Show Notes
In the summer of 1673, two now famous Frenchmen and five others who are all but nameless traveled by canoe from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac to central Arkansas on the western bank of the Mississippi River, and then back again. Louis Jolliet was a new sort of Frenchman, a natural born North American, having come into this world in Quebec in 1645, now a fur trader and voyageur. Jacques Marquette was the more usual sort, having been born in France in 1637. By the time of the expedition Marquette was a Jesuit priest, long known to the nations of North America as a “Black Robe.”
The episode begins with an overview of New France in the years between Samuel de Champlain's death in 1635 and 1661, when it languished because the Five Nations of the Iroquois had it entirely bottled up. The expedition was a marker of New France's rapid expansion after King Louis XIV began to rule in his own right that year.
Along the way, our heroes become the first Europeans to visit Iowa (Go Hawks!), see some extraordinary painted monsters, learn the importance of the calumet, and find a short portage in the eastern continental divide at a place soon to be called Chicago.
Map of the route (visible in the shownotes for the episode on the website), credit Illinois State Museum
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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)
Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition
Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf)
Piasa "monsters" (Wikipedia)
Carignan-Salières Regiment (Wikipedia)
Beaver Wars (Wikipedia)
More from The History of the Americans
This factoid-rich episode is a major rewriting of one of the earliest and most popular episodes of the podcast, Introduction to the Columbian Exchange, which originally aired on February 12, 2021 and then again in a revised form as episode #166 on October 11, 2024. This version includes lots of new aspects of the Columbian Exchange, and more recent scholarship on several of the topics discussed in the old episodes.
It is the 1670s. Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, having returned from exploring south of Lake Erie, made common cause with the flamboyant and visionary new governor of New France, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac. Together they hatch a plan to get permission from Louis XIV to build a string of forts in the Great Lakes region and explore and settle the Mississippi River Valley. La Salle travels to France twice, and enlists the King’s first minister, the great Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to support a mission to find the mouth of the Mississippi so that France might establish a base there for the purpose of better harrassing Spain. Along the way La Salle builds a huge fort at the eastern end of Lake … Ontario, survives the second of five assassination attempts, and Frontenac demonstrates a great flair for diplomacy with the Iroquois.
It is time to get back to New France and the exploration of the middle of this beautiful country of ours. Our vehicle will René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, known to both his contemporaries and to history as “La Salle.” You’ve heard his name, especially if you live within driving distance of the Mississippi, but do you know what he actually did? This and the next few episodes tell La Salle’s remarkable story.
It is the spring of 1681. The “exclusion crisis,” an insurgency in Parliament proposing to exclude the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, from the line of succession, was reaching its climax. Even so, on March 4 King Charles II found time to grant William Penn a vast territory extending from the west bank of the Delaware River to a longitude equal to the then western border of Maryland. It was now William Penn’s role, as sole proprietor of Pennsylvania, to fill it up with people. He would do a remarkable job, especially under the challenging circumstances, relying heavily on his … pen. Along the way he would write a practical and moral defense of English colonialism at a time when many of the movers and shakers in London were arguing against it.
With Sir William Penn’s passing in 1671, and his deathbed admonition that his son stay true to himself, young William Penn was both financially independent and liberated from worrying that his own activism on behalf of the Quakers would hurt his family. William now owned lands that generated income of around 2000 pounds a year, or roughly the wages of 100 laborers of the time.