European explorers searched in vain for a northwest waterway through the North American continent. French traders living in the northeast heard of a great river that the natives called Messi-Sipi to the west. Was this river the Northwest Passage? Or was the Messi-Sipi really the Rio Grande, the river that Hernando de Soto had discovered a century earlier? That’s what Father Jacques Marquette and his companion explorer Louis Jolliet hoped to discover in 1673. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely explorer and hero than Father Jacques Marquette, yet his gentle and compassionate nature made him the perfect ambassador to the friendly native peoples they met along the banks of the great Mississippi River.
This biorgraphy is the result of careful investigation into every phase of Father Marquette's brief life, a few days short of thirty-eight years, 1637-1675. The reader may learn here for...
Father Marquette's Journal
A biography of the French Catholic priest who arrived in Canada in 1666 to serve as a missionary, and became part of the first group of white men to travel down the Mississippi River and back.
In 1673, an unlikely pair set off to see whether the Mississippi River flowed into the Pacific Ocean.
More than two centuries later, popular children's author Laura Ingalls Wilder chronicled nearly disastrous encounters that her father and aunt had with these large wild cats who stalked animals and humans alike, and terrorized ...
A biography of the French explorers whose primary goal was to find the Northwest Passage, but who made their mark on history by exploring and charting the Mississippi River.
An account of the expedition led by two Frenchmen, a soldier and a priest, to explore the Mississippi River in the late seventeenth century.
Father Pere Marquette, S.J., a Jesuit Priest in the early 1600's on the North American Continent, gained the confidence of the Indians, not only with his Catholic Religion, but his wisdom and understanding of the American Indian, and his ...
Through monuments and artwork, Ruth D. Nelson retells the story of the 17th-century French Jesuit missionary-explorer.