People have undertaken epic journeys in North America for many thousands of years, but only the stories of some have survived long enough to be on the radar of modern inhabitants.

We’ll likely never know about the individual exploits of the continent’s earliest explorers, those true trailblazers who crossed the Bering Strait in the days of the woolly mammoth and established the first human presence in what millenniums later would be termed the “New World.”

Not long after the United States became a country, the Corps of Discovery Expedition made national superstars out of Meriweather Lewis and William Clark after they set out in 1804 from Illinois on a journey to the West Coast, rediscovering for a new audience landscapes, plants and animals already well known to the people who had long lived in those areas.

They paved the way for a steady stream of settlers from the East, whose arduous westward travels by covered wagon were relived by countless kids at the outset of the video game age through the popular software “Oregon Trail,” in which losing often meant dying of virtual dysentery.

Thousands of years after the initial explorers fanned out across the continent and more than a century before Lewis, Clark and dyspeptic prairie schooner pilots launched journeys from Illinois, a pair of French Canadian rangers conducted a quest here that literally put their names on the map. Eventually.

First, Jacques Marquette’s account of his travels with Louis Jolliet down the Mississippi River and back up the Illinois River to Lake Michigan had to be rediscovered in a Quebec archive, hundreds of years after the trip.

The voyage of Jolliet, a fur trapper, and Marquette, a Catholic missionary, had far more impact than namesake cities in Will County and Michigan. According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the expedition helped “helped to initiate the first non Native-American settlement settlements in the North American interior that introduced Christianity into 600,000 square miles of wilderness, gave French names to cities from La Crosse to New Orleans, transformed traditional Indian cultures, and nearly exterminated the fur-bearing mammals of the Upper Midwest.”

Beyond that, the explorers’ purported stroll on their return trip between the Des Plaines River over a glacial moraine to another river that led to Lake Michigan could be the first chapter of Chicago’s origin story, though that is a matter of perspective.

The voyagers reportedly proposed a canal bridging the continental divide that would finally link the Mississippi River system and its giant, western water network to that of the Great Lakes and its access to the East. Hundreds of years later, that idea became reality with the Illinois and Michigan Canal, a keystone in Chicago’s early prominence.

Discussions of the voyage of Marquette and Jolliet are loaded with heavy undertones, especially with regard to the country’s legacy involving its indigenous population. But these particular explorers are noted for their mostly friendly relations with the people they met along the way.

It’s a trip more people should know about, especially because this year marks its 350th anniversary, said Jenna Krukowski, an interpretive naturalist at Isle a la Cache Museum in Romeoville. And the best way she knows to do that is to have some fun with it.

Part of the Forest Preserve District of Will County, headquartered in Jolliet’s namesake city, she and museum colleague Sara Russell thought that fun should involve more than searching the county seat for Jolliet’s missing “L.”

Instead, they turned to the concept of the Oregon Trail video game for a “put yourself in their shoes type of program” that will recreate the expedition in a survival game based on a translation of Marquette’s once-lost journal.

“People know Joliet and Marquette — they’ve heard the names,” she said. “But they don’t really know what they did.”

So interested modern day explorers can find out, secondhand, what it feels like to be in their canoes at Quest: A Joliet and Marquette Adventure for Families, a holiday break program planned for 11 a.m. Dec. 28.

The canoes are actually tables, but “we pull out all of our stuff, blankets, axes, trunks, the staging if you will,” Krukowski said. People can come with their own canoe companions of family and friends, or join solo.

“Not every explorer, every hired hand, knew each other before going on this adventure,” she said.

The modern explorers will have maps and choose how to outfit their expeditions. They’ll encounter some of the same people and navigate similar situations. There will be a Mississippi River monster or three along the way as well.

At one point Marquette describes in a translation of his journal “monstrous fish, one of which struck our canoe with such violence that I thought that it was a great tree, about to break the canoe to pieces.”

“On another occasion we saw on the water a monster with the head of a tiger, a sharp nose like that of a wildcat, with whiskers an straight erect ears,” the journal continues.

There’s also an early description of American bison and a few other creatures, as well as the first recorded sighting of the mythical Piasa beast painted on cliffs near modern Alton.

How people navigate those encounters will dictate “if you were a successful explorer or not,” Krukowski said. And like in the video game that gave them the idea, there are virtual consequences involved.

“You’re definitely going to die if you do not portage the canoe,” she said, with the caveat that the program was based on an initial program they’d bring to fifth graders on field trips. “There’s lots of adult topics we talk about, but it’s very family friendly, and fun for adults too.

“It’s a way for people to gather and build community. You’re all going to laugh at the choices you make in this program.”

To add flavor, they’ll also provide some of the edible provisions the voyagers would have had with them for modern participants to snack on, such as bison jerky.

“Not only will our canoe adventurers be making some of the same choices as Jolliet and Marquette had to make, but they’ll also be eating some of the same foods,” Krukowski said.

As she dove deep into learning about the voyage, Krukowski said one of the favorite things she learned was that while Marquette and Jolliet are often credited with coming up with the idea that eventually became the I&M Canal, they actually were advised about the portage by people who had been living in the area and had been using it for years.

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Their “discovery” was only new to them, but made for an easier trip on the way back up to Lake Michigan than continuing on the Mississippi and traveling back through Wisconsin.

After wrapping up their trip together, Marquette and Jolliet went their separate ways. Jolliet’s account and much of the other material they collected were lost when his canoe overturned on his return trip, leaving Marquette’s journal the main source of information from that 1673 trip.

Marquette’s descriptions are such that there is lots of interpretation involved in trying to figure out exactly where the expedition went, though “there’s a really good chance they passed right by us,” at the Isle a La Cache Museum site on the Des Plaines River, Krukowski said.

Even if not, “that’s part of the fun of it,” she said. “We want to be as right as we can be, but at the end of the day, we might just not know.”

After their famous expedition, Jolliet returned to Canada while Marquette returned to exploring the southern half of Lake Michigan, and died not long afterward, according to contemporary reports, of what might have been dysentery unrelated to the Oregon Trail.

The two explorers were reunited centuries later, at least in name, in 2020 when Marquette University established a formal relationship with Joliet Junior College.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].