A Look at History
Father Marquette Watches Over the Park from Above
BY FRANK STRAUS

A few years ago, the keepers of the state museum in my home state of Illinois tore out the entire first floor and rebuilt it. The new exhibits tell a story of prairies, woodlands, marshes, and lakes. In these dioramas can be found buffalo, bear, deer, and wolf, living in a land that does not yet know gunpowder. Next to each case is the number of a year, and a short explanation of what each one of Illinois' natural ecological systems looked like in that year. The year number is always the same: the most important single year in the history of the state. It is 1673.

1673 was the year when the first Europeans paddled down the Mississippi River. They

were the first to see what was to become Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky. They were led by two men: the secular leader, Louis Jolliet, and the missionary, Father Jacques Marquette, S.J., of Mackinac Island and St. Ignace.

This French-Canadian expedition into the heartland of North America, the first to find and chart the Mississippi River, the first to bring home to Europe an idea of the actual size and fertility of the continent, pushed off from our Straits of Mackinac. It was from these blue waters that these men paddled forward to their destiny.

The unveiling of the Father Jacques Marquette statue in Marquette Park September 1, 1909. The statue remains a centerpiece almost a century later. (Photograph courtesy of Tom Pfeiffelmann)

It was no accident that these men were looking for dark black soil. The accidents of history had given to the French-speaking people a cold, rocky land on the northeastern fringe of the continent, the province of Quebec. On the shores of the St. Lawrence, throughout the 1600s, French-speaking Catholics sank deep roots into the stony earth. The thin farmsteads of Quebec could not, however, feed all of its men, women, and children.

A tireless French Jesuit, Marquette, from the old cathedral city of Laon, had celebrated Mass at La Pointe in northern Wisconsin and at Mackinac Island here at the Straits. Somewhere he had met a Native American, a stranger to the upper Great Lakes, a member of that group of tribes known later as the Illini Confederacy. This Illinois Indian taught Marquette some of his language and told him of the rich corn fields southwest of the Great Lakes. From the Straits of Mackinac, Father Marquette passed on these tidings to his superiors in Quebec with a plea that he be allowed to raise the Christian cross among this unknown, unchurched, and numerous people. The secular government agreed and sent Monsieur Jolliet, a layman, westward with orders to accompany

Marquette and report on the lands to be discovered. The two men combined forces at St. Ignace in December 1672. The following months of winter were spent in preparation for the journey of discovery.

From St. Ignace, two canoes came ashore at Green Bay and ascended the Fox River. Native guides pointed out a narrow portage to the westward-flowing Wisconsin. As a current swept the canoes out through the mouth of this river, the Frenchmen caught sight of the Mississippi.

Down the Mississippi went Jolliet and Marquette, meeting and ministering to a clan of Illini on the eastern shore of what would become Iowa Territory. For almost 1,000 miles, everything they saw was new to European eyes. In what is now Arkansas, the voyageurs reached the southernmost point of their journey. They had reached the land that the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto had marched through many years before. The Natives here were less friendly to Frenchmen, and some of them possessed things made in Spain or Spanish Mexico. The Frenchmen decided to turn back.

Once again accepting the advice of Illini-speaking Natives, the canoe flotilla took a side turn near the present-day city of St. Louis. Paddling up a tributary of the Mississippi, the present-day Illinois River, they approached Lake Michigan's southern end. Marquette was astonished by the thick population of tribesmen and the generous supply of corn, fish, and game.

Back again on Lake Michigan, the historic expedition was over. Jolliet returned to Montreal with a report of their findings, while Marquette determined to remain on the lakeshore for two more years, ministering to the Natives.

Sentimentalists would later write that Marquette pined for the sight of his "home" mission church of St. Ignace. There is no way of knowing whether or not this was true; the Jesuit had already traveled many miles in his vocation, and had spent almost every winter of his adult life in a different campsite. Marquette was to winter over in 1673-74 in De Pere, in eastern Wisconsin; and winter over again in 1674-75 on the Chicago Portage, by a small creek on what was to become the South Side of the city of Chicago. From each of these points he sent back brief messages to Quebec, describing his journeys and his work as a savior of souls.

The good father probably never realized that these truncated accounts were to become the definitive story of his great expedition. Louis Jolliet had kept a careful journal; but in the rapids of Lachine within eyesight of Montreal, disaster struck. The explorer's canoe was swept away with all of his records. Jolliet himself survived and dictated a brief recapitulation of his memories to another priest; but that verbal account then disappeared. It appears to have been used to patch out and extend Marquette's brief narratives, and when a final account of the journey was set up in type by the Jesuits of Paris in 1678, the story was told as if Marquette had been the leader of the expedition.

It was this half-true story, that of Father Jacques Marquette as the leader rather than the co-leader of the discovery of the Mississippi, that would be retold in one American history textbook after another and which would lead to the erection, in September 1909, of a bronze statue in Mackinac Island's Marquette Park. For when a great but troubled nation, anxious about floods of immigrants from unfamiliar countries, was to look for a unifying hero who was a Roman Catholic priest, Marquette would be the man.

Mackinac Island's bronze statue depicts a man in late middle age, bearded, his face worn and heavy with experience and responsibility. The real Father Marquette was 38 years old in 1675 as he paddled northward from Chicago along the western shore of the Lower Peninsula. He had several faithful Quebeckers with him on this final journey, but none of them were educated men, and it is not known what was the exact nature of the priest's fatal illness. It is clear that Marquette knew he was dying. His companions later recalled that they had tried desperately to reach Marquette's home church at St. Ignace. This might have been because Marquette loved the Straits of Mackinac, or it might have been a consequence of the spiritual dilemma involved in dying without another priest in attendance.

We do not even know by how many miles the heroic priest fell short of his goal. The mouth of the Pere Marquette River at Ludington has the traditional claim, but the friends of Frankfort, Michigan, believe that it was there that Marquette closed his eyes for the last time. The spring wildflowers were out; it was May 16, 1675.

Much later, Marquette's bones would be carried north in a birchbark box or mocock, and interred beneath the floor of the small church he had helped to build; and in 1877 bone fragments, believed to be those of the Jesuit missionary, were rediscovered by the St. Ignace shore, and the grave re-marked.

Thirty-two years after that, in September 1909, a crowd of men and women gathered in a new grassy park below Fort Mackinac. Suitable remarks were made, and two American flags were pulled apart to reveal the solemn visage of the reimagined explorer. The park was named in honor of Marquette, and off to one side, Islanders built a replica of the little bark chapel in which he had ministered in 1670-71.

Almost another century has passed, and Marquette still stands on his pedestal, staring out into the Great Lakes that he had helped to map and chart. Every so often a seagull will settle down atop his head.