The Mississippi Was First Mapped by a Polyglot Priest and a College Dropout-Turned-Fur Trapper - a podcast by Scott Rank, PhD

Perhaps the most consequential expedition in North American history wasn’t the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was one that happened 130 years earlier and undertaken by a Catholic priest fluent in multiple Indian languages and a philosophy-student-drop-out-turned fur trapper. This was the 1673 Jolliet and Marquette expedition – in which French explorers mapped out the Mississippi Valley and confirmed that the river led to the Gulf of Mexico, not the Pacific or Atlantic – and it took place against a sprawling backdrop that encompassed everything from ancient Native American cities to French colonial machinations.

Today’s guest, Mark Walczynski, author of “Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition“ place the explorers and their journey within seventeenth-century North America. His account takes readers among the region’s diverse Native American peoples and into a vanished natural world of treacherous waterways and native flora and fauna.

Walczynski also charts the little-known exploits of the French-Canadian officials, explorers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries who created the political and religious environment that formed Jolliet and Marquette and shaped European colonization of the heartland. A multifaceted voyage into the past, Jolliet and Marquette expands and updates the oft-told story of a pivotal event in North American history.

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