I have spent the last several months tying up loose ends in my research of the history of the village of St. Marie and the Legend of the Cross.
One of the threads that I have been pulling on recently involves the question of who named St. Marie.
I think most area area people would cite the local legend that Father Marquette named St. Marie when he stopped to bless a spring there on his way to the Mississippi River in 1673. But that’s incorrect.
St. Marie village founder John Shaw and others credited Jesuit priests traveling the river in the late 1700s, long after Marquette’s trip, with selecting the name.
Two area historians who wrote about St. Marie around the end of the 19th century, meanwhile, reported that a French Jesuit historian, Pierre Charlevoix, visited Wisconsin in 1721 and reportedly found the spring that Father Marquette described in his journal.
It was clear both historians relied on the same source: a biography written about Wisconsin’s first Catholic bishop, John Henni (1805-1881), by Martin Marty in 1888. Marty (1834-1896) is remembered in church history as the first bishop of the Dakota Territory. He was known as “The Apostle of the Sioux.”
A couple of weeks ago I tracked down Marty’s book, “Dr. Johann Martin Henni, erster Bischof und Erzbischof von Milwaukee; Ein Lebensbild aus der Pionierzeit von Ohio und Wisconsin.”
It was written in German.
The translated title is, “Dr. Johann Martin Henni, first Bishop and Archbishop of Milwaukee; A Picture of Life (Biography) from the Pioneer Days of Ohio and Wisconsin.”
There have been no direct translations of Marty’s book about Henni, though Peter Leo Johnson relied heavily on Marty’s research in his biography of Henni, “Crosier on the Frontier: A Life of John Martin Henni,” published in 1959. (The Milwaukee Archdiocese retains an expansive archive of Henni’s materials translated and organized by Johnson.)
I found a copy of Johnson’s book a few weeks ago, but it was a dead end. He did not mention St. Marie.
But when Marty’s book arrived last week, I was confident I could find Charlevoix or St. Marie in the German text and then find someone to translate. It was easier than I thought.
First, local historian Joe Wyse alerted me that Marty’s book had been digitized and was available online. Using the text search function, I identified passages that mentioned Charlevoix and/or St. Marie. A paragraph describing Henni’s travels in 1861 included his stop at St. Marie to dedicate the church and confirm 59 Catholics.
I then reached out to another local historian, John Dolan, to see if any of his Lutheran contacts could help translate Marty’s German to English. He agreed to help and quickly identified the one passage I was seeking, on Page 256.
Meanwhile, Joe showed me how to use the translation tool with Google books. John’s translation matched Google’s: “From Berlin the bishop travelled to St. Marie, also like Berlin, located on the Fox River. Here he consecrated the new stone church under the title Mary of the Source (also translated to spring, fountain, or well). As is well known, this place was named this way by the Jesuit Charlois because of the strange spring in the middle of the morass.”
I was surprised that there was no mention of Marquette and that Marty reported Charlevoix not only visited the fountain but also named it, “as is well known.”
Unfortunately, I cannot corroborate Marty’s claim with any other source.
Local historians have been unable to find any reference to St. Marie or Marquette’s fountain in the available journals describing Charlevoix’s time in Wisconsin, which occurred during a period when the Fox Indians were exacting tolls and harassing travellers on the Fox River.
Charlevoix’s “Journal of a Voyage to North America” was originally published in 1761. The two-volume collection was republished in 1922 by the Caxton Club. In the Historical Introduction, translator Louise Phelps Kellogg indicated Charlevoix did not travel the Upper Fox River on his way to the Mississippi River.
“The usual routes via either the Fox-Wisconsin or the Chicago-Des Plaines portage being blocked by the intertribal wars then raging, Charlevoix (traveling from Green Bay) … skirted the eastern shore of Lake Michigan and at its southern end entered the St. Joseph River,” Kellogg reported.
From there the travellers portaged to the Kankakee River, then followed the Illinois River to the Mississippi en route to New Orleans.
So, while I have successfully concluded the search for the Marty book cited by the 19th century historians, it only muddied the water even further. It seems unlikely Charlevoix travelled the Upper Fox much less found Marquette’s spring or named St. Marie.
The mystery remains, and the search continues!
Please let me know if you spot any errors or have suggestions about this blog.
Thank you for reading and caring about local history.