MARQUETTE, JACQUES. - Jesuit, missionary and explorer, b. at Laon on 10 June 1637, d. in present-day Ludington on 18 May 1675. From 1666 he lived in the Indian missions of Canada, first with the Algonquins, then with the Hurons at Trois Rivières and at Sault Ste Marie, and in 1670 at the mission of the Holy Spirit. He possessed six dialects and was greatly beloved by the various tribes.
From as early as 1670 he desired to penetrate into the regions of the Mississippi, beyond the lands already discovered by the French, and he had gathered information about them, especially from the Illinois, farther south, and had also discussed the matter with his superiors and the governor. The latter finally decided upon the expedition, entrusting it to the enterprising Québec merchant L. Jolliet, and assigning M. to him as a companion. The canoes set out from the mission of St. Ignatius on 17 May 1763, skirted the northwestern shores of Lake Michigan and, through Green Bay, the Fox River and Lake Winnebago, entered
Wisconsin, which emptied precisely into the Mississippi, reached on 17 June; then they descended along the broad current as far as the confluence of the Arkansas. For fear of the neighboring Spaniards and of new Indian tribes, Jolliet and M. did not dare to advance farther, and on 17 July they took the return route, going back up the Ohio and the Illinois and reaching Crown Bay and Lake Michigan toward the end of September. While Jolliet continued on to Québec to carry 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; and he ended his life while trying to return to Mackinac, to the mission of St. Ignatius.
The aim of learning whether the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, as the French believed, or farther east into the Gulf of Mexico, had been achieved. During the journey and afterward, M. carefully noted down what he had seen — tribes, places, fauna and flora — and the adventures that had befallen them, deducing from them the prospects for future commerce. Americans have always regarded him as the discoverer of the Mississippi; they gave his name to a city (now also the center of a diocese: "Sault Ste Marie and M."); the Jesuits erected Marquette University in Milwaukee; in 1904 the M.-League arose in New York, an association of laymen to keep alive interest in the Catholic missions among the Redskins and to provide them with the necessary spiritual and material means; in 1887 his statue, the work of the Italian S. Trentanove, was placed in the Capitol in Washington; and other bronze reproductions were placed at Marquette, Michigan and on the island of Mackinac.