Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition by Mark Walczynski (review)

Reviewed by: Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition by Mark Walczynski Jon Parmenter Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition By Mark Walczynski (Champaign, Ill.: 3 Fields Books, 2023. Pp. 304. Appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, 125. 00; paperbound, 24. 95; e-book, 14. 95. ) Published during the 350th anniversary of the voyage of Jolliet and Marquette, this book promises an updated narrative overview of the expedition and an effort to situate it in the broader historical context of late seventeenth-century French colonial expansion into the future American Midwest. The author also targets "unsupported claims" concerning the Jolliet/Marquette expedition "that have gone unchallenged for more than half a century" (pp. vii–viii). The author succeeds in providing a detailed textual reconstruction of the voyage across chapters four through seven in the heart of the monograph, but the discussion of the expedition's significance as "the key that opened the door to the American West" (p. xii) does little to move our understanding of its importance beyond that articulated by an earlier generation of historians. Walczynski includes substantial detail regarding the Indigenous peoples involved in the broader story of the expedition, but his narrative rarely escapes the perspective of his European sources. He mostly relies on the writings of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, which he accesses largely in published English translations. The author engages in frequent historiographical quarrels (e. g. , pp. 36–38, 53–55, 68, 141–42) but the stakes of these disputes seem comparatively low relative to what might have been learned about the expedition from a fresh analysis of relevant original French-language sources. Lack of reading knowledge of French also hinders the capacity of the author to contextualize his claims vis-à-vis recent scholarship on French colonial North America by Gilles Havard, Arnaud Balvay, and Cécile Vidal. The author painstakingly reconstructs the Jolliet/Marquette expedition, including an effort to calculate distances using Google Earth (p. xi), and to use later primary sources to flesh out points of interest mentioned in 1673 (pp. 105–106, 108–109, 115). Given these efforts, the lack of an updated map of the expedition's 2, 100-mile course, notwithstanding the inclusion of a small photograph of such a map produced by Starved Rock State Park, is disappointing. The author prioritizes instead a discussion of the ways in which Marquette and Jolliet's accounts of their voyage suggested that large commercial vessels could sail without interference on the Illinois River from the Chicago Portage to the Mississippi River, and how that claim (later proven incorrect) influenced subsequent French exploration (particularly that of La Salle) and policy-making. The final five chapters of the book represent the author's effort End Page 159 to assess the impact of the Jolliet/ Marquette expedition, which can be summarized as leading to a French presence in the Illinois River valley in the short term (witnessed by the missionary work of Jesuit Claude Allouez and La Salle's construction of Fort Crèvecoeur), and opening the door to subsequent Euro-American occupation of the central and lower Mississippi Valley in the longer term. These are not novel conclusions. The history of the Jolliet/Marquette expedition awaits a substantial, updated analysis. Jon Parmenter Cornell University Copyright © 2024 Trustees of Indiana University