(upbeat music) - Welcome to "At Issue."

I'm H. Wayne Wilson, thank you so much for joining us.

This is the 350th anniversary of an expedition by a Jesuit missionary and a French fur trader.

And after 350 years, it might be time for a fresh look at the lasting effect the French had on what would become the state of Illinois and the adjoining states.

And we'll have that conversation with Mark Walczynski.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- Mark is the author of "Jolliet and Marquette," it is "A New History of the 1673 Expedition" that was 350 years ago and we thank you so much for being here.

Before we get started, about the Marquette and Jolliet, or Jolliet and Marquette, as you reference it in the title of the book, your background is with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

- That's correct.

I worked 25 years with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, and then I taught college at Illinois Valley Community College for nine.

But I've been studying history for decades, especially French Native American history of the Western Great Lakes, Illinois Country, and such.

- And with that, you have done what I would call exhaustive research in adding some, maybe at least to me, unknown aspects to the expedition of Marquette and Jolliet.

Before we get, and I wanna talk about the trip, but what was the most surprising aspect of this before you started your adventure into this?

What did you, what was the surprise?

Or were there multiple surprises?

- Yeah, there were, I would say there were multiple surprises or multiple, I would rather say multiple issues.

Most of the books that were written that are most cited, most referenced, are from the 1960s, 1970s, some as early as 1923, and some even from the articles and parts of books from the late 1800s.

And I always had an issue with this point or that point that just doesn't seem right, I don't know how these two are reconcilable.

So I figured- - So there was a different issue in one book versus another book, and you couldn't reconcile those?

- There was that, but there was just this didn't seem to make sense because the way the author may have spinned, and I don't mean spin, interpreted what he read, so there was enough of those where I said, all right, I have to, I am not the information police but I have to look into this because there's some things that are extremely vague.

Some things appear to be contradictory.

So let's start off with a brand new fresh look at this voyage instead of having those preconceived notions from the books and things that we have read, and a lot of these are really good books, but this gets more into the weeds, I guess I could say, about some of these issues.

- So where does the 1673 expedition rank in American history?

- Well, in my opinion, and I would say that it's every bit as significant as the Lewis and Clark expedition.

And I would say as far as humanity is concerned, the 1969 Moonshot going to places where no one has ever been before, not no one, the Native Americans obviously lived here for thousands upon thousands of years but the French have never been there before.

Man has, as far as we know, has never been to the moon, and so these are new ventures into places that were unknown to certain people.

- Now we know that there, some notes were kept by one of them and then there were very few notes by the other, where did you find your information?

- A lot of that information comes from the Jesuits themselves.

We are so fortunate to be able to live today where we have access to some really good information.

For example, one of my primary sources is called "The Jesuit Relations" and that's a list of about 66, 67 different books that were published in France to reveal the exploits of these missionaries going into new places.

The people that they met, the things that they saw.

And you can get that online right now in fantastic translations by Reuben Gold Thwaites.

You can, you can actually read the reports from great translations if you're not fluent in 17th century French, and they are outstanding sources of information from the people who were there, who wrote it down, what they saw.

- And we know that the French amongst the nations that were exploring the region, the British, the Spanish, et cetera, but the French were really good at keeping records.

- They were the best.

When you were born, France and Canada were essentially church states.

Both institutions fought for the favor of the King to be able to do this or to be able to do that.

And they kept really, really good records, especially the church records, because when you were born, there would be a record of the day you were born, who your parents were, who your brothers were, where they lived, and such a few days later on your baptism, who your godparents were, where they lived, and information like that.

We can take that all the way till when you get married.

All that information is gonna be recorded and then we're gonna go to your will, what you own, where it's at, who gets what, why they get it, and so on and so forth.

So actually, we know more about an insignificant Frenchman who lives somewhere in Southern Illinois along the Mississippi River than we know about some American heroes like Daniel Boone.

- Let's talk about the trip.

It started in May of 1673.

- Correct.

- In St. Ignace, which that's an area that would become the upper Peninsula of Michigan.

- [Mark] Correct.

- That's not the Mississippi River.

- No, no.

- So they go by land over to the Mississippi?

- Well, what they did is they left, there was seven Frenchmen Jolliet, Marquette, and five canoe men.

And one of 'em was a man by the name was Jacques Largier who figures big in Illinois history as being a linguist and scribe for other later Jesuits.

And so they left St. Ignace, which is right by the Mackinaw Bridge.

And if you're familiar with the Upper Peninsula and they scooted down the shore of Lake Michigan and they would stop at Indian villages, Native American settlements that they encountered at the Menominee River, where they encountered the Menominee, where those people tried to convince Jolliet and Marquette don't go any further because there's monsters, sea monsters and things like that that can get you.

No, we're going.

And so they reached the Fox River of Wisconsin, paddle up the Fox River of the Wisconsin to the Wisconsin Portage at today's Portage, Wisconsin.

From there, they took the Wisconsin River all the way to the Mississippi.

They landed there 30 days after leaving St. Ignace.

From there, they went south stopping at a couple of Indian villages.

One of them was the reason for Marquette's coming to Illinois, and that's the Illinois Indian villages that were on the Des Moines River.

- And that became the Missouri River?

- No, this is Des Moines River.

- Oh, okay, all right.

So before we go further on the trip, was one of the goals to find out where the Mississippi went?

- Yes, if we look at Louis Jolliet represented the state or the secular government.

Jacques Marquette represented the church.

And it was common at that time to have these well-educated Jesuits and other, for example, Sulpicians that went on LaSalle's first expedition.

Some of these people were military officers, cavalry officers before they gave that up to join the priesthood.

Some of these guys were really sharp.

And so it had a representative of both the church and state in the same canoe as they went down.

And one of Louis' objectives was to find out whether or not the river that the Iroquoian speakers call Ohio, is that the same river that the Algonquian speaking tribes from Minnesota and Wisconsin call Mississippi?

Are they the same river, just two different names for the same river, or are they the same river?

And so that was one of Jolliet's, one of his tasks to do.

And since all rivers eventually dump into a sea, which sea does it dump into?

Because all they had was speculation because of the way the Native Americans told the French Jesuits about where the villages are at by this great river.

It may appear to them that maybe this river pops out in Virginia, maybe it pops out in the sea of California.

Maybe it pops out at the Sea of the South, which is the Gulf of Mexico.

So that's one of Jolliet's primary missions to find these things out.

- So they're headed down the Mississippi but they don't go all the way.

It does obviously dump into the Gulf of Mexico.

- Sure.

- But they don't go that far.

- Correct.

- Why is that?

- Well, they're getting into areas that were extremely unfamiliar to them.

Most of the journey was unfamiliar to them, but they ended up at the Arkansas Village, at the today's Arkansas River near its mouth with the Mississippi.

And they could tell by looking, by speaking to the tribe, they couldn't speak the language.

So now Marquette, who was the linguist of the party, he's out of his range.

So we really can't speak to these people anymore.

But they learned from a kid from another village that they met who acted as an interpreter for them that there's some real problems down here.

First of all, these tribes that are down there are very hostile.

You're not gonna go through their territory.

It's their territory.

Secondly, there's possibility that the Spanish are down there, and if the Spanish catch you, you're not going back home.

And they could see just how truthful these tribes were to them because they saw that their village had nothing.

They didn't have any trade goods.

All they had was just a few things that they could gather.

A buffalo hide, for example, was considered a great luxury for these people when farther up north, there's buffalo hides everywhere.

And so they realize that, all right, we know this thing, this river dumps into the sea.

We believe them.

We've stopped at other villages, and they said it dumps into the South Sea.

We believe them.

We see that these people are not lying to us.

I think we better go back up north because they had probably collected curio, specimens, birds, plants, who knows what.

Marquette never mentioned any of those things, but if you're gonna be in an exploratory operation expedition, you're going to take samples of these things to show samples of oars that they may have found down the way.

- So they go north on the Mississippi against the current.

- [Mark] Yes.

- So now the trip's more difficult.

- Much more difficult because as Marquette noted as they were going down the Mississippi River, once they passed the Missouri River, the Missouri River was flooded.

There was whole trees and islands and everything that was being belched out into the Mississippi.

And so they paddled, that crew paddled in the hot summer sun in the Mississippi River Valley down there which is always full of mosquitoes and always hot and humid, 440 miles to get to the Illinois River.

And it took 'em 44 days.

- Why did they decide to go up the Illinois because they had already come down the Mississippi and they said, well, this is a new river?

- Well, they had, they stopped at Illinois, actually two Illinois villages on the Des Moines River which would be at today's Iliniwek State Historical Site in Clark County, Missouri, right up in the far upper corner of Missouri.

And one of the chiefs there gave him a boy to go with him.

And that boy we found out was actually a guide.

Okay because there's rivers all over the place dumping into the Mississippian streams.

Well, you have all these Illinois villages.

You have two of 'em on the Des Moines River.

You have one up by Starved Rock.

You have Illinois living up on the Fox River in Wisconsin.

You have them living in southern Illinois.

You have 'em all over the place.

They communicated with each other.

This is nothing new.

They knew when the feasts were being held, when the communal buffalo hunt is being held, when it was time to look for a bait.

They knew all that stuff.

So he had communication.

So this boy has obviously been to Kaskaskia which is the large Illinois Indian village right near Starved Rock.

He had been there before.

And if you look at what the Illinois River would've looked like in 1673, look at Emiquon or Meredosia it's nothing but huge backwaters, islands, false channels, isthmus, there's lakes on islands and later explorers as late as the 1800s, as we got so twisted and turn around there, that it took us a day to get out, to extract ourself because we made a wrong turn.

People like Henry Schoolcraft wrote things like that.

So this boy got them up that new stream where no European that we know of had ever ascended and took them to the Indian Village there near Starved Rock.

- And just for clarification, the Indian Village is at Kaskaskia up by Starved Rock, don't confuse that with the First State Capitol.

- [Mark] Correct.

- Two completely separate issues.

As they come up the Illinois River, what do we know about their time here in the Peoria area?

The Peoria Lake, et cetera?

We know we refer to it as Lake Pimiteoui.

What do we know about that?

- From Marquette's writings, and remember that his journal was actually his report.

So he's trying to be, he wrote great detail about villages in Wisconsin, about finding a certain kind of plant, about the villages there in northwestern Missouri.

But from the time they left the Arkansas Village to the time they landed at Green Bay, it's just a handful of sentences.

For some reason, Marquette did not write very much, just the very important things, we're on this river which they called the River St. Louis.

We stopped at an Illinois village we call Kaskaskia.

There's a portage there, and we got a couple of guides to take us the rest of the way.

And that's about it.

Now yes, it's possible he ran out of ink.

It's possible he ran out of paper but they would've used vellum at that time or it's possible, probable, or likely that he was very sick because we know he spent the next year recuperating from a horrible illness that he got while on that journey.

So he didn't really mention that much.

Where we get the more, the better information is from people that were right after Marquette, (indistinct) who came through here in his party in 1687 from LaSalle, who was here in January of 1680, and from other people.

And so you can piece together because these guys saw the same things as Marquette and Jolliet.

Marquette, who kept the notes just for whatever reason, did not document, didn't write it down.

So what I do is I go back to these reports from later on, some of 'em shortly thereafter to be able to make a good full view of their journey.

- For instance, Lake Pimiteoui roughly translated at least what we assume is Fat Lake.

And that's because there was plenty of wildlife around Peoria Lake.

What became Peoria Lake.

Is that, I mean, interpretation of languages is not an exact science.

- That's sure, that's correct.

As far as I can tell, and one of the people that helped me the most with this book is Michael McCafferty.

He's a Native American linguist.

He's not a Native American, but he's a linguist of Native American languages who has been reconstructing the once nearly extinct Miami-Illinois Indian language, the Miami and Illinois, once the same tribe.

And what I find from him from his writings is we actually know a lot more specifics about the language than actually some people who were living at that time.

My understanding, and matter of fact, he wrote I can't remember what year it is, but it's an Illinois Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.

He talks about that very thing.

He has an article written there and even people who lived at that time who were learning the language got things wrong but they wrote it down and it's been perpetuated.

So according to my colleague, it might mean something more like to grease through, there's something to do with grease, fat, but the construction of the word onomastics, I guess you'd call it, seems a bit different than what Pierre Dilliet who wrote those words, wrote.

- Other people came afterwards, (indistinct), LaSalle, did the 1673 expedition, was that the door opener?

- Yes, exactly.

In fact, the Jesuits wanted to find semi-sedentary tribes, farmers because when they first came to Canada, they were dealing with woodland people who are constantly living in a seasonal subsistence pattern.

But when they found the Wendat, or we would call the Huron and the Illinois, these people are farmers.

They live in large, large villages, and they supplement their diet with bison meat and deer meat and such.

When they found the Illinois, since the Wendats were essentially destroyed by the Iroquois, now the Illinois groups are on the Jesuits' target.

We need to get there.

So Marquette was the first person to mention and document on a map these Illinois villages.

And after Marquette died, then two years later in 1677, (indistinct) came to take over Marquette's work.

And we see that these villages keep getting larger, or the one at Kaskaskia out by Starved Rock.

When Marquette was there in 1673, there was probably 1,480 people, give or take 200.

When he returned two years later, there was about 6,000 people living there.

And when (indistinct) was there in 1677, he counted 351 cabins or huts, which roughly 20 people were there.

So you're over 7,000 people.

And then when LaSalle pulled up on shore there in New Year's day of 1680, his missionaries count 460.

So this village is huge and getting bigger.

And so for that reason there, the French were interested for trade, conversion, and things like that to get into that, to get to that village.

But when LaSalle, who was here in 1680 based his entire, I believe his entire success of his mission of what Jolliet told to Claude Dablon, who was the head Jesuit in Canada, Jolliet lost Marquette's paperwork, lost his report in a canoe wreck.

And so now he goes to meet with the head Jesuit to give him a verbal account of what he and Marquette had just did.

And you can read that in "Jesuit Relations Volume 58."

And he made some pretty big claims.

LaSalle had access to that.

And LaSalle also had access to a map, a period map from that time.

So LaSalle says, you know, I think I can do this.

I can make it to the Gulf of Mexico, because climate, we are in a time called the little ice age.

And so communication between Quebec and France was limited for several months a year.

Ships can't come in, you're gonna run into icebergs out in the shipping lanes and things like that.

So we need a port that's 365 days a year ice free so we can communicate that way and an easier place to bring trade goods rather than drag them up to Montreal.

So LaSalle figured after finding out what Joliet told Dablon that I think I can do this.

And so he got royal permission to come down here.

So LaSalle gets here, builds forts, more people are coming, LaSalle's gone.

The trade increases.

Now they move from Starved Rock in 1691 to Lake Peoria.

So now the operation's moving here.

And then in 1699, d'Iberville locates the mouth of the Mississippi River via the Gulf of Mexico.

Now we have a huge corridor opening up and it just, they're infiltrating as we go along.

- So the French are in Quebec, they're in New Orleans, they wanna make a connection between the two, and they've got fur trading is established.

What happened between 1673 and 1754 when the seven years war or the French and Indian War began?

- Well, a lot of things.

One of the things was between about 1712 and about 1733, there was what are called the Fox wars.

And the Fox and the French did not get along.

It's one of the times when the French, who normally got along, had great relations with most tribes, what they did was they just could not get along with the Fox.

And the Fox had a very good argument complaint against the French.

And the French literally tried to wipe them off the map.

They tried to hunt down and kill every last Fox Indian that they could find.

The Fox had to take refuge with the Sauk Indians, their cousins.

So what that did is the French couldn't use any of the rivers up north.

They couldn't go down to Wisconsin rivers.

The Fox will get 'em, they couldn't go down to Rock River, Fox will get 'em, couldn't go down to Mississippi River, or the Illinois River.

Very dangerous.

So it drove them down to the Ohio River to use that so they can avoid the Fox.

So that's one thing that brought this, the ball of the French to that area of the country.

And that combined with a number of different, number of different things.

- And then they had to seed land as a result of the French and Indian War in 1763.

- That's correct.

- And I'd like to continue the conversation.

- Sure.

- In fact, I will continue the conversation just not on camera.

Mark Walczynski, thank you so much.

He's the author of "Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition."

We appreciate you being here on "At Issue."

Thank you so much.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- And we'll be back next time with another edition of "At Issue."

Please join us then.

(upbeat music)