ROMANCE AND REALITY OF THE DEATH OF FATHER JAMES MARQUETTE, AND THE RECENT DISCOVERY OF HIS REMAINS.
The bold and energetic exploration by the Canadian Louis Jolliet and the French Jesuit James Marquette, in which, embarking in a frail canoe, they penetrated to the Mississippi by the Wisconsin, and followed the course of the great river to the Arkansas, gives them and their important achievement a place in American history. It was an expedition carried out by two skilled hydrographers familiar with the extent and limit of American exploration, trained by education and long observation to map and describe the countries through which they passed. Their great object was to determine the extent of the river, its chief affluents, and the nature of the tribes upon it, as well as to decide whether it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific.
In New Mexico, the advanced outpost of the Spanish colonies, some definite knowledge of the interior structure of the continent prevailed; but to the rest of the world the great watershed of the Rocky Mountains, with the valley of the Mississippi and Missouri to the east and a series of rivers on the west, was utterly unknown. Marquette and Jolliet lifted the veil and gave the civilized world clear and definite ideas. The two learned explorers floated alone down the mighty river, whose path had not been traced for any distance since the shattered remnant of De Soto’s army stole down its lower valley to the gulf.
Father Marquette was not a mere scholar or man of science. If he sought new avenues for civilized man to thread the very heart of the continent, it was with him a work of Christian love. It was to open the way for the Gospel, that the cross might enlighten new and remote nations.
No missionary of that glorious band of Jesuits who in the seventeenth century announced the faith from the Hudson Bay to the Lower Mississippi, who hallowed by their labors and life-blood so many a wild spot now occupied by the busy hives of men—none of them impresses us more, in his whole life and career, with his piety, sanctity, and absolute devotion to God, than Father Marquette. In life he seems to have been looked up to with reverence by the wildest savage, by the rude frontiersman, and by the polished officers of government. When he had passed away his name and his fame remained in the great West, treasured above that of his fellow-laborers, Ménard, Allouez, Nouvel, or Druillettes. The tradition of his life and labors in a few generations, while it lost none of its respect for his memory, gathered the moss of incorrectness.
Father Charlevoix, travelling through the West in 1721, stopped on Lake Michigan at the mouth of a stream which already bore the name of “River of Father Marquette.” From Canadian voyagers and some missionary in the West he learned the tradition which he thus embodies in his journal:
“Two years after the discovery (of the Mississippi), as he was going from Chicagou, which is at the extremity of Lake Michigan, to Michilimackinac, he entered the river in question on the 18th of May, 1675, its mouth being then at the extremity of the lowlands, which I have noticed it leaves to the right as you enter. There he erected his altar and said Mass. Then he withdrew a little distance to offer his thanksgiving, and asked the two men who paddled his canoe to leave him alone for half an hour. At the expiration of that time they returned for him, and were greatly surprised to find him dead. They remembered, nevertheless, that on entering the river he had inadvertently remarked that he would end his journey there.
“As it was too far from the spot to Michilimackinac to convey his body to that place, they buried him near the bank of the river, which since that time has gradually withdrawn, as if through respect, to the bluff, whose foot it now washes and where it has opened a new passage. The next year one of the two men who had rendered the last tribute to the servant of God returned to the spot where they had buried him, took up his remains, and conveyed them to Michilimackinac. I could not learn, or have forgotten, the name this river bore previously, but the Indians now give it no name but ‘River of the Black-gown’; the French call it by the name of Father Marquette, and never fail to invoke him when they are in any peril on Lake Michigan. Many have declared that they believed themselves indebted to his intercession for having escaped very great dangers.”
Father Charlevoix’s fame as a historian gave this account the stamp of authority and it was generally adopted. Bancroft drew from it the poetical and touching account which he introduced into the first editions of his History of the United States.