>> coming up,laura chmielewski frenches the 1963 exhibition led by desolate mesentery -- my desolate missionary jacques marquette. she is the "jacques marquette and louis jolliet -- exploration, encounter and the french new world author of "jacques marquette and louis jolliet -- exploration, encounter and the french new -- she is the author of "jacques marquette and louis jolliet -- exploration, encounter and the french new world." mr. osborn: good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. david, the manager. we are open every saturday. something going on every week. today, we are happy to have back

with us a professor who is professor of history in suny. she is been here six times. it is a pleasure to have her here. she has had terrific talks exploring early american , history. today she will talk to us about in a book.oming up jacques marquette and louis jolliet and their explorations and what they found in their expectations in explorations. how did or did not correspond with their expectations. i am sure it will be interesting. at the end, we will take questions. thank you for coming back again. come on over. [applause] thank you,lewski:

david for having me here again. , i have always so happy when i'm here. my family affectionately knows the talk as my annual. it is an annual everyone looks forward to. i appreciate the opportunity. i should explain how this came about. he contacts me about speaking here, it goes something like this, can you give a talk on x and i say, not in the detail you would be happy with, but i can connect it to a, b, and c. we have a negotiation and something comes out that is the talk for the year. this year i was grateful to david because he gave me the opportunity to talk about something i've spoken about before.

i've had discussions with this group about borderlands and frontiers, the colonial empire and interesting things that came out of that relationship. he gave me the opportunity to talk about a book project near and dear to my heart. i hammered out this book on jacques marquette and louis jolliet. the book bears that title with exploration, encounter, and the french new world. it will come out in november of this year. the indexing and designing of the cover and so on are coming to an end. i am looking forward to it coming to fruition. i wanted to give you an idea of why this book is coming out in the first place. it is part of a series.

it is called "historical americans." the goal of this project came out where all kinds of projects start. it is the reg out rooms or restaurant or bar associated with one of the big academic conferences. this was the society of the historians of the early american republic, where i met the editor. he said, we need early people for this expository biography series that drills down to robust history and he said, can you do a spaniard? i said, no. he said, what can you do? i thought about it and said here we are in saint louis. -- we are in st. louis, once a seat of the colonial empire.

i work on no one as closely as the new world jesuits. i think it is synergy here. so, i pitched the idea of a dual biography of jacques marquette , a priest who lived in the 17th century. explorationner in louis jolliet. studies ofs of french, i cannot figure out the pronunciation of the t's. my pronunciation came from the blues brothers where they mention the prison that was named in honor of the explorer, talk about dubious honors. this was what i talked about an iran with it. this is not only a geographical piece of people like chavez, laura ingalls wilder, woody

laura ingalls wilder, woody guthrie, but it is kind of about the midwestern and jesuit story -- but it brought the midwestern and jesuit story that needed to be told. with great excitement, i worked on that for a number of years. we are in an area that has been close to new rochelle. new rochelle is obviously a town of -- westchester right so the importance of new rochelle stands out. it was very much a periphery of the french north american experience of the 17th and 18th century. new rochelle was founded by french huguenot, that is french calvinists, who were not not

-- you are not -- who were not permitted to settle it in french canada itself. that was reserved for catholics. the reason i am bringing this up because there was a big french world out there. anyone who knows anything about american history knows that is a big french colonial world out there. in the 17th century, very evolving, and the product of competing visions. they include relationships with native americans, industry and trade, and colonial administrative structure as well as religious issues and how religion would play a part in this french colonial enterprise. it is a larger french world i am addressing today.

the fact that it is briefly made larger by the workouts jacques -- by the work of jacques -- by jacques marquette and louis jolliet. let me talk about what they were doing in the 17th century. i have some slides prepared today, but we are having technical difficulties. david prepared this flyer and happen to include two images i planned to talk about. it is a statue of louis jolliet. and an image of jacques marquette that is not drawn from my. we know it is not drawn from my. odd tonsure. we don't have an image we can rely on, but we do not know what either of these men looked like.

-- these men look like. we have no real record of their physical appearances, but we do know their backgrounds and their backgrounds were fascinating. when we think of a marquette we think of almost this prototype of a saint to going out into the wilderness to bring souls to french catholicism and spread the influence of france. other historical camps will see it differently. it is the spread of european hegemony, opening a door slightly and gets kicked open with the arrival of europeans, who forged this path westward. that is marquette in a nutshell. trapper, what for is to be said about him? buckskin?

something with tobacco, what have you. about for, trappers, traders, are a rough group of people who spread the influence of new france, but spread it through taking on many relationships with native american women throughout the areas where they were trapping fur. so that relationship is also is kind of under scrutiny. in actuality, the two men were far more complex. jacques marquette was born in leon, france. he is the son of a wealthy french family. family had the habit of getting into trouble and out of trouble richard then before and more powerful -- out of trouble richer than before and more

powerful. this had been the marquette family story for three centuries. they had important friends, inroads with rich and aristocratic houses. they were well known and wealthy, prestigious, married into equally prestigious families, thus increasing their wealth. at an early age, jacques marquette has a great deal of piety. his childhood has been inflected by the fact france is sending over missionaries, jesuits are being consumed by literate french readership. it certainly would have been the market family. young marquette seems very moved by this. he seems to be the child in the family who was singled out for advanced education. all of these children were likely educated.

we know he had two sisters who andme religious sisters educated as such. takens family would have education of their children quite seriously. and he is the one who moves on, not the one destined to take on the family name but the one destined to go in a different religious direction. his writings, but we know of them, are inflected with a good deal of humor. he is struggling to understand the world around him, sometimes in a very humorous way. i will talk about that more later on. he is someone who is quite desperate to be a missionary. he is also someone who from the -- who from the evidence that exists, seems to suffer from some sort of chronic ailments. if one is to go back and look at

records, it was said he died of typhus, i do not know. even when he was the jesuits lasted, --was a so and was scholastic he was suffering from some rain that chronically upset his digestive system. crohn's disease, something of that nature, we do not know but we do know it was mysterious enough for the jesuits to hold off on sending him to the new world. say, either you are not physiologically ready to take on the demands of what you want to propose -- of what you propose to do. he pushes and pushes, this is what he wants to do. it leads to my last statement last him, he is one of the , of what i perceive to be, the jesuit marder generation. they are willing to die in the

name of spreading their faith. generation, i have spoken about before, maybe not so much. they are political players and they want to shape policy but he martyr's impulse to him. he dies in his mid-30's, a year after the famous exploration. he got his wish. he died among native people , spreading the gospel. jolliet is fascinating himself. he is not this daniel boone we may think of. is like jacques marquette, born into an elite family. their father is a real right.

right. wield it might sound humble, but it was a skilled trade. born in quebec and 6045, born to a family -- born in quebec in and isorn into a family singled out. dies when he is very young. oh boy, that is really difficult in the 17th century, to lose your father, who is a protector of one's family but no. because his father had a trade, his mother is a marriageable prospect. she married up several times. each time after she widowed, she

marry someone else who is even wealthier and more prestigious and brings more money into the relationship. her last husband happen to be a woodward himself. himself.a widower they had many children together. louis jolliet ends up being a stepbrother to multiple siblings who were half native american. is a well-connected young man. trapper, he was a superb keyboard player. he was a harpsichord is and an organist -- a harpsichordist and an organist. he provided the music. it cuts across the grain of the fur trappers.

it is not him. he is in a vicious man -- he is an ambitious man. he really knows the trade of for from the ground up. where did he learn it? he had an older brother. trappere of the master and traders. it seemed like louis jolliet was so intrigued by his brother's life and business. it entices them to leave quebec and learn the business. brother, a married man, who children never comes back. he disappears into the

wilderness. in 1704.thing happens we have no idea where he died. we have no idea where he died. he said lee never return to the back -- return to quebec. that is a sad fate for a man who chose this profession. sometimes, you just die somewhere and you are never heard from again. that was certainly the case of at least two of the sons from this family. so, i hope i kind of complicates the story of where the two men came from. one, the chronically ill frenchman who really wants to die as a missionary and the other is this deeply ambitious , skilled, literate man, who knows the fur trade and everything about the management

of quebec as well. about jacques marquette and louis jolliet. we always talk about louis jolliet first. there were more memorials to jacques marquette than louis jolliet. in actuality, the leader of this exploration we're going to talk about is louis jolliet. he was the one deputized to explore this large mysterious river and to find out what is there. is this the northwest passage? is this the fabled waterway that cuts through the entire continent and leads to them for -- to the vermillion or the south sea? is this something the french could control and build an

empire off of? would it that be terrific? let's get an answer to it. flex anch government expedition to explore this river. louis jolliet knows he can do it alone. he has the obvious choice because of his intelligence, knowledge of the landscape, and connections. he chooses as his travel partner -- he inquires about the jacques marquette, who is a known quantity at this point. he is very zealous, very active, immediately heads west to the great lakes region. for louis jolliet, this is the kind of energy desired. i have the knowledge, this man has the desire to go, he also has the connectivity with native american groups, he is been

working among native american groups for about eight years at at this point, so this is the ideal partner for me. the jesuits automatically agree. he is young, if he does suffer from a chronic disease and things like it has been in remission for a while, so he seems capable of making the journey and he definitely wants to go. the men meet one another in the early winter of 1673 at a mission. it is on mackinac island. they immediately like one another. it is clear they can work with one another and well complement one another with strength and weaknesses. to give you a point of contrast, along with them, five other men. we only definitively know the names of three of them. -- three of those men. we only really know anything

about one, who ends up being inspired by jacques marquette brother. being a he comes a rough and crude background. so, anyway, it becomes obvious the two men can work together in the expedition is going to be a go. they are charged with exploring the new waterways which has been -- waterways, which has been seen by a few europeans but not explored at this point to see where it goes. is this something that will have great benefits for the french? they take on this responsibility. the travel part itself is relatively brief. all sure a number, if not of you, came into this room knowing something about jacques marquette or louis jolliet.

their time together was a mere four months. they started in may and it was over by august. when they traveled back up to the mississippi, they traveled t through two separate routes. marquette had other things he wanted to do with what time he had left. his disease was getting to them at that point. we're talking about four months and 700 miles. any of us who have gone on summer vacation may cover 700 miles in a really good days driving. good days driving, very fast -- not advised. [laughter] prof. chmielewski: but it does not seem like that amount of time. when you do it on canoes,

taking it with you along the , itscape, which has no road is not an easy thing to do. they traveled light. left thearquette who writings, said god would provide. they were going out into the wilderness where they knew some of the native languages involved. he had full faith the native people would provide for them. provide, we will talk about in a little bit. certainly makes good sense given they had summoned other challenges. they are navigating the waterway, which is a tricky one. the mississippi river has an incredible number of bends.

false entry points. especially to the gulf of mexico, which is not as far as they got. they only got as far as the arkansas river. it is a tricky place to go. it works against you, requiring great physical strength to actually work that waterway. so that is what they leave with. not very much, but with this great ambition they are going to cover as much ground as they conceivably can and get as much information as they conceivably can. they start at the fox river, which comes out of green bay , which is now green bay, wisconsin. they enter the mississippi river. all along the way, jacques marquette is writing about the things that fascinate him. the lancet -- obviously. the natural -- the landscape --

obviously. the natural environment. the animals he sees, making comparisons of animals with those he is familiar. you see something and the native american has a name for it, you rename it. all europeans seem to do that with alarming frequency so they won't accept or respect those original names of things. identifying things in the landscape that might be useful for trade. always on the lookout for mineral wealth. it is a very big deal for this expiration. copper has been found in the great lakes region. the french have known about the copper for a couple decades. you might think copper penny, virtually useless, the government is thinking of taking it out of circulation but copper

isa circulation, but copper a very important metal in the 17th century. to find a lot of copper would be a good thing for the french empire. it would be another potential revenue source apart from fur. so, they are always on the look at for mineral wealth. whenever they see cliffs, which there are many along the mississippi river especially in places like alton, illinois, they are assessing to see if they might see any minerals they can recognize. always on the lookout for what native people have. do they have things that might be of use? do they have metals, might they

be using them for orientation? where does it come from? they are curious and they want to know if it can be gotten in the vicinity. it is something they look for. there also fascinated by the animals. what do they see? buffalo, fish of various kinds -- of various kinds, birds , an amazing profusion. in the book, i make a point of marquette in the late 17th century and then john audubon , who forged the mississippi in -- and etched the same species, some of which -- etched the same species. how do we know about them?

mentioning joliet as much? because barely -- because jacques marquette barely mentions him. i came to the conclusion, part of it is because they work so well together that any effort was implied that they had done this to gather. this was not a product of marquette doing his thing or louis jolliet doing his. of course, jacques marquette is the recordkeeper. at a time when record keepers storyportant, we get the from his perspective. kept records too. he is literate.

my do not -- why do we not hear his voice? the sad circumstances of what it meant to live in the 17th and 18th 18th century world. paper frequently does not survive at a time when structures and repositories wash down, fall down, burn down with alarming frequency, the paper goes with them, so that was likely the fate with all of the records that jolliet kept. he had the foresight to make two copies of everything he wrote about. and what happens? out of aets dumped a canoe accident, and the other set is kept at the

jesuit mission at mackinac, and that is burned down. so gone forever. there are things we can guide to his he owned, but not this particular thing so all of that is coming with from marquette but with the assumption that jolliet is always present. let's talk about the native people. i opened this book trying to do what the historians call facing east farm indian country. what it means to be a native american looking at these newcomers in your midst, what that experience might have been. the first thing i looked about is we are told they called jesuits black robes or black elms. my thought is that any native person living on the banks of the mississippi river in southern illinois during the summer would have looked at a jesuit and said, what are you thinking wearing that thing?

all right gosh. nudity is so much more comfortable. what is wrong with you? they would have thought that they looked really odd. they would've looked at jolliet with his acute facial hair, it was documented they found it incredibly unattractive. "boy, are you ugly." but we can probably understand you a little bit better because you are more dressed down for the occasion. you don't have the necessity of wearing the ugly outfit up here of your priesthood. jolliet, who knows what his reaction would have been, but that would've been their first encounter. have we seen these people before? yes, we have seen people like them. we have heard something that sounds like their language. in fact, most of the communities

that they encounter during their journey have had some interaction with europeans before. whether it is pleasant or unpleasant really is sometimes a mystery. these are people who are not completely disoriented by the arrival of newcomers who look different, sound different, and really don't fit any models of previous encounter experience. wherever they go in the first half of their journey, they interpret the reaction of the native people as very welcoming , that they are valued, that these people are happy to going that they are going to have a practitioner of the gospel in their midst. they are happy about that. from the native american perspective, we cannot rule out

any human response, but what we can develop is a range of possible emotion. are these people going to be useful to us against our enemies? are these people going to bring with them interesting goods we will be able to get on a regular basis? are these people going to form kinship networks with us that will increase our power and prestige in this area? these are all likely scenarios that native people would have played out. we don' do know that there must've been an element of welcome because marquette and jolliet survived. they live. it would've been easy to kill them. there was nobody following them, there was no form of communication anywhere back to the settled areas of new france, . they could have just never been heard of again. it was not uncommon. it could have been the scenario here but it was not. they are fed, they are housed,

and most importantly, when they come across the largest settlement of what is modern-day peoria, it is called the peoria village of the illinois people, cey are given a alament, which is a native .merican pipe it can be used in several ceremonial ways. some are peaceful, some are not so peaceful. it depends upon how it is used, but they are given one. when they leave this illinois village which is a couple hundred miles into their journey, they are told to hold on to it. don't let it out of your sight. it might become useful.

it did, it does as they travel further south, they encounter communities that seem less and less eager to have them in their midst. somewhat so several nights they choose to sleep in their canoes with a watch rather than coming to shore where they could be more comfortable. they sense the danger as well. where does the danger come from? according to marquette, it seems they fear native people being a hostile to their presence much less than they fear somebody else. to me, this is the total surprise of the book. who do they fear? they fear the spanish. that to me was a shock. i am kind of conditions, as many people are, even though i write about the complications of religious culture, i think of

the french and the spanish are both catholic. they both have similar goals and work hand-in-hand with one another. indeed, that is not the case. by the end of the 17th century, the spanish are actually seriously concerned about whether the french are making major power plays in the new world. i specifically say new world , not just north america, but also in the caribbean. a great source of spanish wealth in addition to the silver mines of mexico in brazil and south america are these sugar colonies of the caribbean. the french indeed are very much looking to firm up till holes in the caribbean and get some of the sugar for themselves. they have indeed been doing that. but what could they possibly doing in north america that can harm the spanish?

well, suffice it to say that marquette and jolliet are aware that the spanish are not looking at random frenchmen, even a priest, with a friendly eye at this point. there are at very least would be some competition among native american groups. a perceived moving in in terms of trade and taking over lucrative trade with native people. that is something they very much do not want. when they get to the mouth of the arkansas river, 700 miles beyond where they have started, they know they are not going any further. they are warned by the native people there, who first come out with firearms, clearly from

somewhere -- and not of french origin -- that they need to proceed with caution. heldd, it is that calumet aloft that gets them to safety. they are told two pieces of vital information. first, this river goes to something described that sounds very much like the gulf of mexico, of which most europeans have a working knowledge. of at this point. this does not go to california, which they also have knowledge of, so perish the thought. marquette and jolliet, who is inexpert in rivers, is thinking the same thing. the other piece of information is that we spanish are here. watch it. so it is sufficiently threatening and also the fact that this season has gone on so

long, and they are heading to warmer places and they are getting further away from home. ok, it is time to turn around. the expedition has really been a success. marquette has made inroads with people whom he thinks will be friendly and receptive to his religious message. so he is confident that the upper mississippi is not only filled with native americans who will be friendly to the french cause, but he has identified farming possibilities and mineral wealth and realized this might go to the gulf of mexico, but it is still a really good river, and it is a really good river that would do really, really well in french hands. the information about the mississippi river happens to come into the french colonial administration and the colonial management back in france at an

interesting time. the french were contemplating -- what are we going to do with what we have now? we have french canada, but there are not a lot of people there, so we might claim something on a map, but how do we possibly defend something on a map without a lot people? and how do we get a lot of people? well, we are not going to let protestants migrate to our corner of the french new world because that might be detrimental to our survival. that is what they are thinking. obviously i am paraphrasing here. the other thing is, if you drain off a bunch of french farmers, who will farm in france?

that is a thing as well so they think they must re-trench. stay in the settled areas of french canada, focus on the things that are there, they this mississippi peace, we might deal with something at some now, it is, but for what it is. they would like to commandeer it , but it is not something that is a tremendous power play. but power plays are attempted by others, most notably nine years later and then 11 years later. has anyone heard of the fatedof lasalle's kind of mission to the gulf of mexico?

salle's kindde la of fated mission to the gulf of mexico? public television did a marvelous nova production about this with the archaeological evidence. a younger courtier -- he did not have the likability quotient by but heuette and jolliet, had powerful friends and supporters who gave him material support to take the information gleaned by howard to fellows, build at the mouth of the mississippi river, and use it to solidify french claims, connect with the great lakes, and you have the interior of the continent.

la salle wanted to take that one step further. he was after the seemingly idle threat of the new world. la salle thought it would be a jumping off point to hit the jumping off point and new mexico, said there is a jumping off point. it was not so idle a threat after all it was not seemingly so. they are thinking about it and pondering possibilities. as some of us might know, most the la salle expedition meets with tragedy. his men turn on him. his body is thrown into the river. survivors walked the length back to the great lakes. if la salle had survived, we might have had a very different continental colonial story.

indeed a very different heritage. i remember in graduate school telling a professor i was even thoug i was in american history, i was interested in the french, and he said, well that is not very american. there is something called louisiana. by the time a i finished up my phd program, i had to give that person due credit. we might've all had very different passports and driver's licenses. as it was, the expedition fell apart, the french really did make it on that retrenchment vision, and it was not until the early decades of the 18th century that they once again tried to solidify the claim to the mississippi. the result is louisiana, far larger than the state of louisiana, comprising a third of what is now known as the united states and hawaii. but it was never fully a french

colony. it was always a numbers game. with the french, and the french were never quite willing to carry that off. populating the places that they claim on a map. what happens to marquette and jolliet, i kind of alluded to that at the beginning of the that.but i will add to marquette as i mentioned, was dead within two years. and, i -- it is a misnomer to say i like the way he ends. accurate, but i find it fascinating. he died as he was attempting to establish another mission. a mission near the mississippi river near a place called tess

-- he dies very close to easter. the record of his death in the way he died is almost as long as the record he left of exploring the mississippi over the course of four months. the reason for that i believe is that it was supposed to lay groundwork for what is catholicism and the journey to sainthood. if somebody has the right kind of death, that would confirm they were a person of such holiness that they might be considered for sainthood down the road. and i believe marquette has been considered for sainthood at various times following his death. he dies amongst native people, though. he died a death very drawn out from his disease that seems to have haunted him through much of his adult life, and he is buried by the side of what is now lake michigan. his remains were left there. about one year later, a group of native people exhume him, and they reported again, this would

have been very important for it, that he had barely became at all. but what they do is prepare him for burial in a native american sort of way. they preserve the bones but not the flesh. they wrap his remains using a native american technique, and they bring him back to the mission where this all happened , and that's where his bones actually reside to this day. so we have this great irony of this man who did, regardless of how modern people perceive it, look to transform native american culture in some way, transform it to make them more catholic, to make it more french, to change the world view, what have you, ultimately

being transformed himself in death. jolliet, however, goes on for several decades, for four decades, as a matter of fact. he is a major player in québec industry, politics, he gets all sorts of land grants to develop fishing stations in the mouth of the st. lawrence river and do all sorts of other things. as marquette is dying, he is courting, and he marries an equally prestigious young woman , who bringsesant her own fortune into the marriage, her own businesses,

-- even as a young woman, she had amassed property in young french woman could do, young englishwoman could not. together they built an empire. he goes on another expedition. the tables are flipped. he thinks with french religion and french rectitude going to this little english fishing ng, hey, joined the french. it happened before, we'll make a good, instead they tried to work on the french and say, join the english, we can use men of your talent, and we will make it your worth your while. but the point i make to my statement said anyone i speak to is that he was never exploring for exploration sake, nobody did that. he was exploring for business possibilities, and he was fighting them wherever he looked. he had a talent for exploiting geography, for

exploiting his knowledge of how waterways work, and how people and goods and manufacturers could be moved around and used to benefit new france and his affiliated industries and families. so that is always what his eye is toward. part-time comedy is a professor. he is a part-time professor of river line history at the college of québec, the jesuit college where it all started for him. but it is not enough for him. he usually ends up filtering back. even having these connections, this influence, this money, he too dies in obscurity. so these two men who are known to us and known throughout american history as great explorers really stand in for the great mysteries that still exist in american history. what happens when you don't have records? what happens when you only have

fragments? that is when historians fill-in. to fill in try stories. that is what i've tried to do today. i thank you for your time and attention. it was a pleasure. [applause] laura: thank you. i can take any questions you might have. yes? [indiscernible] laura: no personal connection. my family was farming cabbages in poland. i am not part of that french story. my husband and i are both products of jesuit education , and i suppose that is where i was bitten by the jesuit bug. anyone who goes to a jesuit institution, they take their history very seriously.

there were two groups of people who knew they were making history that was worthy of being saved. one was puritans, the other was jesuits. they seem like a study in contrast, but they are shockingly alike in some ways. and their institutions reflect that. yes? >> you mentioned on the way down, most of these people had encountered europeans before. was there any clear reason why those guys did not get noticed for their discoveries, or how many -- laura: foreword illiterate from were illiterate from the start. >> how many expeditions left and never got heard from versus the ones that came back? laura: none that were as much, not before marquette and jolliet had this mandate to explore the river and find information that could be useful.

for the most part, there is some discussion among the jesuits jesuit whoally a just a does not get as much attention as he deserves. he was in the great lakes region working hundreds of miles of circuit. he was a jesuit as well. his writing describes so many of the people that marquette and juliet encounter first, -- jolliet encounter first, but he is always on the move. he does not have a mandate for exploration, he has a mandate for something else. any europeans who were passing through, who were looking to trap and trade or bringing goods with them, frequently were

illiterate. literary rates in french canada are shockingly low, especially compared to their neighbors to the southeast which would be new england. you have some literate people but very few are. and then there is the breaking out of educational skills in the 18th-century century where a good number of people can read it were never taught to write. i told my students said they were like, nobody would ever take a stick and try to scratch their name out in the dirt? and i would say, you would never get mail. you never see your name written out. you would be too busy trying to

find food than trying to scratch your name out in the dirt and trying to make your sense of an alphabet, to which you have never been fully introduced. >> what about the disparity between the french and english population? the french and indian war, i think there were 40,000 frenchmen? laura: about 70,000 in the french north american -- >> about a million and a half? laura: million and a half, absolutely. the handwriting is on the wall. but if you think about the possibility, what is that foundational idea? movement of the mississippi that made it easier for the french to settle. the most perfectly reserved french city and the mississippi valley, not new orleans but a city below new orleans in missouri, i think it is missouri. it might be arkansas. this is arable farmland. this is good farmland. he applies to be able to send some farmers there to start

farming communities, and he is told no by the french government. but what if the french had made good on it? the firms grew longer and -- the farms the farms grew longer and healthy. it would've been anyone's game. there were not enough people. we have to remember this is a time when one in every 10 frenchmen is protestant, and they are not allowed to migrate to the french catholic new world. they are not welcome so there are local places. that is where they are going and they are enriching these colonial enterprises and not the french, whereas if the french had allowed them to migrate to get out of the tencent situation at home, who is to say they would not be so grateful for being able to leave and carve out their own identity that they

would not have been perfect french colonial citizens. but it is always counterfactual, too. it is a big what if. >> the spanish had the same problem, not enough people. any catholic, anywhere in europe -- laura: yes. >> like italians, the catholic, germans, belgium stash laura: yes, it is very fascinating. i would like to see the names of some of the generals in the war. a reflect the origins. yes? >> talking about the whole of behind the stake in , what you said about the colonists, british

colonists, if they came, they could actually claim in no uncertain parts of land that were there, but the french i do not think that was true. they still owe the land to the lord's other personal stake was not -- and that decision may have been -- the seniorialsa in you system meant there was land given to a noble person, aristocrat, or member of the french gentry, if you will. i don't not know if that is the proper term but the land belonged to that person. you might be a french settler who migrates to the new world under the auspices of a señora, but you are technically be an

employee and definitely a tenet. tenent. the land was not your own. but french farmers who came to the new world who also had a scale like chevalier's father did, you could do very very well for yourself. so, not being able to only and was less of that issue. there were other types of fortune to be made other than land fortune. in the english world, we have some question. the retraction of land grants under the dominion. you had to reapply. so in and of itself that is not hard and fast. the value of land is constantly changing. the markets will bear that rate.

it complicates a little bit. i saw your hand up. the late 17thut century, how far west had the british spread? laura: by the late 17th century, the british are, my first look addresses a good chunk of this as it pertains to the north and northwestern boundary. they claim, in conflict with france, this is not settled until the end of the century, land coming into with or within 100 miles of the st. lawrence river to the northwest, they claim land because all the way into new brunswick and canada -- ohio -- laura: no, ohio is not going to be something until the 17th century. it is a vague reserve the right to go there kind of thing.

there are not hard and fast boundaries in the colonial charters. they stipulate a kind of ship to this kind of thing is not sorted out until the 1790's actually. but really it is where settlement has gone and where people have gone and where people have chosen to stay. the western boundaries do not get somewhat shored up until the great migration of the scotch irish in the first half of the 18th century, and these are people want to be on that front ier, and they go pretty far out because they want to be left alone. they do not want a lot of interaction. they have had enough of power shaping their lives, which is very much their experience protestant colonists in ireland , such as they were.

but at this point, it is vague and grabby, and you would not travel too far from any seat of power, because how do you get goods, and how do you eke out a living? >> [indiscernible] absolutely not. they are not close. >> i just want to say that your talent as a storyteller is incredibly compelling. laura: thank you. they do much. that means a lot to me. thank you. [applause] >> first question, as far as the writing of marquette, are they primarily from the jesuit relations? laura: they are. i think i know where you are

going with this, which is that we do not know. it complicates the source material further. that material was amassed by ages, when sitting very comfortably back in québec, who was rewriting and tailoring some of what marquette did not give him personally but what came back to him from -- he was putting it in a voice that would have made it suitable as a document for good reading. so marquette may have not been a terribly skilled storyteller at in the hands of the jesuit superior at that point, it he is overwriting marquette's adventure. it was the last revelation to come out. the revelations stopped being produced and published in france

at this point, so this is kind of the endpoint and some people say it does not really belong is one of the jesuit relations, it is what is called an allied document. that was actually a tremendous debate around the 1940's between andauthor and the jesuits, there is one franciscan with the wonderful name of francis borgia. he has a b in his bonnet about jacques marquette. he claims it is not marquette who deserved all the credit for the mississippi exploration. it was another one who traveled with louis jolliet. he was notorious for hating

jesuits and liked franciscans. go figure. he had a nasty temperament based on a misreading of 17th-century records and what it meant to be what is it called, some sort of phrase that in the modern day means nasty -- oh, bill bilious. marquette was described as bilious. in the 17th century, that meant you had kind of a chronic churning in your innards. he used that terminology to say marquette does not deserve this stature as this founding individual. that it belongs to a franciscan. part of it was, too, that he rewrote what he said, so that he did not really do this, but he said he did.

everyone is taking this information and amassing it. we do have primary documents for some of the jesuits, and we know how little or how much it was overwritten. in some of these cases, it was not that much. they made it suitable for storytelling but preserved all of the spirit of the activity, but we know this is all from marquette's perspective, so i am saved through the intervention through the virgin of the blessed virgin mary. she clearly wants me to make the trip, but modern people might say, well notwithstanding, i mean people have their beliefs then as they have them now. it is really, you know, that native americans let you live, help to live that you got from scrape to point b, so off that language. that impulse that would've been so natural to marquette to get at the real story and the role

real voice. >> talking about the spanish for a second, desoto, that was what 1540's or so? laura: yes. >> so 130 years earlier. maybe in the 1660's or 1670's, there were some pretty ugly incidents. would marquette have been aware of that? to what degree would that have informed his knowledge? laura: that is a good question. whenever we talk about the spanish story of the new world as filtered through other services, the black legend of spanish conquest comes up. in many countries, not just protestant ones, even though the protestants were kind of the great generators and producers of the information, really had a strong belief that there was

something that made the spanish particularly barbarous in enough themselves in the new world so that is a great question. to what extent those materials would have traveled to france and been available for popular france,ion an in i would say likely. i would have to say likely. to what extent would the french be willing to leave those things? the french, despite those being catholic countries, they have an checkered relationship with the from time to time, so i mention that would've been reflected by whenever the relationship was they had with the spanish. >> spanish weapons, did the spanish have a foothold in the southern part of mississippi? laura: no, they don't. they are chiefly in the florida area, and they are likely in florida, but moving through

channels but underscoring the idea of a spanish sphere of influence, and marquette and jolliet would have no way of knowing where that was, and they would not risk it at this point. >> are you familiar with -- laura: yes, i think of with jolliet, who he goes over to the other side. >> did they have any interaction? laura: i do not know if they had any interaction, but he offered his services, and english were cracked any kind of came back -- >> one more question? laura: yes. >> as far as european attitudes toward native americans -- spaniards wanted them, and english one of them first as

allies but then later one of them gone. oversimplification? laura: it is. it is relatively a complex and easy question to answer the same time, but attitudes toward native people are going to change in the vault, the course of the colonial story, and i will start with the spanish, the spanish do have this eye on enslavement, even though they are given explicit direction by their church and monarch that they are not supposed to do that, that that is not a desired practice, how can you do that, etc. but the spanish story becomes complicated through marriage and various types of people from origins of mixing along the

lines and we know the mixing was very robust. that is something you never see in significant numbers from the english. the english really keep to their own pools for intermarriage. the scottish less, but the english -- and when i say scottish, not the scots, but the scot-irish. the french have always been looked at as the most benign of colonizers. they wanted native americans as allies, respected their culture. that too is an evolutionary process that is based on necessity. a big mississippi for the french is that the topic we keep coming back to common numbers. they know they do not have the ability to really successfully oppress anyone on a massive scale or kick anyone else out on a massive scale, but they do have these very skilled culture

broker practitioners, not only in jesuits but in committed, knowledgeable catholic laymen like jolliet. fur trapperot every for trevo falls into that category, but certainly jolliet does, and there are other men like jolliet willing to say, look, we are part of this enterprise, too, and we believe we can create the same blood, a whole category of humanity in the new world that is at once french, catholic, native american, with a robust knowledge of the land and its resources, and isn't that highly desirable? some french might say no, it is not, but other frenchmen are going to say, yes. that is a good idea, and that separates us from our colonial competition. >> [indiscernible] laura: it is a great city.

yeah, it is. do if time for one more question? i think we do. >> you mentioned about the french and the native american. -- who are products of intermarriage, we associate most -- the story seems to coalesce around the 19th century with the development of canada as a sovereign nation, and manitoba as a province and a man who was a big proponent of recognition of them and their place in canadian society, and he ends up dying because of that, dying as a political prisoner because of that.

so yes. part of the story i did not tell was more of that facing east and how native women who marry french men and then adopt catholicism for whatever reason, because it is appealing to them or because it makes sense giving the worldview, whatever, and up being very much the powerbrokers in the native american communities. very much the powerbrokers in their the ones who have the powerful spouses, the powerful fathers, the powerful brothers. they carry the zeal of the convert and have the relationship with the priest s when they come along and become factors, permanent factors in the landscape. they're also the ones who keep husbands in line more so and kind of reminds him of the duties, the sacramental duty more than these cradle catholics, if you will, do themselves. when they are out in the

wilderness, as they would've called it. >> [indiscernible] [applause] laura: thank you very much. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> this weekend on american history tv on c-span3, temple university professor andrew eisenberg on the environmental movement in the 1970's. eisenberg: the environmentalist was a product sold to american consumers just like the big mac. >> then father and daughter talk about their experiences during 9/11. >> we take off, and we had serene,t into a

peaceful, and silent sky with no when airborne. out to the northwest, and we never find anything. we were not heroes that day. passengers on flight 93 were the heroes. >> on sunday on "american artifacts," through the harriet tubman visitor center. >> it opened up a new world for her. central lobe epilepsy, which allowed her to have amazin visions. she heard voices. she heard people singing. she would have very vivid dreams. at 7:00 on oral histories, our series on photojournalists, that begins with eric draper.

eric: that is the first time that we started seeing the replay of the second tower being hit. allmerican history tv weekend, every weekend, only on c-span3. >> this weekend, on "the presidency," author greg robinson discuss the conflict president franklin d roosevelt and first lady eleanor roosevelt over executive order 9066, which led to japanese internment camps during world war ii. here is a preview. >> as far as the president's background and personality, that is a more subtle but more compelling factor. it is hard to say what influence they have, but we certainly can of fdr had a past history sharing popular prejudice japanese-americans.

as i talk about in my book, in the mid-1920's, years before he was elected president, franklin roosevelt written a set of articles on diplomatic relations between the united states and japan, which he wanted to improve, but he publicly incentives that japanese for honest and local -- un assimilating into united states culture, and becoming citizens on the ground protected the racial security of white americans against intermarriag. i am quoting him. i will do my best fdr. this is from this article in 1923. "so far as americans are concerned, it must be admitted and as a whole we believe that the minion of white with oriental blood on an extensive scale is harmful to our future." clear howt is not

much he continued this through in period of the war, he was correspondent with the chief anthropologist at the smithsonian institution about japanese skulls. recentd that the japanese were so biologically progressive and evil is that their skulls were less developed evolutionary than the skulls of other groups, and he was thinking about intermarriage to dilute this awful japanese aggressive sentiment. it is certainly true that if you justify mass action against people on the grounds that they are not really american, you will be less inclined to care about their citizenship rights enough to intervene to protect them. . >> watch the entire program sunday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern. this is american history tv, only on c-span3.