The Great American Steamboat Race Read Online Free PDF

it, meaning “great river” (Library of Congress).
    his army placed his corpse in a hollowed-out tree trunk and sank it in the river, lest the Indians discover that despite what he had told them, he was not immortal after all. The survivors then fled down the river and made their way to Mexico.
    A 35-year-old French Jesuit missionary priest, Jacques Marquette — known to history as Père Marquette — and a Canadian-born Jesuit seminary dropout turned explorer, 27-year-old Louis Joliet (or Jolliet), were the first Europeans to actually explore the big river. Unlike the Spaniards who had preceded them, Marquette and Joliet set out not merely to cross the mighty stream but to discover where it would take them — perhaps, they thought, to the Pacific Ocean. Further unlike the Spaniards, they meant to befriend and proselytize the natives they would meet along their way, not conquer and pillage them. It was Marquette, moreover, who recorded in his journal the name the natives had given the big river — Missisipi, as Marquette spelled it, the “great river.”
    On May 17, 1673, Marquette and Joliet launched their two canoes into Lake Huron near Michelmackinaw, at the lake’s western end, and with five fellow explorers, all of them half Indian and half French Canadian, began paddling their way westward through the Straits of Mackinac and into Lake Michigan, then along the south shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Arriving at the mouth of the Fox River at present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, Marquette and Joliet ascended the Fox to Lake Winnebago, then continued on to a Mascouten Indian settlement at present-day Berlin, Wisconsin, where they stopped and rested and learned of a portage, farther south, that would lead them to the Wisconsin River, which flows into the Mississippi. Following the Indians’ directions, they crossed overland to the Wisconsin River near Portage, Wisconsin, put their canoes back into the water and traveled downstream to the Wisconsin’s confluence with the Mississippi near Prairie du Chien, reaching the big river on June 17, 1673, exactly a month after their departure.
    Days of further travel led Marquette to deduce that, contrary to their hopes, they were not headed toward the Pacific Ocean. “Judging from The Direction of the course of the Missisipi,” he wrote, “if it Continue the same way, we think that it discharges into the mexican gulf.” When the explorers passed what apparently was the mouth of the Missouri River, however, Marquette guessed that that was the river that would take them toward California and in his journal he expressed the hope that he might later explore it.
    Marquette and Joliet continued their brave descent of the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas River and there they decided they had gone far enough. They estimated that they were within a few days of the Gulf of Mexico and were fast approaching Spanish-held territory and consequently feared capture or worse.
    And so on July 17, 1673, the little party of explorers turned their canoes upriver and started the trip back to the French settlements whence they had come, finally arriving in late 1674 after making several stops along the way. Marquette never got to explore the Missouri. He died in 1675, a victim of dysentery contracted on his historic voyage down the Mississippi. Joliet married shortly after his return. In 1680, as a reward for his service to Canada (or New France), Joliet was granted Anticosti Island, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. In May 1700 he became lost and died while on an expedition to one of his land holdings.
    Rene-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, born in Rouen, France, in 1643, was perhaps the first to see the Mississippi for what it was — a broad highway that, with its tributaries, provided access into the heart of a vast continent teeming with promise and potential. Another dropout from the Jesuit priesthood, he left France to seek a new life in Canada in the spring of 1666, arriving