Highlights Archives
Father Marquette Gets a Blog...
... And Wisconsin Gets a Name
Blogs seem to be popping up everywhere. Still, Father Jacques Marquette (1637-1675) is not someone you'd normally associate with the latest trends in technology. The venerated missionary seems an unlikely blogger. But then, he was an unlikely explorer. On May 17, 1673, two weeks shy of his 36th birthday, Marquette set out with Louis Joliet, a 27-year-old philosophy student turned fur trader, on the epoch-making voyage that would make them both famous. Together they were the first Europeans to travel down the Mississippi River. The studious Jesuit scholar was none too robust, however, and the trip turned into his death sentence.
Throughout the summer of 1673 Marquette and Joliet both kept a journal. Joliet's was swept away when his canoe capsized within sight of Montreal the next year; Marquette's was hidden away in an archive and was rediscovered a century and a half later. In it he recorded in delightfully personal terms his impressions of the Wisconsin wilderness, his conversations with Indian leaders, the strange animals and plants he encountered, bizarre petroglyphs, monstrous whirlpools, and a hundred other curiosities passing before his eyes as he and Joliet descended the Wisconsin and the Mississippi.
This summer we're delighted to convert his journal entries to electronic form and stream them out twice a week as a blog from Wisconsin Historical Diaries. In addition to Marquette's own words, running commentary will try to pinpoint the explorers' location, link to other contemporary accounts, explain archaic words and phrases, and offer insights that make reading the journal more fun.
Where were Marquette and Joliet this week, in the year 1673? They had just left a village of 3,000 Indians near modern Berlin, in Green Lake County, and had become the first Europeans to cross the famous portage between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers. Once securely in their canoes again, Marquette noted that "The river on which we embarked is called Meskousing" — thereby christening our state. To see what else he said about it, to learn how "Mescousing" became "Ouisconsin" and finally "Wisconsin," and to discover what the name means, visit Wisconsin's Name at our portal to Topics in Wisconsin History.
You can have each installment of Father Marquette's blog delivered automatically to your home page through an RSS feed, or you can come back and read it at your leisure each week. Either way, we hope you'll revisit the Marquette blog and experience America's heartland in the words of the first Europeans who laid eyes on it.
:: Posted June 6, 2005
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