In 1673 Louis Jolliet and the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette travelled from the Great Lakes into the upper Mississippi River region. Their expedition depended on Indigenous geographical knowledge, diplomacy, and river routes already known to Native peoples. European maps and reports from the journey expanded French imperial ambitions in North America.

The expedition produced travel narratives and missionary reports that translated Indigenous landscapes into European descriptive prose. Such texts often preserved fragments of Native names and knowledge while reframing them through Christian and imperial assumptions. The Mississippi later became a major imaginative river in American literature, from Longfellow's romanticised Indigenous subjects to Mark Twain's vernacular river world.