In the summer of 1673, two now famous Frenchmen and five others who are all but nameless traveled by canoe from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac to central Arkansas on the western bank of the Mississippi River, and then back again. Louis Jolliet was a new sort of Frenchman, a natural born North American, having come into this world in Quebec in 1645, now a fur trader and voyageur. Jacques Marquette was the more usual sort, having been born in France in 1637.  By the time of the expedition Marquette was a Jesuit priest, long known to the nations of North America as a “Black Robe.”

The episode begins with an overview of New France in the years between Samuel de Champlain's death in 1635 and 1661, when it languished because the Five Nations of the Iroquois had it entirely bottled up. The expedition was a marker of New France's rapid expansion after King Louis XIV began to rule in his own right that year.

Along the way, our heroes become the first Europeans to visit Iowa (Go Hawks!), see some extraordinary painted monsters, learn the importance of the calumet, and find a short portage in the eastern continental divide at a place soon to be called Chicago.

Map of the route (visible in the shownotes for the episode on the website), credit Illinois State Museum

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition

Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf)

Piasa "monsters" (Wikipedia)

Carignan-Salières Regiment (Wikipedia)

Beaver Wars (Wikipedia)