MARQUETTE, JACQUES (1637-1675), French Jesuit missionary and explorer, re-discoverer (with Louis Joliet) of the Mississippi, was born at Laon, went to Canada in 1666, and was sent in 1668 to the upper lakes of the St. Lawrence. In 1673 he was chosen with Joliet for the exploration of the Mississippi, of which the French had begun to gain knowledge from Indians of the central prairies. The route taken lay up the north-west side of Lake Michigan, up Green bay and Fox river, across Lake Winnebago, over the portage to the Wisconsin river, and down the latter into the Mississippi, which was descended to within 700 m. of the sea, at the confluence of the Arkansas river. Enter ing the Mississippi on May 17, Joliet and his companion turned back on July 17 and returned to Green bay and Michigan (by way of the Illinois river) at the end of Sept. 1673. On the journey Marquette fell ill of dysentery; and a fresh excursion which he undertook to plant a mission among the Indians of the Illinois river in the winter of 1674-75 proved fatal. He died on
his way home to St. Ignace on the banks of a small stream (the lesser and older Marquette river) which enters the east side of Lake Michigan in Marquette bay (May 18, 1675). His name is now borne by a larger watercourse which flows some distance from the scene of his death.
See Marquette'c Journal, first published in Melchissedech Theve not's Recueil de Voyages (1681), and fully given in Martin's Relations inedites, and in Shea's Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley (1852) ; cf. also Pierre Margry's Decouvertes . . . des Francais dans l'ouest et dans le sud de l'Amerique septentrionale (16r4-1754, Memoires et documents originaux (1875), containing Joliet's Details and Relations; Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) ; Agnes Repplier, Pere Marquette, Priest, Pioneer and Adventurer (1929).