The river expedition that opened the American West

The upper Mississippi was charted in the 1670s by two French explorers, Jolliet and Marquette. Their feat set the stage for America’s westward expansion – for good and ill.   

In 1669, a French Jesuit priest living at a mission in present-day Wisconsin heard from members of the Illinois tribe about a great river. Intrigued, Jacques Marquette formulated a plan to explore the body of water and to learn about the Indigenous people that populated its shores. Several years later, he and Louis Jolliet did just that, becoming the first Europeans to map the northern portion of the Mississippi River.

On the 350th anniversary of their consequential voyage, historian Mark Walczynski has written the absorbing “Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition.” The author, who calls the expedition “the key that opened the door to the American West,” makes the case for revisiting their journey by noting that he’s benefited from new tools unavailable to earlier scholars. These include linguistic analysis of Native American languages, recent archaeological findings, and advances in understanding the early geology and climate of the Midwest. 

Walczynski is also interested in correcting the historical record where he thinks previous authors have erred. For instance, there is disagreement about when Jolliet, who was born in 1645 near Quebec, and Marquette, who was born in France in 1637 and traveled to the New World in 1666 as a missionary, first encountered one another. Some historians have written that the two men met several years in advance of their expedition, which Walczynski disputes: He argues that they met just before setting out for the Mississippi together.

These academic disagreements are not likely to be of great interest to those who aren’t steeped in the historiography of the period. General readers will be more edified by the story of the expedition itself, which the author describes in detail.

Marquette was well qualified for the journey; he spoke six Native languages and was a skilled cartographer. He was anxious to learn about the tribes he hoped to convert to Christianity. Jolliet, about whom comparatively little is known, might have been chosen by colonial authorities because he helped fund the venture. His primary interest was likely in personal financial opportunities that the expedition might yield.

Despite their differing motivations, both Jolliet and Marquette, along with a crew of five men, assumed considerable risk during the four-month journey, during which they covered 2,100 miles’ worth of land and waterways in nine present-day American states. “I found myself in the blessed necessity of exposing my life for the salvation of all these peoples,” Marquette wrote before they set out. Starting in the Great Lakes region, the group traveled in two bark canoes laden with food, weapons, goods to trade, and gifts for the Indigenous people they would meet. “The explorers ate infrequently, drank river water, and were exposed to wind, rain, heat and humidity, and clouds of mosquitoes,” Walczynski writes.

The Native Americans they encountered, many from different bands of the Illinois tribe, provided helpful information and were eager to trade for European weapons and goods. The author notes that in contrast to the Spanish, Portuguese, and English, the French – whose government was then more interested in profiting from the fur trade than in creating permanent settlements – generally attempted to form what the author calls “respectful relationships” with Indigenous people.

Even so, Walczynski observes, referring to the Illinois people in particular, that contact with the French – not least with the missionaries who disregarded and denigrated their existing religious rituals – eventually “[stripped] the Illinois of their customs, culture, spiritual beliefs, and in time, under the British and American regimes, their land.” 

As Jolliet and Marquette continued south to the mouth of the Arkansas River, the explorers were warned by the inhabitants that they would encounter hostile tribes and Spanish colonials if they continued downstream. The party decided to return north, retracing their route up the Mississippi. Walczynski explains that they had accomplished much of what they set out to do, having charted the course of the Mississippi and confirmed that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. 

The legacy of the expedition is visible today in the many cities and waterways that bear the explorers’ names, from Joliet, Illinois, to Marquette counties in Michigan and Wisconsin. 

More significantly, their voyage set the stage for future exploration, most notably for the 1682 expedition of René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, who canoed the lower Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, claiming the land that became known as Louisiana for the French. Jolliet and Marquette, Walczynski demonstrates, “opened the doors for what became the future."