At length Talon, seconding Colbert’s views of extending the empire of France and the sphere of Jesuit missions, deputed Marquette to the welcome business of exploration. Before he set out, however, he had collected the scattered remains of one branch of the Hurons at the Point of St. Ignatius, on the northern shore of the peninsula of Michigan, where a chapel was built and a mission established. This settlement was long maintained “as a key to the west, and a convenient rendezvous of the remote Algonquins, to whom the French gave protection; and Marquette thus gained a place also as one of the founders of Michigan.”[10] While Marquette was thus occupied, Allouez and Dablon explored Eastern Wisconsin and the north of Illinois, preaching the religion of the cross among the Mascoutins, Kickapoos and Miamis. Allouez alone extended his pilgrimage among the tribes of the Fox Indians who inhabit the region around the river of that name. The Potawatomies, among whom Marquette dwelt, heard with amaze of his intended exploration of the “Great River,” or the “Father of Rivers,” as it was also poetically called, and used their utmost efforts to discourage him. “Those distant, nations,” they told him, “never spared the stranger; their mutual wars filled their borders with bands of warriors; besides which the Great River abounded in monsters, which devoured both men and canoes; while the excessive heats caused death.” Marquette was not discouraged; “I shall gladly lay down my life for the salvation of souls,” said he. Marquette, accompanied by Joliet a trader of Quebec, five other Frenchmen and two Algonquin guides, paddled up Green Bay in birch-bark canoes; then ascending Fox River crossed the portage to the Wisconsin, where in a beautiful region dwelt the friendly Kickapoos, Mascoutins and Miamis, to whom Allouez had preached with success. A council of the old men was called to receive the strangers; and the two guides left them, from fear of the Sioux and the fabulous terrors of the region into which they were venturing. And now, on the tenth of June, 1673, Marquette, Joliet and their French companions, being, as Marquette himself says, “left alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence,” embarked on the Wisconsin, and sailed “between alternate prairies and hill-sides, without seeing a single Indian; and for the first time beholding herds of buffalo, the lowings of which and the splash of their oars, were the only sounds which broke the silence of the primeval wilderness. Thus proceeded they for seven days, when they happily entered the Great River, with a joy that cannot be expressed.” So far the object of their mission was accomplished. And now the two birch-bark canoes, raising their sails, floated down the magnificent river unconscious into what regions it would lead them.