ome three years earlier
than Joliet, but this is not substantiated. We also reject the belief
that he reached the stream by way of the Chicago portage in 1671.

[Illustration: Totem of the Illinois.]

[1676]

In 1672 Count Frontenac, Governor of New France, despatched Louis Joliet
to discover the Great River. He reached the Strait of Mackinaw in
December, and there Pere Marquette joined him. In May, next year, they
paddled their canoes up the Fox River and tugged them across the portage
into the Wisconsin, which they descended, entering the Father of Waters
June 17, 1673. They floated down to the mouth of the Arkansas and then
returned, their journey back being up the Illinois and Desplaines
Rivers. Joliet gave his name to the peak on the latter stream which the
city of Joliet, Ill., near by, still retains. Joliet arrived at Quebec
in August, 1674, having in four months journeyed over twenty-five
hundred miles.

It thus became known how close the upper waters of the great rivers, St.
Lawrence and Mississippi, were to each other, and that the latter
emptied into the Gulf of Mexico instead of the South Sea (Pacific); yet,
as the Rocky Mountains had not then been discovered, it was for long
believed that some of the western tributaries of the Great River led to
that western ocean.

[Illustration: The Reception of Joliet and Marquette by the Illinois.]

[1682]

In 1676 Raudin, and three years later, Du Lhut, visited the Ojibwas and
Sioux west of Lake Superior. Du Lhut reached the upper waters of the
Mississippi at Sandy Lake. He went there again in 1680. In 1682 La Salle
crossed the Chicago portage and explored the lower Mississippi all the
way to the Gulf, taking possession of the entire valley in the name of
France and naming it Louisiana. Nicholas Perrot travelled by way of the
Fox and Wisconsin Rivers to the upper Mississippi in 1685, and again in
1688. It is in his writings that the word "Chicago" first appears in
literature.

There were thus between the two great valleys, 1, the Superior route; 2,
the Wisconsin and Fox route; 3, the Illinois River route, whether by the
Kankakee, La Salle's way, or by the south branch of the Chicago River,
Joliet's way; and 4, the route by the Wabash and Ohio. The Wabash, too,
could be approached either from Lake Erie or from Lake Michigan, through
St. Joseph's River. At high water, canoes often passed from Lake
Michigan into the Mississippi without portage.

[Illustration