The Misunderstood Mission of Jean Nicolet

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Uncovering the Story of the 1634 Journey

Patrick J. Jung

A groundbreaking study of explorer Jean Nicolet that clears away the myths and offers an accurate and compelling picture of early European expansion into the Upper Midwest.

240 pages, 6 x 9, 26 b&w illustrations, 2 maps
Hardcover: $28.95 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-879-9
Ebook: $15.99 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-880-5
Publication Date: 11/23/2018

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Front cover of The Misunderstood Mission of Jean Nicolet

Description

For years, schoolchildren heard the story of Jean Nicolet’s arrival in Wisconsin. But the popularized image of the hapless explorer landing with billowing robe and guns blazing, supposedly believing himself to have found a passage to China, is based on scant evidence—a false narrative perpetuated by fanciful artists’ renditions and repetition. Historian Patrick J. Jung sets the record straight in this deeply researched study of Nicolet and his seventeenth-century journey to the Upper Midwest.

In more recent decades, historians have pieced together a story that is not only more plausible but much more complicated and interesting. Patrick Jung synthesizes the research about Nicolet and his superior Samuel de Champlain, whose diplomatic goals in the region are crucial to understanding this much misunderstood voyage across the Great Lakes. Additionally, historical details about Franco-Indian relations and the search for the Northwest Passage provide a framework for understanding Nicolet’s famed mission.

Author Bio

Patrick J. Jung

Patrick J. Jung is a professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. He received his PhD in history and anthropology from Marquette University and has published three books on Native American and white relations in the upper Mississippi River valley and the western Great Lakes: The Black Hawk War of 1832; The Nicolet Corrigenda: New France Revisited, written with Nancy Oestreich Lurie; and The Battle of Wisconsin Heights: Thunder on the Wisconsin. He has also published two articles on Jean Nicolet: “The Chinese Robe and Other Myths: The Real Story of Jean Nicolet” in Voyageur: Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review and “Jean Nicolet (Again): Comment on Ronald J. Mason’s ‘Where Nicolet and the Winnebagoes First Met’” in Wisconsin Archeologist. Jung lives in Milwaukee.

Patrick J. Jung is of the new generation of American historians, the postcolonial scholars. His Jean Nicolet does not go into an unknown wilderness; instead, he is employed in France’s colonial government, traveling as a diplomatic envoy to initiate negotiations with the powerful Puans nation controlling trade in a western sector of the Great Lakes.