It seems quite probable that Chicago was an important meeting-place for Indian travelers long before the first white men came to the foot of Lake Michigan. The portage of the Indian preceded the canoe of the white man, and the Indian trail was the forerunner of the white man's road. Who the first white visitor to Chicago was cannot be stated with certainty. The chief incentive to the exploration of the Northwest was the prosecution of the fur trade, and it is probable that wandering coureurs de bois had visited this region in advance of any of the explorers who have left us records of their travels. Coming to the domain of recorded history we encounter, on the threshold as it were, the master dreamer and empire builder, La Salle.
Already interested in the subject of western exploration, in the summer of 1669 he set out from his estate of Lachine in search of a river which flowed to the western sea.[43] His course to the western end of Lake Ontario is known to us, but from this point his movements for the next two years are involved in mist and obscurity. It is believed by some that he descended the Ohio to the Mississippi in 1670, and that the following year he traversed Lake Michigan from north to south, crossed the Chicago Portage, and descended the Illinois River till he again reached the Mississippi. But the claim that he reached the Mississippi during these years is rejected by most historians. Probably the exact facts as to his movements at this time will never be known. We are here interested, however, primarily in the question whether he came to the site of Chicago. Even this cannot be stated with certainty, but the preponderance of opinion among those best qualified to judge is that he probably did.[44]
[43] For this expedition and the subsequent movements of La Salle see Winsor, Cartier to Frontenac; Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, IV, 201 ff.
[44] Margry was convinced of this and Parkman thought it entirely probable. Winsor thought that La Salle came to the head of Lake Michigan, but was in doubt whether he entered the Chicago River or the St. Joseph. Shea, who constantly belittles La Salle's achievements, believed he "reached the Illinois or some other affluent of the Mississippi." See the references given in note 43.
The pages of history might be scanned in vain for a more fitting character with which to begin the annals of the great city of today. La Salle is noted, even as it is noted, for boundless energy, lofty aspiration, and daring enterprise. He combined the capacity to dream with the resolution to make his visions real. "He was the real discoverer of the Great West, for he planned its occupation and began its settlement; and he alone of the men of his time appreciated its boundless possibilities, and with prophetic eye saw in the future its wide area peopled by his own race."[45]
[45] Edward G. Mason, "Early Visitors to Chicago," in New England Magazine, New Ser., VI, 189.
In strong contrast with the masterful La Salle succeeds, in the early annals of Chicago, the gentle, saintly Marquette. For a number of years vague and indefinite reports had been carried to Canada of the existence, to the west of the Great Lakes, of a "great river" flowing westwardly to the Vermilion Sea, as the Gulf of California was then known. These reports roused in the French the hope of finding an easy way to the South Sea, and thence to the golden commerce of the Indies.
Spurred on by the home government Talon, the intendant of Canada, took up the project of solving the problem of the great western river.[46] It chanced that for several years Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, had been stationed on the shore of Lake Superior. Here he heard from his dusky charges stories of the great river and of the pleasant country to the westward. In consequence he became imbued with the double ambition of solving the geographical question of the ultimate direction of the river's flow, and of seeking in this new region a more fruitful field of labor.[47] In the summer of 1672 Talon appointed Louis Joliet, a young Canadian who had already achieved something of a reputation as an explorer, to carry out the new task, and the projected exploration of the great river was launched. Joliet proceeded that autumn to Mackinac—the Michilimackinac of the French period—where he spent the winter preparing for the enterprise. Hither Marquette had come two years before, and here he had established the mission of St. Ignace. Proximity and a common interest in the projected enterprise combined to draw the two together; so that when the expedition set out from Mackinac in May, 1673, the party was composed of Joliet, Marquette, and five companions. Though Joliet was the official head of the expedition, it has come about, through the circumstance that his records were lost almost at the end of his toilsome journey, that we are chiefly indebted to the journal of Marquette for our knowledge of it, and have come insensibly to ascribe the credit for it to him.
[46] Winsor, Cartier to Frontenac, 231.
[47] Ibid., 199-201.