Читать книгу Highways and Highway Transportation - George R. Chatburn - Страница 36

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—Religious devotion and zeal has done much for the settlement of North America: the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Catholics in Maryland and Canada, and very much later the Mormons in Utah are familiar examples. A French Jesuit missionary, Jacques Marquette, who with another, Claude Bablon, had founded (1668) a settlement at St. Mary’s on the falls between Lakes Superior and Huron, said to be the first French settlement within the present boundaries of the United States, had made friends with the Illinois Indians and learned their language. He also collected the remains of the Huron tribes at St. Ignace and established a mission there (1671). Marquette had heard from the Indians many tales of the Great river to the west, and decided to explore the region along its borders, despite their assertion of great dangers, that its warriors never spared the stranger, and that monsters would devour both men and canoes. Traveling with his company up the Fox River from Green Bay he crossed the portage, which still retains the name “Portage,” to the headwaters of the Wisconsin. With the explorer Joliet and five subordinates as companions, he boldly embarked upon the Wisconsin and floated down its course, knowing not where it would lead nor what dangers might be in store. After seven days of solitary travel they floated with inexpressible joy on the broad bosom of the Mississippi, June 17, 1673. They continued their lonely voyage along its placid waters until they reached the mouth of the Moingona, where were seen evidences of habitation. Fourteen miles in the interior was a native village. They said they were received most friendly with a calumet, invited into their dwellings, and feasted. They explained their religious doctrines and were sent away with the gift of a calumet or peace pipe embellished with the heads and necks of various colored bright and beautiful birds.

They sailed along their solitary way and were soon rewarded by hearing the rush of the swifter, more turbulent, muddy waters of the Missouri, which seemed from thereon to enhance the speed of the current. They went on past the mouths of the Ohio and the Arkansas, where they found savages who spoke a new tongue and were armed with guns, proof that they had trafficked with the Spaniards from the Gulf of Mexico, or with the English from Virginia. These exhibiting hostility which was only allayed by the peace pipe, they retreated and sailed back up the river. When Marquette reached the Illinois he entered and ascended that river where he beheld the magnificent fertility and coloring inuring to the late summer and early autumn of the extensive plains and vast wooded tracts of Illinois. An easy portage brought him to the Chicago River, a short stream whose waters are now reversed and flow into the Illinois. Some authorities claim Marquette to have been the first white man to set foot upon the site of Chicago (1673). Others[28] state that the French Jesuit Nicholas Perrot and his party of fur traders pitched their tent on its prairies the latter part of 1669.

To Marquette, however, belongs the honor of discovering two very important routes to the Mississippi Valley; the one by way of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, and the other by way of the Illinois. Unfortunately the hardships of this journey undermined his health and the next year (1674) a half hour after he had retired for devotion to a small altar of stones on the banks of a little stream now called by his name, he was found dead. Thus judged by the extent and value of the territory traversed, passed away, at the early age of thirty-one, one of our country’s greatest explorers.