The next stage of their journey brought them to a village just opposite the mouth of the Arkansas River. Here they were received in great state by the Arkansas Indians, notice of their coming having been sent ahead by their new friends. There was the usual speechmaking, accompanied by interminable feasting, in which a roasted dog held the place of honor. There was a young Indian who spoke Illinois well, and through him Marquette was able to preach, as well as to gain information about the river below. He was told that the shores were infested by fierce savages armed with guns. By this time it was evident that nothing was to be gained by going further. The explorers had ascertained beyond dispute that the Mississippi emptied its waters, not directly into the Atlantic, or into the Pacific, but into the Gulf of Mexico. If they went further, they ran the risk of being killed by Indians or falling into the hands of Spaniards. In either case the result of their discovery would be lost. Therefore they resolved to return to Canada. Just two months from their starting and one month from their {183} discovery of the Great Water they began their return. Their route was a different one from the original, for on reaching the mouth of the Illinois River they entered and ascended it. On the way, they stopped at a famous village of the Illinois tribe called Kaskaskia. Thence they were guided by a band of young warriors through the route up the Des Plaines River and across the portage to Lake Michigan. Coasting its shore, they reached Green Bay, after an absence of four months. Thus ended a memorable voyage. The travelers had paddled their canoes more than two thousand, five hundred miles, had explored two of the three routes leading into the Mississippi, and had followed the Great Water itself to within seven hundred miles of the ocean. They had settled one of the knotty geographical points of their day, that of the river's outlet. All this they had done in hourly peril of their lives. Though they experienced no actual violence, there was no time at which they were not in danger. In the end the voyage cost Marquette his life, for its hardships and exposures planted in his system the germs of a disease from which he {184} never fully recovered, and from which he died, two years later, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Joliet met with a peculiar misfortune. At the Lachine Rapids, just above Montreal, almost at the very end of his voyage of thousands of miles, his canoe was upset, two men and his little Indian boy were drowned, and his box of papers, including his precious journal, was lost. Undoubtedly his daily record of the voyage would have been very valuable, for he was a man of scholarship as well as of practical ability. But its accidental loss gave the greater fame to Marquette, whose account was printed. In recent years, however, he has been recognized as an equal partner with the noble priest in the great achievement.