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cc >> Let me introduce Patrick Jung as part of the Wisconsin Historical Society's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Patrick Jung is a professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and has written several history publications including the books, The Battle of Wisconsin Heights, 1832; Thunder on the Wisconsin and The Black Hawk War of 1832. Here today to discuss the story of Jean Nicolet's journey to Wisconsin, please join me in welcoming Dr. Patrick Jung.

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>> Hello, I'm Dr. Patrick Jung. Let me start by saying that everything you know about Jean Nicolet is wrong.

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I know this because everything I thought I once knew about Jean Nicolet turned out to be wrong, too. And the reason I got everything wrong was because of this picture you see. It is from my fourth grade textbook on Wisconsin history that I had as a child at 81st Street School in Milwaukee. I was lucky to have found a copy of it in the Milwaukee Public Library so I could scan this picture. I had to do a little PhotoShopping.

indistinguishable

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We'll get to that. You have probably seen a picture very similar to this one, all right, at some point in time. It is the various depictions of Jean Nicolet that are the culprit. And it's the reason that we adhere to outmoded and outdated interpretations of Jean Nicolet and his 1634 journey. All these images have given us a false idea of Jean Nicolet. So we're going to look at the myth, and we're going to look at how these images have made us so wrong for so long. Of course, we only have paintings of Jean Nicolet. He was the first European to visit Wisconsin in 1634. Of course, there were no cameras then. He was sent westward by this man. This man is Samuel de Champlain. He was the commander of the colony of New France, the capital of which was Quebec. In 1634, the fledging colony of New France had fewer than 200 French persons. It had been taken over by the English from 1629 to 1633, but the greatest enemy to New France was the Five Nations League of the Iroquois to the south, what is today upstate New York. You have the Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca Indians. These tribes had long been the enemies of the Indian allies of the New France who lived in the St. Lawrence River valley. Now we know from the writings of the Jesuit missionaries who served in New France and who came to North America to convert the Indians to Christianity that this was the case. It is from these same Jesuits and their writings we know about Jean Nicolet and his journey. But we actually very, very little. Everything we know comes from the writings of Father Paul Le Jeune and Father Barthelemy Vimont, and the two of them together wrote only a total of four printed pages concerning Nicolet's journey to Wisconsin. These pages are part of the famous Jesuit Relations, which were reports that the Jesuits sent back to their superiors in France and which recorded their activities in North America. Much of what they wrote concerning Nicolet is very vague, and it's one of the reasons that, even today, historians continue to debate exactly where Nicolet went, what route he took, and whether he conducted his journey in 1633 or 1634. These questions are not easily answered. In fact, there are more questions and mysteries surrounding Jean Nicolet than there are firm answers. I only want to focus on a few of these mysteries today, and one them in particular for which I have been able to provide an answer. And it's this answer that has disproven many of the false assertions about Nicolet, although certainly not all of them. Now, before I proceed any further I should say that I've not figured all of this out myself. In fact, the person who deserves the most credit is my colleague and co-author, Nancy Oestreich Lurie, a retired anthropologist from the Milwaukee Public Museum who spent much of her career studying the Ho-Chunk Indians, also known as the Winnebago, of Wisconsin. It was these people whom Nicolet visited at Green Bay in 1634. And for this reason Nancy began her research into this problem of Jean Nicolet when she began her fieldwork among the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk back in the late 1940s. Together, we wrote a book titled The Nicolet Corrigenda, published in 2009. Now, we'll start with the greatest myth concerning Jean Nicolet. In the description of his meeting with the Ho-Chunk, Father Barthelemy Vimont wrote that Nicolet, "wore a grand robe of China damask, all strewn with flowers and birds of many colors." This short passage has given birth to what Nancy and I call "the myth of the Chinese robe," and is the textual foundation for the gravest of the factual errors. Vimont's description of Nicolet's meeting sat collecting dust for over 200 years. It was only the 1850s that historians began to dust off the Jesuit Relations and examined them for what they had to say about North American history. The first historian to intimate that Nicolet wore a Chinese robe was the French Canadian scholar Benjamin Sulte, who in 1876 wrote that Nicolet must have believed he had arrived in China, or somewhere quite close to it. Why? He wore a Chinese robe, of course. And Nicolet must have thought that the Ho-Chunk were Chinese, or at least that they were Asians. Sulte asserted that Nicolet possessed "the belief that these people were not far from the Chinese, or they must have known them, and Nicolet had put on a great robe of Chinese damask." Now from this point on, the myth of the Chinese robe simply swells in size and scope. In 1881, Consul W. Butterfield of Wisconsin reiterated Sulte's conclusion. Butterfield noted that "Nicolet was chosen to make a journey to the Winnebagoes, for the purpose, principally, of solving the problem of a near route to China." He also wrote, "But why thus attired? Possibly he had reached the Far East.... Possibly, a party of Mandarins would soon greet him and welcome him to Cathay," another way of saying China. We'll look at the reality in a minute, but first let's look at a few paintings. I've already showed you this one, the rather crude picture from my fourth grade Exploring Wisconsin textbook, which I remember so well. And this threw me off for a long, long time. Okay, it did. It did. There are better ones. Here's one by E.W. Deming, painted in 1904. It hangs in the State Capitol building. Here's another one. This one's at the Milwaukee Public Museum. It was painted, I think, in 1917 by George Peter. So what's happened to all of us, at some point in time, we've seen one of these pictures or something very similar to it. They're based upon the histories written by people like Sulte and Butterfield who were among the first to examine the story of Nicolet. One of the problems is that these historians were often working with less-than-perfect English translations of the original French texts. But more significantly, they were writing 200 years after the fashions of Jean Nicolet's day had, quite literally, gone out of fashion. Here is what Barthelemy Vimont was actually describing. It was not so much a robe as it was a cape. The word cape is a much better contemporary translation of the original French word. As you can see, the capes in Jean Nicolet's day could be quite ornately embroidered, just as Vimont described. Moreover, there is nothing even remotely Chinese about them. Nicolet's cape was made of damas de la Chine, or China damask, a kind of silk with patterns woven into the fabric, much like Vimont described. And while this style of silk originated in China, knowledge of how to make it had arrived in France by the Middle Ages, and by Nicolet's day a significant amount of silk, including damas de la Chine, was made in Italy and France. "Okay," you say, "Why is this important?" It is important because so much has hinged on that one factual error. Sulte and Butterfield, who I cited earlier, are the two who set the tone for historians right down to the present day, including myself. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation in the 1990s, and when I recounted the story of Jean Nicolet, I, just like many historians before me, assumed that Jean Nicolet was hoping to get to China by paddling through the Great Lakes. Why did I believe it? Well, I remembered the picture in my fourth grade textbook at 81 Street School in Mrs. Koski's class. Moreover, later scholars, including Wisconsin's preeminent historian Louise Phelps Kellogg, cited Sulte and Butterfield in her great opus on the French regime in Wisconsin and in the Great Lakes region. Like them, she thought Nicolet wore a Chinese robe because he was hoping to get to China. I cited Kellogg in my dissertation. Nancy Oestreich Lurie cited Louise Phelps Kellogg in her early works. Just one person after the next just keeps continuing the same mistake. There was another factor in addition to the Chinese robe. That was the fact that early in his career, Samuel de Champlain was one of the many European explorers who hoped to find the fabled Northwest Passage, the waterway that would link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and provide an easy route to the riches of China. Gerard Mercator produced a map in 1587 that hinted at such a possibility via a northern route. You cans see here. You go up through here, around the Arctic Circle, and viola, you're in China. Samuel de Champlain, I'm not sure if he ever saw Gerard Mercator's maps, but he definitely saw maps very similar, maps that hinted at a Northwest Passage, despite the fact that such a thing had never been proven. It was just basically wishful thinking. This is Champlain's famous 1616 map. And he knew a little bit about the Great Lakes. He had been as far west as Lake Huron, and he thought maybe you go through the Saint Lawrence Seaway, you go through Lake Ontario, up through Lake Huron. This is actually Lake Michigan, and out to the Pacific. He doesn't draw the Pacific there, but that's what he hints at. So he suggested an interior route. Historians such as Sulte, Butterfield, and Kellogg assumed that since Champlain was searching for the Northwest Passage earlier in his career, he must have done so later as well, and that that was the reason he sent Nicolet westward in 1634. Nicolet took a Chinese robe, the thinking went, so he would be properly attired for the occasion. Now, many people had their doubts about Nicolet seeking the Northwest Passage to China. Kellogg certainly did. She wrote that in the text of her book. She pored over Champlain's writings, and these works make it very clear that he was not so geographically nave to believe that China lay just beyond the waters of Lake Huron which, as I say, which was as far west as he ever traveled. But Kellogg wrote that Nicolet was looking for China despite her doubts. Why? Because he had a Chinese robe, of course! Why else would he take such an item? My own research certainly confirmed Kellogg's doubts. Nancy Oestreich Lurie was the first scholar to debunk the myth of the Chinese robe. It wasn't a Chinese robe at all but it was simply a silk cape commonly worn by Frenchmen in Nicolet's day. Once she figured that out, everything else began to fall into place. I won't give you all the details here. That is why Nancy and I wrote a book, and we want you to read it, you see. Nancy has her doctoral degree in anthropology. Mine is in history. My contribution was researching Champlain and his understanding of the Great Lakes and their geography. My rationale was that Nicolet's knowledge of North American geography almost certainly was similar, if not identical, to that of Champlain. And Champlain's writings were really all I had to go by for this task. Nothing exists by Jean Nicolet's own hand that describes his life or his journey. Champlain's maps and writings are useful, but only to a degree. First, he mentions early in his career the desire to find the Northwest Passage, he doesn't mention this at all in his later works. But neither did he ever explicitly write that he no longer believed that such a route was not possible via the Great Lakes chain. Such a conclusion rests in part more upon ideas that are strongly inferred in Champlain's writings rather than unequivocally stated. However, it is clear in his writings that he never believed that one could travel a few hundred miles west of Lake Huron and find China, or the Pacific Ocean. He knew the globe was a lot larger than that. So any idea that Nicolet was paddling through Lake Huron with the hope of getting to China is absolutely fallacious and absolutely not supported in Champlain's writings. Now, Champlain did produce a 1632 map, and he also produced a very short description of it. This was the last visual expression of what he knew about the geography of North America prior to Nicolet's visit to Wisconsin in 1634. It's clear when looking it, that he no longer believed in 1632, as he did in 1616, that the Great Lakes flowed westward toward the Pacific. The farthest western lake in the Great Lakes chain on this map is a body that he called Grand Lac, or the Big Lake. It looks like Lake Superior due to its orientation and position, Here's Lake Ontario, here's Lake Huron, this tiny body of water is Lake Erie. Grand Lac was not necessarily Lake Superior. It's what Champlain knew about Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Grand Lac was sort of a composite of both bodies of water. He heard stories of larger Great Lakes farther to the west, and in his mind he conflated Lake Michigan and Lake Superior into a single body of water. He received knowledge of Lake Michigan's existence from the Ottawa Indians in 1615. He most likely learned of Lake Superior's existence in 1624 from the French missionary Gabriel Sagard, who in turn likely learned it either from the Indians along the eastern shore of Lake Huron, or from the French explorer Etienne Brule. However Champlain learned of these two lakes, as I said, he received information about them and in his mind this was just one big body of water to the west of Lake Huron. So Grand Lac is a composite of facts that he knew about Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. Nevertheless, the shape of Grand Lac suggests that it is a closed inland body of fresh water. Moreover, his description on it makes it very clear that it only flowed eastward into Lake Huron and not westward toward the Pacific Ocean. So by inference I can, with relative certainty say, his belief that somehow the Great Lakes provided a path to the Pacific was no longer there in 1632. He may not have said it explicitly, but it certainly is revealed implicitly. I should note that this comes neither from my nor from Nancy Oestreich Lurie The understanding of Champlain's geographical thinking over time was developed by the brilliant Canadian scholar Conrad Heidenreich, who was kind enough to read a draft of our book and whose books and articles I relied upon heavily when doing my own research. And by all rights, Conrad Heidenreich should be the one giving you this talk. Heidenreich should have been the one to state that Nicolet was not looking for the Northwest Passage or a water route to China. Heidenreich entertained the same doubts about this legend as Kellogg. Heidenreich has done the most significant research into the evolution of Champlain's geographical thinking over time. Heidenreich was the one who discovered all that I just told you. So why is he not here? Why did Heidenreich hesitate to conclude that Nicolet was doing something else other than looking for the route to China if he believed that Champlain no longer championed the idea that the Great Lakes were the waterway to the Pacific Ocean? Simple, Heidenreich, too, believed that Nicolet wore a Chinese robe,

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and thus, Nicolet MUST have been looking for the route to China. And don't think this is a criticism. Conrad Heidenreich made the same mistake as Benjamin Sulte, Consul W. Butterfield, Louise Phelps Kellogg, Nancy Oestreich Lurie, and Patrick J. Jung. I remember talking to Conrad Heidenreich on the telephone a few years ago, after he had read a draft of the The Nicolet Corrigenda and Nancy's idea that Nicolet simply wore a regular French cape, and not a Chinese robe. He said, "Wow, I hadn't thought of that before. This changes everything we know about Jean Nicolet." I said, "Don't feel bad. I made the same mistake." As Nancy is fond of saying, once you pull the thread of the myth of the Chinese robe, all the other myths unravel, figuratively and literally. For the last two years, I have been busy writing another book on Nicolet, and I have developed a few new ideas. Namely, that I believe that Nicolet probably had a much clearer idea of the geography of the western Great Lakes and the Indians living there than did his boss, Samuel de Champlain. Gabriel Sagard, who I mentioned earlier, during his year as a missionary on Lake Huron's eastern shore from 1623 to 1624, had learned about the Ho-Chunk Indians and about Lakes Superior and probably about Lake Michigan as well. Definitely about Lake Superior. This is quite clear in his writings. Nicolet lived in the same area for eight years prior to his 1634 journey. It's reasonable to conclude that during the eight years he lived in the vicinity of Lake Huron's eastern shore, Nicolet would have learned as much as Sagard, and probably even more. I should also note that such an assertion is lacking direct evidence, so I present this as an educated speculation, but one that is at least grounded in some very compelling indirect evidence. I also arrived at another conclusion, and that I believe must have had its genesis in Mrs. Koski's fourth grade classroom at 81st Street School in Milwaukee, sometime, I think 1972, maybe it was. I thought it rather odd, even as a child, that, if Nicolet did think he was in China, that he would feel compelled to wear a Chinese robe. Why would he do that? If he really believed he had arrived in China, what good would it have done to wear a Chinese robe? Think about it. It wouldn't have disguised the physical features of his face and he was undoubtedly a European. He certainly wouldn't have impressed the Chinese by wearing a Chinese robe. I think they'd seen Chinese robes before, don't you? Yeah. He wouldn't have shown them anything novel. The first European to reach China by sea was the Portuguese ambassador Ferno Pires de Andrade in 1517. He arrived as a European, in a European ship, wearing European clothes. Why would Nicolet, if he believed he had reached China, have done anything differently? So when you think about it, there's just no reason for a Frenchman to wear a Chinese robe even in China. So I figured-- The whole myth just kind of falls apart rather quickly. As Nancy Oestreich Lurie and I discovered, wearing a silk cape of French design would have been much more appropriate for Nicolet regardless of where he thought he was going. Such capes were considered proper for gentlemen to wear for official functions, not only in France but throughout Europe in the early 1600s. Jean Nicolet was an agent and diplomat sent by Samuel de Champlain to make peace between the Indian allies of the French and a distant tribe in the western Great Lakes. Such an event would certainly have been analogous to the various appearances of diplomats in the royal court of France of the time who, as you can see, wore capes. That was considered something that a nobleman, a gentleman would wear for formal occasions. So, Nicolet did not wear a Chinese robe, just a silk cape that was commonly worn by Frenchmen of his day. He was also not looking for the Northwest Passage or a water route to China. Then, what was he doing on this journey? To understand why Nicolet was went westward, it's important to understand the thinking of his boss, Samuel de Champlain, whose writings make it very clear that he was concerned about the security of New France and its Indian allies in the St. Lawrence River valley and along the eastern shore of Lake Huron. There is more than adequate evidence for this. Champlain's greatest fear was the Iroquois tribes in what is today upstate New York, the Five Nations League of the Iroquois. We know from both Champlain's and Sagard's writings that the Indians on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, namely the Ottawas, the Nipasings, and particularly the Hurons, traveled as far as the Ho-Chunk homeland, right here. You have the Winnebago there, but it's Ho-Chuck homeland, which was at Green Bay of Lake Michigan, and that the Ho-Chunk had a fearsome reputation and just as often made war against these tribes with whom they traded as anything else. The writings of Nicolas Perrot are the best source concerning the Ho-Chunk during this period. Perrot made his observations at a later date the 1660s and 1670s, but he recorded earlier events during the time of Nicolet roughly three decades earlier. I'm going to quote Perrot at length. "In former times, the Puans," the French word for the Ho-Chunk or Winnebago, "were the masters of this bay," Green Bay. "This nation was a populous one, very redoubtable, and spared no one; they violated all the laws of nature; they were sodomites, and even had intercourse with beasts. If any stranger came among them, he was cooked in their kettles. The Malhominis," or the Menominees who lived right across Green Bay from them, "were the only tribe who maintained relations with them, and they did not dare even to complain of their tyranny. Those two tribes," the Ho-Chunk and the Menominee, "believed themselves the most powerful in the universe. They declared war on all nations whom they could discover. The Outaouaks," or the Ottawas, "sent to them envoys, whom they," the Ho-Chunk, "had the cruelty to eat. This crime incensed all the nations," or the Indian tribes, "who formed a union with the Outaouaks, on account of the protection accorded to them by the latter under the auspices of the French, from whom they received weapons and all sorts of merchandise." While much of this is hyperbole particularly the statement about intercourse with beasts, other sources indicate that the Ho-Chunk did, indeed, practice cannibalism on their defeated enemies. That was not uncommon among Great Lakes tribes during this period. Moreover, if Perrot's writings are correct, and there is no reason to doubt that they are not, this savage attack against the Ottawas most likely occurred in 1633, possibly 1634. We know that in these two years, Champlain spent a great deal of time and energy bolstering the defenses of New France against the Iroquois to the south. Nancy and I believe that Nicolet's mission to Green Bay was purely diplomatic and had as its purpose ending the threat of the Ho-Chunk on the western frontiers of New France. So it's very clear that Champlain was worried about the Iroquois to the south, but it's also evident that the Winnebago, the Ho-Chunk presented yet another threat to the more distant western tribes with whom the French had diplomatic relations. In fact, Barthelemy Vimont makes this very clear in his short writings on Nicolet. "Jean Nicolet," he writes, "was finally recalled and appointed Agent and Interpreter. While in the exercise of this office, he was delegated to make a journey to the nation called People of the Sea," another French name for the Ho-Chunk or Winnebago, "and arrange peace between them and the Hurons, from whom they are distant about three hundred leagues," or 630 miles, westward. Had the myth of the Chinese robe never arisen, I think historians would have had a much more accurate idea of Nicolet's mission more than a century ago. If this had been the case, the various paintings of Nicolet looking rather ridiculous in a Chinese robe would never have been painted. In turn, young elementary school children who saw these pictures in the early 1970s would not have been led astray by these false images, and when they found themselves to be young graduate students in the 1990s writing their dissertations. They would not have continued the related myth that Nicolet was looking for the Northwest Passage and a water route to China. Of course, had I not made that mistake when I was in my early 30s, I would not have had a chance to correct it with the assistance of Nancy Oestreich Lurie, and I would not have had the honor of speaking here with you today. I believe that the greatest contribution that Nancy and I make to understanding the story of Jean Nicolet consists of debunking the myth of the Chinese robe. I also want to stress that it is Nancy, and not I, who deserves all the credit for this. In our book, we tackle other issues as well. The most vexing is the actual site where Nicolet made his landfall. There have been many theories put forward. There are two general schools of thought, what I call the Lake Superior School, and the Lake Michigan School. The adherents of the Lake Superior School believe that Nicolet entered Lake Superior rather than Lake Michigan, while adherents of the Lake Michigan School believe vice versa. Nancy and I are firm members of the Lake Michigan School as opposed to the Lake Superior School. We believe the evidence firmly places the Ho-Chunk in a series of villages along the western shore of the Door County Peninsula, possibly even as far north as the Mackinaw Straits. The largest of the villages was at a site called Red Banks northeast of present-day Green Bay. the Ho-Chunk most likely had another village site at Sawyer Harbor farther to the north. That's around Sturgeon Bay. However, we also believe that Nicolet did not go to this site but to a Menominee village where Marinette, Wisconsin now stands. The Ho-Chunk and the Menominees were allies, and a meeting at this village would have been a neutral site where the Ottawas and Hurons who accompanied Nicolet would have been more willing to parlay with their Ho-Chunk enemies. I'm probably a little bit behind in here. I'm just going to show you here. This is the route that I'm fairly certain Nicolet took, based upon the very vague description. Here's Red Banks. Here's the Menominee village, here's Sawyer Harbor. This just would have been a neutral site. To go right to Red Banks knowing that the Ho-Chunk were at war with the Ottawas and Hurons probably would have been a bit dangerous. It would have been easier to go to the Menominee village. And their allies would have just called for a delegation from Red Banks to come and talk to them. Even that-- There's evidence that they may have not occupied Red Banks at the time. There's a lot of speculation that goes into what I just said. The Ho-Chunk village at Red Banks was surrounded by an earthen mound that most likely was a defensive parapet that guarded against enemy assaults. We have only two pieces of definite evidence for the existence of this mound. The first is a map produced in 1845 by the United States Army that shows the outline of "ruins" at Red Banks, which, if the scale of the map is correct, was about half a mile in length by a quarter mile in width. The Green Bay lawyer Morgan L. Martin in 1851 provided the only narrative description of this mound complex, and it's quite short at that. But these two sources, along with the oral traditions of the Ho-Chunk people and later Jesuit descriptions of the tribe, are enough to know with a solid degree of certainty that the Ho-Chunk lived along the western shore of present-day Door County at the time of Nicolet's visit. The debate over where Nicolet went and where he made his landfall continues right down to the present day. I'm writing an article this week. Nancy and I are in a debate with another scholar over this issue. In fact, even our fellow scholars in the Lake Michigan School cannot seem to agree. This is evidenced by the fact that two separate historical markers currently exist that claim Nicolet's landing. One is at Red Banks where we don't think he went.

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I just don't think he was there. Another is on Doty Island on Menasha. The was a huge debate at the turn of the last century over putting both of these up. So there's multiple historical markers. There's also scholars who say that he went all the way as far south as Chicago. And of course, if Nancy and I had our way about it, we would ask for a historical marker at Marinette. So, I hope I've enlightened you a bit about the 1634 journey of Jean Nicolet. I'd love to believe that the middle-aged man who was once a fidgety fourth grader in Mrs. Koski's class at 81st Street School in Milwaukee and his esteemed colleague Nancy Oestreich Lurie have, beyond a shadow of a doubt, provided the final answers to the enigma that is the story of Jean Nicolet. However, I believe such a claim would be very premature on my part. Just as Nancy and I have presented important new evidence that has revised older interpretations, undoubtedly future scholars who are now fourth graders fidgeting somewhere else will unearth new evidence over time and that will continue to refine our understanding of Jean Nicolet and the period of early French history in Wisconsin as well. Thank you very much.

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