Marquette and Jolliet called the chiefs together and told them that Jolliet was sent by the governor to find new countries, and Marquette had been commissioned of Heaven to preach. Making the chiefs a present, without which they would not have received the talk seriously, the explorers asked for guides to that tributary which was said to run into the great river. The chiefs responded with the gift of a rush mat for Marquette and Jolliet to rest on during their journey, and sent two young Miamis with them. If these kindly Indians disliked to set the expedition further on its way, they said nothing but very polite things about the hardihood of Frenchmen, who could venture with only two canoes, and seven in their party, on unknown worlds. The young Miamis, in a boat of their own, led out the procession the tenth morning of June. Taking up paddles, the voyageurs looked back at an assembled multitude--perhaps the last kindly natives on their perilous way--and at the knoll in the midst of prairies where hospitable rush houses stood and would stand until the inmates took them down and rolled them up to carry to hunting grounds, and at groves dotting those pleasant prairies where guests were abundantly fed. Three leagues up the marshy and oats-choked Fox River, constantly widening to little lakes and receding to a throat of a channel, brought the explorers to the portage, or carrying place. The canoes then had to be unloaded, and both cargo and boats carried overland to a bend of the Miscousing, which was the Indian name for Wisconsin River. "This portage," says a traveler who afterwards followed that way, "is half a league in length, and half of that is a kind of marsh full of mud." In wet seasons the head of Fox River at that time seemed not unlikely to find the Wisconsin, for Marquette has set it down in his recital that the portage was only twenty-seven hundred paces.