It was to this seasoned explorer that the commission was given and he left for the Sault, near which he was told he would find Father Marquette, who would be his companion. Marquette was of a noble family of Laon, a city of Northern France, associated with nearly all the epoch-making incidents in the history of France, and which has been one of the great centres of fighting on the Western Front in the Great War of to-day. His mother was Rose de la Salle of Rheims. Marquette had been in the country about five years, and after two years of training in the mission at Three Rivers had been sent to the remnants of the Huron nation driven north-westward by the Iroquois, until near the western end of Lake Superior they established themselves in a village where they hoped to be far enough away from their great enemy to recover themselves. Hither in the summer came wandering Indians of a tribe called the Illinois, who told Marquette of the great river which flowed through their country, of the fertile lands, and how glad they all would be if he would visit them. After the village was broken up by the Sioux Indians, the Hurons determined to go back to more familiar haunts and settled at Michillimackinac, fifty miles to the south-west of the Sault. Marquette accompanied them and there he was found by Joliet. They spent the winter making their plans for the journey, and in May, 1673, they started westwards with their party of Frenchmen and Indians, through Lake Michigan to Green Bay. Thence up the bay they went and up the Fox River to its source. A short portage over a narrow strip of prairie and they dropped their canoes into water flowing southwards, now the Wisconsin River, and after about 40 leagues they glided out into the great river, the Mississippi, first christened by a religious name, then called by a statesman’s name and finally back to its Indian name, with the significant meaning of “great water.”[9] Down they floated through the land of the buffalo and the wild turkey, until seeing upon the bank traces of men, they landed and came to the villages of the Indian tribe who had invited Marquette to visit them. The Black Gown, the distinctive garb of the Jesuit brotherhood, was at once recognized and here they stayed for some days, exchanging gifts and courtesies and making enquiries about the further reaches of the river. Before leaving these friendly Indian villages the Illinois Indians gave them a calumet, or pipe of peace, as a safeguard for them in their passage through hostile savages, probably just to show to the savages by using their own sign that they were coming in friendship. The calumet used by these Indians was made of a bowl of red stone with a long stick as a stem. This stick was covered along its whole length with heads of birds all coloured like flame, while a bunch of red feathers shaped like a great fan adorned the middle of the stick.