Marquette and Jolliet Expedition (1673): Down the Mississippi

The Marquette and Jolliet expedition of 1673 was a canoe journey by the French Jesuit Jacques Marquette and the fur trader Louis Jolliet from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi River. Between May and September 1673 they and five companions travelled thousands of kilometres, reaching the mouth of the Arkansas River. They became the first Europeans known to explore the upper Mississippi and confirmed that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Background: the “great river”

By the 1660s French missionaries and traders around the Great Lakes heard frequent reports of a great river to the west, which Algonquian speakers called by names like Messipi. Officials in New France hoped it might lead to the Pacific and a route to Asia, or at least to new fur-trading partners.

In 1672 the intendant Jean Talon and the new governor, the Comte de Frontenac, chose Louis Jolliet, a Quebec-born trader and mapmaker, to find the river. Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit who ran the mission at St. Ignace on the Straits of Mackinac and wished to preach to the Illinois peoples, joined him.

The journey south

The party left St. Ignace on 17 May 1673 in two birchbark canoes with five French voyageurs. They paddled along Lake Michigan to Green Bay, up the Fox River and across a short portage to the Wisconsin River, near present-day Portage, Wisconsin. On 17 June 1673 they entered the Mississippi near today’s Prairie du Chien.

Drifting south, they met people of the Illinois Confederation, probably Peoria, who welcomed them and gave them a calumet, a ceremonial pipe that served as a passport of peace with other nations. Near present-day Alton, Illinois, they saw large painted figures of monsters on the bluffs, later known as the Piasa. They passed the muddy torrent of the Missouri, which they called the Pekitanoui, and the mouth of the Ohio.

In mid-July they reached a Quapaw village near the mouth of the Arkansas River. The Quapaw told them that the sea lay about ten days away and that there were armed Europeans to the south. Marquette and Jolliet concluded that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of Mexico rather than the Pacific. Fearing capture by the Spanish, they turned back on 17 July.

The return and the lost journal

On the way north, Illinois guides showed them a shorter route up the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers and over the portage to Lake Michigan at the site of present-day Chicago. They reached the Jesuit mission of St. François-Xavier near Green Bay at the end of September 1673, after a round trip that most estimates place at more than 4,000 kilometres (about 2,500 miles).

Jolliet spent the winter preparing his report and maps. In 1674, as he approached Montreal, his canoe overturned in the Lachine Rapids. Two of his men and an Indigenous boy drowned, and his journal and maps were lost; he later redrew a map from memory. The fullest surviving account is the narrative attributed to Marquette, preserved by the Jesuits and first published in Paris in 1681.

Key people

• Jacques Marquette (1637–1675), Jesuit missionary from Laon, France, fluent in several Indigenous languages.
• Louis Jolliet (1645–1700), Canadian-born explorer, trader and hydrographer, leader of the expedition.
• Jean Talon and Louis de Buade de Frontenac, the colonial officials who commissioned the journey.
• The Illinois and Quapaw peoples, whose hospitality, guidance and information made the voyage possible.

Consequences

The expedition gave France its first reliable knowledge of the Mississippi valley and the Illinois Country. Marquette returned to found a mission among the Kaskaskia in 1675, but his health failed, and he died on 18 May 1675 on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Jolliet was refused permission to found a settlement in the Illinois Country, and later received a seigneury on Anticosti Island in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

Their findings encouraged René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, who reached the river’s mouth in 1682 and claimed the whole basin for Louis XIV as Louisiana. Over the following decades France built a chain of forts and missions linking Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Marquette and Jolliet discovered the Mississippi. Fact: Indigenous peoples had lived along it for thousands of years, building cities such as Cahokia, and the de Soto expedition had crossed its lower course in 1541.
• Myth: They reached the Gulf of Mexico. Fact: They turned back near the Arkansas River, more than 500 kilometres from the sea in a straight line and much further along the winding river.

Timeline

• 1672: Talon and Frontenac commission Jolliet.
• 1673, 17 May: The expedition leaves St. Ignace.
• 1673, 17 June: The canoes enter the Mississippi.
• 1673, late June: Meeting with the Illinois people.
• 1673, 17 July: The party turns back near the Arkansas River.
• 1673, September: Return to Green Bay via the Illinois River and the Chicago portage.
• 1674: Jolliet’s papers are lost in the Lachine Rapids.
• 1675, 18 May: Marquette dies on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Why it matters

The voyage of Marquette and Jolliet opened the heart of North America to French exploration, trade and missions. It turned rumours of a great river into maps and written accounts, and set the stage for French Louisiana and the long contest among European powers and Indigenous nations for the Mississippi valley.