The encouragement the intendant procured for the enterprise fairly entitles
him to share its glory with those who so ably carried it out; for we cannot
attach too much honor to the memory of statesmen who turn to account their
opportunities of patronizing useful adventure. M. Joliet received in
property the island of Anticosti as a reward for his Western discoveries
and for an exploratory voyage he made to Hudson's Bay. He was also
nominated hydrographer-royal, and got enfeoffed in a seigniory near
Montreal. Expecting to reap great advantage from Anticosti as a fishing and
fur-trading station, he built a fort thereon; but after living some time on
the island with his family, he was obliged to abandon it. His patronymic
was adopted as the name of a mountain situated near the Rivere des Plaines,
a tributary of the Illinois; and Joliet is also the appellation, given in
his honor, of a town near Chicago.
Pere Marquette proceeded to Green Bay by Lake Michigan, in 1673; but
he returned soon afterward and resumed his missionary labors among the
Illinois Indians. Being then at war with the Miamis, they came to him
asking for gunpowder. "I have come among you," said the apostolic priest,
"not to aid you to destroy your enemies' bodies, but to help you to save
your own souls. Gunpowder I cannot give you, but my prayers you can have
for your conversion to that religion which gives glory to God in the
highest and on earth peace to all men." Upon one occasion he preached
before two thousand warriors of their nation, besides the women and
children present. His bodily powers, however, were now wellnigh exhausted.
He decided to return to Mackinac; but while coasting the lower shores of
Lake Michigan, feeling that his supreme hour was nigh, he caused the people
in his canoe to set him ashore. Having obtained for him the shelter of
a hut formed of branches, he there died the death of the righteous. His
companions interred his remains near the river which yet bears his name,
and set up a crucifix to mark the spot. Thus ended, amid the solitudes
of the Western wilderness, the valuable existence of one whose name, too
little known to his own age, will be remembered when hundreds of those
which, however loudly sounded in the present, shall have passed into utter
oblivion.[1]
[Footnote 1: Guerin observes that, according to some authorities, La
Salle, some time between the years 1669 and 1671, descended the
Mississippi, as far as the Arkansas, by the river Ohio. There can be no
doubt that the story is a mere figment.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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