In 1673 a French expedition organized in Canada under Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet sailed down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Arkansas, and nine years later (1682) Rene Robert Cavelier, sieur de la Salle, reached the mouth of the river, took formal possession of the country which it drains, and named it Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV.
Two years afterwards the upper course of the Mississippi was explored by Joliet and Marquette.
The first Europeans known to have visited the site of Milwaukee were Father Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit missionary, and his companion, Louis Joliet, who on their return in the autumn of 1673 to the mission of St Francis Xavier at De Pere from their trip down the Mississippi, skirted the west shore of Lake Michigan in their canoes from Chicago northward.
It is served by the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern (of which it is a terminus) and the Chicago & North Western railways, by an interurban electric line, and by lake steamers.
Aurora is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Chicago & North-Western, the EIgin, Joliet & Eastern, and the Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota railways, and is connected with Chicago by an electric line.