At the end of this beautiful sheet of water was an Indian village, where now is the town of Oshkosh. Here were many redskins, Mascoutens, Miamis and Kickapoos, some of whom had migrated thither from Virginia and Ohio. Pere Marquette was greeted hospitably, for many of these Indians were Christians and had erected a handsome cross in the center of their town, adorned with skins of the fox and the beaver, with red belts, bows and arrows, all offerings to the Great Manitou, or God of all Gods. [Illustration: MARQUETTE AND JOLIET DISCOVERING THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER] The wandering priest conducted religious services, then asked his hearers for two guides to pilot them to the mighty river, which he heard was to the westward. Joyfully the red men gave him two Miami braves, who, leading him to the branches of the upper Fox, showed him where to take to the land and portage across country to the head-waters of the _Weskonsing_, now the Wisconsin River. The birch-bark boats were soon floating past virgin forests, in which robins and cat-birds caroled songs of welcome to these, the first white men who had ever sailed past upon the surface of the stream, The Miami guides now departed and the adventurers went forward alone. For seven days the paddles drove the shallow canoes down the slow-moving Wisconsin, and then, upon the morning of the eighth day, the waters widened and the _couriers de bois_ with their venturesome man-of-God suddenly paddled into the muddied current of the mighty _Missi-sepi_, or Great River. It was a point where the Father of Waters was a mile across and was fifty-three feet deep, so, as Pere Marquette gazed upon the turbid current, he had “a joy which he could not express.” For days he had journeyed westward to view the fabled river, and now he saw that wonderful stream of which the wandering fur traders and redskins had told him at the far distant mission of St. Ignace. It was the tenth of June. Marquette had left the quiet mission on May the seventeenth, nearly a month before this; the journey, so far, had been pleasant, but what lay beyond? Hostile Indians, fever, treacherous currents, death in the stream and death upon the shore! Yet, on, on, went Pere Marquette until he had reached the mouth of the Arkansas. Here he halted, for he believed that he was within three days’ journey of the ocean. The good priest was feverish, for the malarial mosquito hovered over the yellow current of the Mississippi then, even as he does now. Yet, what cared he? His work had been well done and he had added much to the glory of France and to the renown of the Jesuit brotherhood.