European trade goods such as metal objects, cloth, guns and gunpowder, had already arrived in the Mississippi River region and points west through Native trade networks starting shortly after Europeans arrived in North America and began trading for furs trapped by Native people. But it was not until 1673 that the first recorded sighting of Iowa by Frenchmen took place: it was during the expedition headed up by Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet.
The route of this group of seven men in two canoes began at the French mission at the Straits of Mackinac. They continued down Green Bay and through present-day Wisconsin via the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, arriving at the Mississippi across from today’s McGregor, Iowa on June 17, 1673.
The first Native people that they encountered as the canoes made their way down the Mississippi were near the mouth of the Des Moines River, on the west side of the Mississippi (in present-day Missouri, just south of the Des Moines River). They were Peoria, a subgroup of the Illinois nation. Along with other Illinois, this group of Peoria had moved west of the Mississippi in the wake of the Beaver Wars. In these conflicts, Iroquois people from farther east attacked Algonquin people, including the Illinois, in attempts to control Native contact with the French and thus consolidate control of the Native side of the fur trade. The Ioways, at that point, had moved farther west because of drought, disease, and attacks from the Illinois, who were themselves under attack.
The Peoria village visited by Marquette and Jolliet had a population of some 8,000 people. Marquette had spent years learning Native languages including the Miami-Illinois language spoken by the Peoria, so the group of explorers was able to communicate with them. While with the Peoria, Marquette and Jolliet witnessed a performance of the calumet ceremony, and asked their hosts about the surrounding region: what and who were upstream on this river?
On the trip, Jolliet kept a journal and drew maps of the territory through which they passed. Unfortunately, as he was returning to Montreal in 1674, his canoe overturned, and his journal and maps were lost. He reproduced the documents from memory as well as he could. Putting the map he drew with the reports sent by Marquette to his Jesuit superiors, we can glean what the travelers learned about their surroundings both from their own observations and from the information given to them by the Native people they encountered. Importantly for the history of Iowa, when the Peoria were asked by Marquette who lived upstream on what is now known as the Des Moines River, they replied that it was a group that they called the “M8ing8ena” (the symbol “8” as used by the French at the time stood in for the “w” or “oo” sounds), which is the rough equivalent of “Moingwena.” This name was subsequently used by French mapmakers to designate the river, which came to be known as the Des Moines River: the river “of the Moingwena.”
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