104 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



in Joliet, the officer. These explorers were cultivated men, and 

 experienced observers. For five years Marquette had been a 

 western pioneer, partly in Wisconsin, and Joliet, while voyaging 

 on Lake Superior some time before, had also probably trod Wis- 

 consin soil. Prom Indian reports they had drawn a map of 

 the region they purposed to penetrate, and kept it at hand as they 

 rowed up Fox river, threaded the marshy maze at the grand 

 divide and carrying place — now Portage City — and among herds 

 of elk and deer, floated down the Wisconsin to the great river, 

 Eeaching this grand goal on the seventeenth of June, they glided 

 with the current of the Mississippi for a month, and probably to 

 the latitude of Memphis, which, according to their belief, was no 

 more than two degrees north of the Mexican Gulf. 



On the return voyage Joliet wintered at Green Bay, where he 

 had found many good Christians the spring before. The next 

 season, when he was about to land at Montreal, his boat capsized 

 and he was only rescued himself after being four hours in the 

 water. His journal was lost — a sad loss for Wisconsin, which 

 was thus bereaved of the wayside notes of the earliest traveler 

 throughout its whole breadth — a record which who would will- 

 ingly let drown ? 



After all who knows but Joliet's loss may have turned out for 

 our gain? and will still? Who shall count the investigators 

 that, mourning for Joliet's misfortune, have thus, or shall, become 

 doubly zealous to gather up and commit to the custody of our 

 Historical Society — or of the art preservative of all arts — 

 every fragment of our annals, letting nothing — no fraction — be 

 lost? 



Throughout the last third of the seventeenth century and in 

 all generations since, priests of the Catholic faith may be traced 

 in or near Wisconsin. There Allouez labored for a quarter of a 

 century onward from 1665. In 1677 Frontenac speaks of the 

 Green Bay mission as no new thing. All tribes near that Bay 

 are mentioned in the missionary report for 1658. In 1680 and 

 for seven years thereafter, Enjalran was stationed there. He had 

 been preceded there by Fathers Andre and Albanel, and within a 

 decade was followed by ISTouvel, and three others whose names 



