Part 2

Jolliet had come of different though not less worthy stock. He was Canadian born, the son of a wagon-maker in Quebec; and he had been well educated, and possessed an active, adventurous mind. He was dressed for this expedition in the tough buckskin hunting suit which frontiersmen then wore. But Marquette retained the long black cassock of the priest. Their five voyageurs--or trained woodsmen--in more or less stained buckskin and caps of fur, sent the canoes shooting over the water with scarcely a sound, dipping a paddle now on this side and now on that, Indian fashion; Marquette and Jolliet taking turns with them as the day progressed. For any man, whether voyageur, priest, or seignior, who did not know how to paddle a canoe, if occasion demanded, was at sore disadvantage in the New World.

The first day of any journey, before one meets weariness or anxiety and disappointment, remains always the freshest in memory. When the sun went down, leaving violet shadows on the chill lake, they drew their boats on shore; and Pierre Porteret and another Frenchman, named Jacques, gathered driftwood to make a fire, while the rest of the crew unpacked the cargo. They turned each canoe on its side, propping the ends with sticks driven into the ground, thus making canopies like half-roofs to shelter them for the night.

"The Sieur Jolliet says it is not always that we may light a camp-fire," said Pierre Porteret to Jacques, as he struck a spark into his tinder with the flint and steel which a woodsman carried everywhere.

"He is not likely to have one to-night, even in this safe cove," responded Jacques, kneeling to help, and anxious for supper. "Look now at me; I know the Indian way to start a blaze by taking two pieces of wood and boring one into the other, rubbing it thus between my palms. It is a gift. Not many voyageurs can accomplish that."

"Rub thy two stupid heads together and make a blaze," said another hungry man, coming with a kettle of lake water. But the fire soon climbed pinkly through surrounding darkness. They drove down two forked supports to hold a crosspiece, and hung the kettle to boil their hulled corn. Then the fish which had been taken by trolling during the day were dressed and broiled on hot coals.

The May starlight was very keen over their heads in a dark blue sky which seemed to rise to infinite heights, for the cold northern night air swept it of every film. Their first delicious meal was blessed and eaten; and stretched in blankets, with their feet to the camp fire, the tired explorers rested. They were still on the north shore of what we now call the state of Michigan, and their course had been due westward by the compass. A cloud of Indian tobacco smoke rose from the lowly roof of each canoe, and its odor mingled with the sweet acrid breath of burning wood. Jolliet and the voyageurs had learned to use this dried brown weed, which all tribes held in great esteem and carried about with them in their rovings.

"If true tales be told of the water around the Bay of the Puans," one of the voyageurs was heard to say as he stretched himself under the canoe allotted to the men, "we may save our salt when we pass that country."

"Have you ever heard, Father," Jolliet inquired of the missionary, "that the word Puan meant foul or ill-smelling instead of salty?"

"I know," Marquette answered, "that salt has a vile odor to the Indians. They do not use it with their food, preferring to season that instead with the sugar they make from the maple tree. Therefore, the bay into which we are soon to venture they call the Bay of the Fetid, or ill-smelling salty country, on account of saline water thereabout."

"Then why do the Winnebago tribe on this bay allow themselves to be called Puans?"

"That has never been explained by the missionaries sent to that post, though the name seems to carry no reproach. They are well made and tall of stature. I find Wild Oats a stranger name--the Menomonies are Wild Oats Indians. Since the gospel has been preached to all these tribes for some years past, I trust we may find good Christians among them."

"What else have you learned about the country?"

"Father Dablon told me that the way to the head of that river called Fox, up which we must paddle, is as hard as the way to heaven, specially the rapids. But when you arrive there it is a natural paradise."

"We have tremendous labor before us," mused Jolliet. "Father, did you ever have speech with that Jean Nicollet, who, first of any Frenchman, got intimations of the great river?"

"I never saw him."

"There was a man I would have traveled far to see, though he was long a renegade among savages, and returned to the settlements only to die."

"Heaven save this expedition from becoming renegade among savages by forgetting its highest object!" breathed Marquette.

His companion smiled toward the pleasant fire-light. Jolliet had once thought of becoming a priest himself. He venerated this young apostle, only half a dozen years his senior. But he was glad to be a free adventurer, seeking wealth and honor; not foreseeing that though the great island of Anticosti in the Gulf of St. Lawrence would be given him for his services, he would die a poor and neglected man.

When, after days of steady progress, the expedition entered the Bay of Puans, now called Green Bay, and found the nation of Menomonies or Wild Oats Indians, Marquette was as much interested as Jolliet in the grain which gave these people their bread. It grew like rice, in marshy places, on knotted stalks which appeared above the water in June and rose several feet higher. The grain seed was long and slender and made plentiful meal. The Indians gathered this volunteer harvest in September, when the kernels were so ripe that they dropped readily into canoes pushed among the stalks. They were then spread out on lattice work and smoked to dry the chaff, which could be trodden loose when the whole bulk, tied in a skin bag, was put into a hollow in the ground made for that purpose. The Indians pounded their grain to meal and cooked it with fat.

The Menomonies tried to prevent Marquette and Jolliet from going farther. They said the great river was dangerous, full of frightful monsters that swallowed both men and canoes; that there was a roaring demon in it who could be heard for leagues; and the heat was so intense in those southern countries through which it flowed, that if the Frenchmen escaped all other dangers, they must die of that. Marquette told them his own life was nothing compared to the good word he wanted to carry to those southern tribes, and he laughed at the demon and instructed them in his own religion.

The aboriginal tribes, by common instinct, tried from the first to keep the white man out of countries which he was determined to overrun and possess, regardless of danger.

At the end of a voyage of thirty leagues, or about ninety miles, the explorers reached the head of the Bay of Puans, and a region thickly settled with Winnebagoes and Pottawotomies between the bay and Winnebago Lake, Sacs on Fox River, and Mascoutins, Kickapoos, and Miamis. Fox River, which they followed from the head of the bay, and of which the lake seemed only an expansion, was a rocky stream. A later traveler has told us that Fox River in its further extent is very crooked, and while seeming wide, with a boundary of hills on each hand, it affords but a slender channel in a marsh full of rushes and wild oats.

The Kickapoos and Mascoutins were rude, coarse-featured Indians. Though the missionary exhorted them as seriously as he did their gentler neighbors, he could not help remarking to Jolliet that "the Miamis were better made, and the two long earlocks which they wore gave them a good appearance."

It was the seventh day of June when the explorers arrived in this country of cabins woven of rushes; and they did not linger here. Frenchmen had never gone farther. They were to enter new lands untrodden by the white race. They were in what is now called the state of Wisconsin, where "the soil was good," they noted, "producing much corn; and the Indians gathered also quantities of plums and grapes." In these warmer lands the season progressed rapidly.

Marquette and Jolliet called the chiefs together and told them that Jolliet was sent by the governor to find new countries, and Marquette had been commissioned of Heaven to preach. Making the chiefs a present, without which they would not have received the talk seriously, the explorers asked for guides to that tributary which was said to run into the great river.

The chiefs responded with the gift of a rush mat for Marquette and Jolliet to rest on during their journey, and sent two young Miamis with them. If these kindly Indians disliked to set the expedition further on its way, they said nothing but very polite things about the hardihood of Frenchmen, who could venture with only two canoes, and seven in their party, on unknown worlds.

The young Miamis, in a boat of their own, led out the procession the tenth morning of June. Taking up paddles, the voyageurs looked back at an assembled multitude--perhaps the last kindly natives on their perilous way--and at the knoll in the midst of prairies where hospitable rush houses stood and would stand until the inmates took them down and rolled them up to carry to hunting grounds, and at groves dotting those pleasant prairies where guests were abundantly fed.

Three leagues up the marshy and oats-choked Fox River, constantly widening to little lakes and receding to a throat of a channel, brought the explorers to the portage, or carrying place. The canoes then had to be unloaded, and both cargo and boats carried overland to a bend of the Miscousing, which was the Indian name for Wisconsin River. "This portage," says a traveler who afterwards followed that way, "is half a league in length, and half of that is a kind of marsh full of mud." In wet seasons the head of Fox River at that time seemed not unlikely to find the Wisconsin, for Marquette has set it down in his recital that the portage was only twenty-seven hundred paces.