Letters of the Jesuit Fathers reporting to their superiors have given us much of the early history of our area in their famed Jesuit Relations. Father Marest, who served as a missionary from Hudson's Bay to Kaskaskia, described the trials of one of these trailblazing trips as he tells of his march from the latter place to Peoria in the spring of 1711:
I had nothing but my crucifix and breviary, and was accompanied by only two savages. The terror of these vast, uninhabitable regions in which for twelve days not a single soul was seen, almost took away my courage. This was a journey wherein there was no village, no bridge, no ferryboat, no house, no beaten path; over boundless prairies, intersected by rivulets and rivers, through forests and thickets and marshes, in which we sometimes plunged to the girdle. At night repose was on grass or leaves, exposed to wind and rain; happy if by some rivulet whose waters might quench our thirst. Meals were only from game killed on the way, and from roasting ears of corn.
This classic on trailblazing is not the first to mention corn, the great product of Illinois. Although ill and about to die, Father Marquette wrote to Quebec in the winter of 1673-4 from within the walls of the first building ever constructed in our state, that "we have not lacked provisions, and we have a large sack of corn."
Jesuits, Franciscans, Seminary Fathers and later Capuchin Monks ventured into the Illinois wilderness for a life of hardship and often death, when they could have lived in a degree of ease and comfort in France had they so chosen. Sulpicians and Fathers from the Mission of the Holy Family also came. Those who traveled with La Salle were usually non-Jesuits. Because he had once thought to join that order and changed his mind, he felt more at ease with Franciscans, as was Hennepin, then of the Recollect branch. These Roman Catholic Fathers provided names to go down in our early history, such as Marquette, Hennepin, Membre’, Ribourde, Allouez, Gravier and later Meurin and Gibault.
Following George Rogers Clark came other American born trailblazers from the east, seeking new lands or fighting Indians. These included Lt. Richard Clark, who made a trip into the Peoria area to pacify Indians in 1780, and William Clark, later Indian Commissioner for the state, but more famous as a member of the exploration team of Lewis and Clark. Both these men were brothers of George Rogers Clark.
Major Stephen S. Long of the United States Army engineers, Rocky Mountain explorer for whom Long's Peak is named, came by keel boat from Jefferson Barracks to Peoria in 1816 with two soldiers and Francis Le Clair, the founder of Davenport, Iowa. He returned south overland, and was making an exploratory trip for the later surveying parties, studying the giant task of staking out the meridians and base lines of the carefully planned Jeffersonian survey system. The actual marking of the Third Principal Meridian, north from the Ohio's mouth on 89°, 10’, 30" West Longitude, was completed in 1821.4 Thus unknown
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