The mound named after him would play another important role in history almost 100 years after his visit. He had no idea that this spot of beautiful land would give birth to a city bearing his name. “Game is abundant… in much greater number than elsewhere.”īut JOLLIET didn’t have the chance to return. “(It) seemed to me the most beautiful and most suitable for settlement,” JOLLIET wrote in his journal. He believed the buffalo could be tamed to pull plows through the prairie ground much like the European ox. JOLLIET saw the buffalo herds and dreamed of fields of crops. He wanted to return and create a settlement here. When Louis JOLLIET camped there, the explorer liked this spot of ground better than any of the wild country that he had traveled through. It was located between what is now Mound Road on the north and U.S. The nature-sculpted mound was about 60 feet high, 450 yards long and 75 yards wide. Lifting up like a small mountain beside the Des Plaines River, it was decorated with grass, oak trees and colorful wild flowers. The mound, which was sand, gravel and clay deposits, had been carved by the river’s flow in previous centuries. From then on, that camping spot on the early maps would be known as Joliet Mound. On their return trip north, they paddled up the Illinois River to the Des Plaines River.Īnd they camped here on a large mound beside the river. Louis JOLLIET, a French-Canadian explorer, and Father Jacques MARQUETTE, a Jesuit missionary, and five others explored the Mississippi River in canoes. In 1673, The Native Americans here saw their first white men. On this particular spot of the map which would become Joliet, this was Pottawottamie country. In their native tongue, Illinois meant “superior men.” They included the Iroquois, the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Cayugas and the Senecas.īut by far the most numerous were the Illinois, from which this state eventually would take its name. The land was so bountiful that other tribes traveled here in trading and raiding expeditions. Even the buffalo herds then roamed over this land that would someday become Joliet and Will County. They lived here for hundreds of years hunting and fishing in this land rich with forests, prairie, streams and rivers. They were the Pottawottamies, the Foxes, the Sacs, the Mascoutens and the Illinois. In the beginning, there was the land and its people. In their native tongue, Illinois meant ‘superior men.’ The most numerous tribe were the Illinois, from which this state eventually would take its name. Native American tribes hunted and fished here for hundreds of years B y John Whiteside of The Herald News (used with permission)
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