JESUITICA: an unstoppable Jesuit

The name Marquette  crops up a lot in the Mid-West of USA, carried by a city on Lake Superior, a County around it, and a Jesuit University in Milwaukee. It comes from Jacques Marquette (1637-1675), a French Jesuit who, starting from Quebec, mastered the Huron language, and heard from the Iroquois about a big river to the south – the Mississippi. Together with Louis Joliet he canoed and portaged his way from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Arkansas River, and then back again to Lake Michigan. He was the first European to winter in what is now Chicago.  He is remembered as one of the great explorers of the mid-West, a man of the frontiers, who was only 37 when he died on the shore of Lake Michigan. The photo features his statue on the Marquette University campus.