miamis, also refugees of the Iroquois Wars, assisted them in navigating the portage between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers.

On 10 June 1673, they became the first Europeans to see the wide vistas of the Wisconsin River. Marquette wrote, “The River on which we embarked is called Meskousing. It is very wide; it has a sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that render its navigation very difficult.”

Jolliet, in a document penned in 1674, rendered a similar spelling for the river, “Miskonsing,” but a later French explorer—René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle—mistook Jolliet’s “M” for “Ou,” which in French makes the sound of “W.” In the Miami language, “Meskousing” literally means “it lies red,” or more accurately, “the river flows through red land.”

This almost certainly refers to the spectacular red sandstone cliffs that grace the river at the Wisconsin Dells. Thus, both Marquette and Jolliet recorded the name of the river that gives Wisconsin its name; LaSalle’s error provided its long-used but mistaken spelling.

On 17 June 1673, the small party entered the Mississippi River “with a Joy that I cannot Express,” according to Marquette, who went on to write many pages of the wonders he and his party observed. He noted the large sturgeons that swam in the river and the great herds of bison on its banks.

On 25 June, Marquette and Jolliet ventured about five miles inland to visit the Peorias, one the constituent nations of the Illiniweks. The two men were feted as guests, and Marquette spoke to the Peorias at length in the Illiniwek language of “God, who had created them, had pity on them, inasmuch as … he wished to make himself known to all peoples.”

Marquette and Jolliet exchanged gifts with the principal leader of the local villages. Marquette noted that he spied upwards of 300 cabins. The Peoria leader, like the Menominees, implored his guests to go no further down the Mississippi “on account of the great dangers to which we Exposed ourselves,” wrote Marquette.

Despite this second warning, Marquette, Jolliet, and their five companions continued their southward journey and soon passed the mouth of the Illinois River. About twelve miles farther downstream, they were struck by the disturbing images of two creatures painted on a limestone cliff.

Marquette wrote, “They [the creatures] are as large As a calf; they have Horns on their heads Like those of deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard Like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body Covered with scales, and so Long A tail that it winds all around the Body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a Fish’s tail.”

What Marquette saw was a depiction of the Water Monsters, spirit beings that provide a segue to understanding the significant theological gulf that separated the spiritual worlds of the French and the Native peoples during the seventeenth-century.

Christian thought stressed transcendence, or the existence of a spiritual plane beyond the realm of humans, where God and His Angelic Host had their domain. Native peoples had no concept of transcendence; humans, animals, and spirit beings lived all in a single plane of existence.

The Water Monsters went by many names. The Illiniweks called them Lenapizha; the Ojibwes called them Mishebeshu. The Water Monsters were one category of spirit beings, or manitous in the various Algonquian languages.

Another category of manitous were the Thunderers (often called Thunderbirds), great beasts that flew in the rain clouds and used lightening from their eyes to do battle with the insidious Water Monsters who lurked below the surface, ready to snatch innocent humans plying the waters.

As the members of the expedition continued past the menacing images, they suddenly encountered a much stronger, even dangerous current.

Marquette wrote “we heard the noise of a rapid, into which we were about to run. I have seen nothing more dreadful. An accumulation of large and entire trees, branches, and floating islands … with such impetuosity that we could not without great danger risk passing through it. So great was the agitation that the water was very muddy, and could not become clear.”

Marquette and Jolliet had just passed the mouth of the Missouri River, the home, in the Native mind, of the terrifying Water Monsters.

Thus, Native peoples lived in a world populated by spirit beings who lived side-by-side with humans, not in a transcendent, heavenly domain as in the Christian mind. Nor was this the only difference between the two cultures.

The French, like all Christians, believed the purpose of this life was to do God’s will with no expectation of any benevolent graces in this world. The Lord reserved such rewards for the afterlife.

Native peoples found this illogical; they believed in reciprocity. If one performed the proper rituals, they could appease and even manipulate the spirit beings in this world to do their bidding. This necessitated, for example, sprinkling offerings of tobacco into the water where the Water Monsters resided to distract them from their notorious habit of snatching humans traveling on waterways such as the Mississippi.

Seventeenth century missionaries like Marquette found this spiritual chasm difficult to bridge. While the Jesuits had some successes in their missionary labors, their ability to convert the Native peoples to Christianity was never as easy as they hoped.

Such frustrations certainly made themselves manifest when Marquette served at the Mission of Saint-Esprit. In the end, the missionaries rarely enjoyed the overwhelming successes they so fervently desired.

After passing the Missouri River, Marquette noted that the Mississippi, based on what he had seen thus far, likely drained into the Gulf of Mexico. He held out hope this new river (the Pekitanoui as he labeled it) that flowed from the west might provide the long-sought water passage through the continent to the Pacific.

Marquette and Jolliet continued as far south as the mouth of the Arkansas River. They conferred and decided they had traveled far enough to determine with confidence that the Mississippi River did not flow to the Pacific. Moreover, the Spanish might be found at its mouth on the Gulf Coast, a possibility that could result in imprisonment for French persons trespassing in Spanish territory. Thus, on 17 July 1673, the little flotilla began the long journey northward.

Whereas Marquette’s journal up to that point fills forty printed pages, he wrote only a few passages concerning the return journey. Marquette and Jolliet decided to return by the Illinois River, make a short portage to the Chicago River, and return to the Mission of Saint-François-Xavier by way of Lake Michigan.

While traveling on the Illinois River, Marquette and Jolliet came to another Illiniwek town, the Grand Village of the Kaskaskias at present-day Starved Rock State Park in Illinois. Marquette promised the Kaskaskias he would return the next spring, thus sowing the seed for his second great voyage.

By the end of September 1673, Marquette and Jolliet reached Green Bay and ended their journey at the Mission of Saint-François-Xavier.

Allouez almost certainly had informed Marquette that the Illinois River and Lake Michigan provided an alternate route to and from the Mississippi, information Allouez had gained earlier from the Illiniweks.

Returning by these bodies of water allowed Marquette and Jolliet to further explore the vast regions over which they traveled. Of course, these various water routes had been known by the Native peoples for centuries. Traveling them—and mapping them—made them known to the French.

Final voyage

After completing the 1673 expedition, Marquette spent the winter at the Mission of Saint-François-Xavier making a map of the journey and editing his notes into a final journal. These documents became particularly important, as mentioned, because Jolliet lost his maps and papers on the way to Montreal. Thus, Marquette’s account became the only official record of the 1673 expedition.

Marquette became quite ill that winter and remained so into the spring and summer of 1674. He likely had contracted typhoid fever. By September, he had recuperated sufficiently to begin preparations for his next voyage.

Unlike the earlier 1673 expedition, Marquette was the leader of the 1674-1675 voyage because it was purely a religious venture that had as its goal establishing a mission among the Illiniweks, specifically the Kaskaskias.

While the 1673 expedition is the one that captures the public imagination, Marquette’s 1674-1675 expedition was of far greater personal and spiritual significance. He would complete the task of opening a mission among the Illiniweks that he had initiated the previous year, a mission he had desired for many years.

On 25 October 1674, he and two lay companions, Jacques Largillier and Pierre Porteret, departed the Mission of Saint-François-Xavier. They paddled up the eastern shore of Green Bay and along the way met a trading party of fifty Boodewaadamiigs and Illiniweks who were also headed to the Illiniwek country.

Marquette and his French companions traveled with the Native flotilla for the remainder of their journey. The entire party first traveled to Sturgeon Bay on the Door Peninsula and portaged to the western shore of Lake Michigan. On 31 October 1674, Marquette, his two companions, and the members of the Native party completed the portage and began to travel southward along the western shore of Lake Michigan.

Marquette kept a detailed journal that recorded the distance travelled each day, and the location where he and his comrades stopped each evening. Thus, the patient researcher can determine most of Marquette’s halts, which included various places in Wisconsin such as Kewaunee, Two Rivers, Sheboygan, Milwaukee, Oak Creek, Racine, and Kenosha. Stops in northeastern Illinois included Winthrop Harbor and Waukegan. On 4 December 1674, Marquette reached the Chicago River.

During the latter half of his journey along Lake Michigan’s western shore, Marquette experienced a relapse of the illness he had suffered earlier in the year. He spent the winter of 1674-1675 in the vicinity of present-day Chicago. His health had improved enough by early spring to continue his journey to the Kaskaskias, and he arrived at their town on the Illinois River in early April 1675, just in time for Holy Week.

He made the most of the occasion to evangelize the assembled Kaskaskias. Marquette celebrated Mass on Easter Sunday and declared the opening of the Mission of l’Immaculée-Conception (Immaculate Conception) in honor of his life-long patroness the Virgin Mary, or as he always referred to Her, the Blessed Virgin Immaculate.

The opening of a new mission in the minds of the Jesuits did not entail the building of a church or other structures; it required only the first preaching of the Gospel. That moment, without any doubt, constituted the highlight of Jacques Marquette’s life and career.

His illness again became worse, and his two French companions convinced him to return to the Mission of Saint-François-Xavier at the conclusion of the Easter Sunday celebration. After returning to Lake Michigan, Largillier and Porteret decided that traveling along the lake’s eastern shore might make for a faster return.

Marquette’s health continued to deteriorate. His companions took him ashore at what is today Luddington, Michigan, and there, Jacques Marquette died on 18 May 1675, just two weeks shy of his thirty-eighth birthday. His body lay buried in a grave prepared by Largillier and Porteret. Two years later, Christian Odawas disinterred his bones and returned them to the Mission of Saint-Ignace at the Strait of Mackinac, where they remain today.

Thus, Jacques Marquette achieved the martyr’s death he seemingly always desired. His fellow Jesuits would continue his work among the Illiniweks and the other Native nations of the Midwest, but their valiant labors west of Lake Michigan came to an inglorious end in the early 1700s.

From 1712 to 1733, the French and their Native allies engaged in series of conflicts known as the Fox Wars with the Meskwakis, and these clashes resulted in the Jesuits ending their missionary labors in Wisconsin by 1728.

For the next century, the Native peoples of the state had no missionaries—Roman Catholic or otherwise—among them.

Only after the United States gained sovereignty over the region did Christian missionaries to the Native nations return. They hailed from other countries and religious orders, such Fr. Samuel Mazzuchelli, an Italian priest of the Dominican order, who arrived at Green Bay in 1831.

Another well-known missionary was Fr. Florimond Bonduel, a diocesan priest from Belgium who arrived in 1835. Both men had to compete with Protestant missionaries during their careers, a situation their Jesuit predecessors did not experience.

It would be wrong to judge Marquette and his fellow Jesuits as somehow initiating the wave of white settlement that ultimately led to the displacement and removal of Native peoples from Wisconsin and the Midwest. Doing so would be to commit the grave historical error of presentism: applying the values of the present on persons in the historical past whose understanding of the world differed greatly from our own.

Moreover, the Jesuits had no plans for Native conquest or removal. If one can discern an ultimate objective in their writings, they envisioned a Christian commonwealth in the lands west of Montreal where the Native nations and the French would someday live side by side in perfect harmony, governed by the strictures of the Gospel.

That this region after 1776 came under the sovereignty of the young American republic, with its insatiable lust for Native land, is not a sin we should place on the shoulders of Jacques Marquette during the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of his journey down the Mississippi River.

Dr. Patrick Jung is a professor of history and cultural anthropology in the Deparrment of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Author of multiple books about the early history of European and Native American contact on the North American continent, Dr. Jung is available for speaking engagements, and can be reached via e-mail at jung@msoe.edu.

The 350th Anniversary of the voyage of discovery of Marquette & Jolliet will be observed in Prairie du Chien on June 16-18. For more in-formation about the event, go to www. expedition350.com or follow them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Expedition350/