86 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



historian, J. G. Shea, pointed out in a volume of Jesuit Relations 

 the following words, written from Quebec to France, in 1640, by 

 Father Le Jeune : " M. Nicollet, who has penetrated into the 

 most distant regions, has assured me that if he had pushed on 

 three days longer down a great river which issues from the second 

 lake of the Hurons (evidently meaning Lake Michigan), he would 

 have found the sea." 



The word Mississippi, meaning "great water," was ambiguous, 

 and, though really denoting a river, might well be mistaken for a 

 sea, especially by an adventurer who knew the sea to be in that 

 direction, and who believed it by no means remote. 



On the strength of this Jesuit testimony, Parkman remarks : 

 " As early as 1639, Nicollet ascended the Grreen Bay of Lake 

 Michigan and crossed to the waters of the Mississippi." This was 

 within nine years after the founding of Boston, which claims to be 

 of all northern cities the most ancient. 



But in the lowest deep a lower deep still opens. According to 

 the latest researches of Benjamin Suite, Nicollet was in Wiscon- 

 sin four or five years earlier than 1689. He started west from 

 Canada in 1684, and returned the year following. The best 

 Canadian investigators assure us that he never traveled west 

 again, but, marrying and becoming interpreter at Three Rivers, 

 below Montreal, he remained there or thereabouts thenceforward 

 till his death. All agree that Nicollet visited Wisconsin. If it 

 is proved that he was not here in 1689 or afterward, he must have 

 been here before. There is some reason for holding that Nicollet 

 had penetrated into Wisconsin at a date still earlier than 1634. 



Chicago is not known to have been visited by any European 

 before 1673. In the autumn of that year Marquette, returning 

 from his voyage down the Mississippi, was conducted from the 

 Illinois river by Indians to that spot as affording the shortest port- 

 age to Lake Michigan. The next year that missionary, on a coast- 

 ing tour along the lake, after a voyage of forty-one days from 

 Grreen Bay, reached Chicago, — which was then uninhabited. As 

 sickness disabled him from going further, his Indian oarsman 

 built him a hut, and two French traders who already had a post a 

 few leagues inland, ministered to him till the next spring, when 



