Red Banks and Jean Nicolet's Robe
Near Green Bay, Wisconsin
A French explorer stepped ashore at this stretch of shoreline in the summer of sixteen thirty-four wearing a splendid silk robe. Jean Nicolet carried the silk garment westward through the Great Lakes, and later tradition says he hoped the inland sea might lead to Asia, though no record from his own time confirms that. What Nicolet found instead were the Ho-Chunk people, the Winnebago, the People of the Sea, as French translators rendered their name.
They numbered in the thousands and occupied a confederacy of villages along this bay and the Fox River valley. When Nicolet fired his two pistols skyward as he came ashore, the thunder they made spread instantly through the village. Witnesses would say the Ho-Chunk had never heard gunfire before.
The place became known as Red Banks, a name that likely describes the clay bluffs visible along this shoreline. Historians have debated Nicolet's exact landing point for generations. A competing school of thought, advanced in recent decades, places his first Wisconsin footfall at present-day Marinette, roughly sixty miles north.
The Wisconsin Historical Society notes that neither case is conclusive. Both Red Banks and an alternate Marinette site hold commemorative markers, and the question remains genuinely open. What is not disputed is what the encounter set in motion.
Within a generation, French missionaries, voyageurs, and soldiers would arrive in numbers, trading iron goods for beaver pelts and remaking the entire region. Nicolet himself was back in Quebec within months. He never returned to Green Bay.
He drowned in the St. Lawrence River in sixteen forty-two.
