page_title: Louis Jolliet
section_title: Exploration of the Upper Mississippi
hierarchical_section_title: Louis Jolliet / Exploration of the Upper Mississippi
caption_attribution_description: English: ca. 1681 map of the Mississippi River system, based on the 1673 expediton of Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet. This is one of many early maps made based on their descriptions of the interior of North America.
context_page_description: Louis Jolliet was a French-Canadian explorer known for his discoveries in North America. Jolliet and Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, a Catholic priest and missionary, were the first non-Natives to explore and map the Mississippi River in 1673.
context_section_description: While Hernando de Soto was the first European to make official note of the Mississippi River by discovering its southern entrance in 1541, Jolliet and Marquette were the first to locate its upper reaches, and travel most of its length, about 130 years later. De Soto had named the river Rio del Espiritu Santo, but tribes along its length called it variations "Mississippi", meaning "Great River" in the Algonquian languages.
  On May 17, 1673, Jolliet and Marquette departed from St. Ignace, Michigan with two canoes and five other voyageurs of French-Indian ancestry. The group sailed to Green Bay. They then paddled upstream (southward) on the Fox River to the site now known as Portage, Wisconsin. There, they portaged a distance of slightly less than two miles through marsh and oak forest to the Wisconsin River. Europeans eventually built a trading post at that shortest convenient portage between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins. On June 17, the canoeists ventured onto the Mississippi River near present-day Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
  The Jolliet-Marquette expedition traveled down the Mississippi to within 435 miles (700 km) of the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back north at the mouth of the Arkansas River. By this point, they had encountered natives carrying European goods and worried about a possible hostile encounter with explorers or colonists from Spain. The voyageurs then followed the Mississippi back to the mouth of the Illinois River, which friendly natives told them was a shorter route back to the Great Lakes. Following the Illinois river upstream, they then turned up its tributary the Des Plaines River near modern-day Joliet, Illinois. They then continued up the Des Plaines River and portaged their canoes and gear at the Chicago Portage. They then followed the Chicago River downstream until they reached Lake Michigan near the location of modern-day Chicago. Father Marquette stayed at the mission of St. Francis Xavier at the southern end of Green Bay, which they reached in August. Joliet returned to Quebec to relate the news of their discoveries.
caption: Ca. 1681 map of Marquette and Jolliet's 1673 expedition.
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