I.
LOUIS JOLIET,
Re-discoverer of the Mississippi.
If one should ask which is the most important river basin in the world, there is no doubt that the Mississippi would be named, with its million and a quarter square miles of area and its twenty-five or more billions of aggregated wealth. Favored in climate, soil, and navigable streams, and endowed with practically inexhaustible veins of coal, copper, iron, and silver, feeding the world with its hundreds of millions of bushels of corn and wheat, and clothing it by other millions of bales of cotton, it is hardly so astonishing that within 217 years from its discovery by Joliet this greatest of river basins should be the abiding-place of twenty-seven and a half millions of people.
Speaking of Joliet, Bancroft wrote that his short voyage brought him immortality; but in the irony of fate his explorations have not even given his name a place in the last edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In writing on American explorers, it seems most fitting that this series of sketches should be headed by this Canadian, whose name is scarcely known by one in a thousand. That aught is obtainable concerning the details of his life is due to the investigations of Shea, which later were admirably summed up by Parkman.
| Signature of Jolliet (Old Spelling). |
Louis Joliet, the son of John Joliet and Mary d’Abancour, was born at Quebec, September 21, 1645. His father was a wagon-maker, in the service of the Company of One Hundred Associates, then owners of Canada.
The son in youth was imbued with devout feelings, which, possibly fostered by the elder Joliet as certain to bring station and influence in manhood, led to his being educated in the Jesuit College for the priesthood, in which indeed he received the minor orders in 1662. Four years later, in the debates on philosophy, which were participated in by the Intendant and listened to by the colonial dignitaries, Joliet showed such skill as to elicit especial commendation from the Fathers.
His future career shows that his studies with the Fathers were not lost on him, and doubtless they contributed largely to make Joliet that intelligent, well-poised leader who filled with credit all duties and positions incident to his varied and adventurous life.
It is probable, however, that during all these years he was at heart a true voyageur, and that his thoughts turned continually from the cloister and books to the forest and its attractive life. Be this as it may, he practically abandoned all ideas of the priesthood at the age of twenty-two, and turned to the most certain, and indeed, in Canada, the only path to wealth, that of a trader in furs with the Indians. In this trade only the hardy, shrewd, intelligent, and tireless subordinate could hope to thrive and rise. Success meant long and hazardous journeys into the very heart of the Indian country, where were needed great physical courage and strength, perfect skill with gun, paddle, axe, sledge, or snow-shoe, a thorough knowledge of wood-craft, indomitable will or casuistry and tact according to the occasion. To paddle a canoe from sunrise to sunset of a summer day, to follow the sledge or break a snow-shoe path before it as far as a dog can travel in a march, to track a moose or deer for leagues without rest, to carry canoes and heavy packs over long portages through an untravelled country, were the ordinary experiences of a voyageur, which were accomplished for the great part on a diet of smoked meat and boiled Indian corn, with no shelter in fair weather and the cover of an upturned canoe or bark hut in stress of storm.