The art of that valley has sought to reproduce or idealize the
faces of these pioneers. The more eloquent, visible memorial would be the
crude map from the hand of the priest Jacques Marquette, son of Rose de la
Salle of the royal city of Rheims.
Of his setting out again for the Illinois, where he purposed establishing
a mission, of his spending the winter, ill, in a hut on the Chicago
portage path, of his brief visit to the Illinois, of his journey
northward, of his death by the way, and of the Indian procession that bore
his bones up the lake to Point St. Ignace--of all this I may not speak in
this chapter.
Here let me say only the word of tribute that comes to him out of his own
time, as the first stories of history came, being handed down from
generation to generation by word of mouth, till a poet or a historian
should make them immortal. The story of Marquette I had known for many
years from the blind Parkman, but not long ago I met one day an Indian
boy, with some French blood of the far past in his veins, the son of a
Chippewa chief, a youth who had never read Parkman or Winsor but who knew
the story of Marquette better than I, for his grandmother had told him
what she had heard from her grandmother, and she in turn from her mother
or grandmother, of listening to Marquette speak upon the shores of
Superior, of going with other French and Indians on that missionary
journey to the Illinois to prepare food for him, and of hearing the
mourning among the Indians when long after his death the report of his end
reached their lodges.
Pages:
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81