Father Marquette

In 1673, a French Jesuit priest and a fur trader set out from the wilds of northern Michigan in two birchbark canoes, seeking a river no European had ever navigated. Father Jacques Marquette carried his breviary and his faith into unknown territory inhabited by peoples whose languages and customs he had spent years learning. Along with Louis Jolliet, he would become the first European to document the upper Mississippi River, traveling over 2,500 miles through a continent that existed beyond European maps. Reuben Gold Thwaites, a distinguished Wisconsin historian, constructs this biography from the missionaries' own reports to Jesuit headquarters in Quebec and Paris. We witness Marquette ministering to the Illini, escaping a murder plot near present-day Chicago, and naming the river "Pekitanoui" before the expedition turned back at the Arkansas settlements, knowing that Spanish soldiers and hostile tribes barred the way to the sea. The book illuminates the geography of the Great Lakes, the cultures of the Fox, Ottawa, and Mississippi tribes, and the daily realities of a 17th-century missionary's life. This is a book for readers who wonder what it meant to step into the unknown with nothing but faith and curiosity.