MARQUETTE, Jacques. - Jesuit, missionary, and explorer, born at Laon on 10 June 1637, died at Ludington (now Mackinac) on 18 May 1675. From 1666 he worked in the Indian missions of Canada, first among the Algonquins, then among the Hurons at Trois Rivières and Sault Ste Marie, and in 1670 at the mission of the Holy Spirit. He mastered six dialects and was greatly beloved by the various tribes.
As early as 1670 he desired to penetrate into the regions of the Mississippi beyond the lands already discovered by the French, and had gathered information about it, especially from the Illinois to the south, and had also discussed it with his superiors and the governor. Finally, the expedition was decided upon, entrusted to the active trader of Quebec, L. Jolliet, with M. as his companion. The canoes left from the mission of St Ignatius on 17 May 1673, hugged the northwestern shores of Lake Michigan, and through Green Bay, the Fox River, and Lake Winnebago entered Wisconsin, which indeed flowed into the Mississippi, reached on 17 June; then they descended the broad current to the confluence of the Arkansas. Fearful of the nearby Spaniards and of new Indian tribes, Jolliet and M. dared not go further, and on 17 July they began the return journey, ascending the Ohio and Illinois rivers and reaching Green Bay and Lake Michigan by the end of September. While Jolliet continued on to Quebec to report the news, M. fell ill with dysentery near present-day Chicago. An attempt to found a mission among the Illinois Indians in the winter of 1674–75 proved fatal to him; he ended his life while trying to return to Mackinac, to the mission of St Ignatius.
The question of whether the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of California, as the French believed, or further east into the Gulf of Mexico had been answered. M. carefully recorded during and after the journey all that he had seen—tribes, places, fauna and flora, and the adventures encountered—and deduced from them the prospects for future trade. Americans have always regarded him as the discoverer of the Mississippi; they gave his name to a city (now also the seat of a diocese: “Sault Ste Marie and M.”); the Jesuits erected Marquette University in Milwaukee; in 1904 the Marquette League arose in New York, an association of laypeople to keep alive interest in Catholic missions among Native Americans and to provide necessary spiritual and material means; in 1887 his statue, by the Italian S. Trentanove, was placed in the Capitol in Washington; and other bronze reproductions were placed in Marquette, Michigan, and on Mackinac Island.