Marquette, Jacques

Jacques Marquette was born June 10, 1637 in the city of Lahn, at seventeen he joined the Jesuits . After several years of work and study in France, in 1666 he was sent as a missionary to New France for the treatment of the Indian population. Jacques demonstrated great success in the study of local dialects, especially of the Huron .

In 1668, Father Marquette ( Fr. Père Marquette ), at the direction of the leadership, proceeded along the St. Lawrence River in the western part of the Great Lakes. He helped set up missions in Sault Ste. Marie (now two cities in Michigan and Ontario ), La Puente on Lake Superior near the present city of Ashland and also helped father Claude Dablon to set up a post in Sault Ste. Marie Great Lakes. In La Puente, the Illinois Indians told the Jesuits of the existence of an important trade route on the Mississippi River. They invited Jacques to train their tribesmen, who lived mainly in the south. Because of the war between the Hurons of La Puente and the neighboring Lakota people, he had to leave the mission and go to the Makino Strait. He also gave his superiors information about the river, asking permission to study.

In 1673, having received agreement from the Jesuits, Marquette joined the expedition of the French Canadian pioneer Louis Jolier . Speaking on May 17 from St. Ignace, along with five mestizos and two canoes, they passed through Lake Michigan to Green Bay and up the Fox River to its headwaters. From there, they carried their boats for two kilometers through the marshes to the Wisconsin River, and many years later the city of Wisconsin appeared on this site. June 17, travelers reached the Mississippi River.

At a distance of more than 435 miles from the Gulf of Mexico , the French were afraid of meeting with other researchers and Spanish colonists , as confirmed by the European knickknacks that the locals had, which turned to the mouth of the Arkansas ^[6] and sailed across the Mississippi to the mouth of the Illinois, through which was the shortest way to return to the Great Lakes. Reaching Lake Michigan, Marquette stopped in September at St. Francis Xavier's Mission (now Green Bay , Wisconsin), and Jolier returned to Quebec with news of discoveries.

On December 4, 1674, during wintering at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, Jacques founded a small missionary post, on the site of which the American city of Chicago grew over time, its name comes from the word "shikaakva", which in the language of Indian Indians means "wild onion" ( chisel ). The status of the city of Chicago received only 163 years after its foundation - in 1837 . The Europeans were assisted by the Illinois in their wintering grounds by supplying them with their sagamite corn chowder ^[7] .

In the spring of 1675, Marquette held a Mass at the Grand Village near the current Starved Rock State Park. But the dysentery he contracted during a Mississippi study undermined his health and died on his return to St. Ignace.

Louis Jolier and Jacques Marquette went by canoe over 4,000 km along the rivers and lakes of the so-called Midwest . Thus, the French were the first to establish that the rivers originating to the west of the Great Lakes, as well as the Mississippi itself, do not flow into the Pacific Ocean , but into the Gulf of Mexico of the Atlantic Ocean. Passing along the Mississippi River, they officially assigned its Indian name to this river, which literally means “Big Water.” In the territories studied by Jacques Marquette in the 17th and 19th centuries New France was spread out.

• Iconographic sources of jesuit father Jacques Marquette fictitious portraits , Web Robert Derome, Professeur honoraire d'histoire de l'art, Université du Québec à Montréal (English)
• All the Documents 1610 to 1791 , including Marquette's journal (Chapters CXXXVI - CXXXVIII) (eng.)
• Thwaites, Reuben G. Father Marquette New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1902 (Eng.)