spoke Illinois well, and through him
Marquette was able to preach, as well as to gain information about the
river below. He was told that the shores were infested by fierce savages
armed with guns.

By this time it was evident that nothing was to be gained by going
further. The explorers had ascertained beyond dispute that the
Mississippi emptied its waters, not directly into the Atlantic, or into
the Pacific, but into the Gulf of Mexico. If they went further, they ran
the risk of being killed by Indians or falling into the hands of
Spaniards. In either case the result of their discovery would be lost.
Therefore they resolved to return to Canada. Just two months from their
starting and one month from their {183} discovery of the Great Water they
began their return.

Their route was a different one from the original, for on reaching the
mouth of the Illinois River they entered and ascended it. On the way,
they stopped at a famous village of the Illinois tribe called Kaskaskia.
Thence they were guided by a band of young warriors through the route up
the Des Plaines River and across the portage to Lake Michigan. Coasting
its shore, they reached Green Bay, after an absence of four months.

Thus ended a memorable voyage. The travelers had paddled their canoes
more than two thousand, five hundred miles, had explored two of the three
routes leading into the Mississippi, and had followed the Great Water
itself to within seven hundred miles of the ocean. They had settled one
of the knotty geographical points of their day, that of the river's
outlet. All this they had done in hourly peril of their lives. Though
they experienced no actual violence, there was no time at which they were
not in danger.

In the end the voyage cost Marquette his life, for its hardships and
exposures planted in his system the germs of a disease from which he
{184} never fully recovered, and from which he died, two years later, on
the shore of Lake Michigan.

Joliet met with a peculiar misfortune. At the Lachine Rapids, just above
Montreal, almost at the very end of his voyage of thousands of miles, his
canoe was upset, two men and his little Indian boy were drowned, and his
box of papers, including his precious journal, was lost. Undoubtedly his
daily record of the voyage would have been very valuable, for he was a
man of scholarship as well as of practical ability. But its accidental
loss gave the greater fame to Marquette, whose acc