Wyalusing: The Bluffs Where Marquette First Saw the Mississippi

The bluffs here at Wyalusing State Park rise five hundred to six hundred feet above the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers, and from that height you can look out over one of the most historically significant river junctions on the continent. On June seventeenth, sixteen seventy-three, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet became the first Europeans recorded to have seen this confluence, emerging from the Wisconsin River into the great current of the Mississippi after paddling from Green Bay. A marker at Point Lookout in the park commemorates that moment, which opened the continent's interior to French exploration and trade.

But people had been gathering at this confluence for far longer. The first humans arrived here about eleven thousand years ago as the glaciers retreated northward. What followed was an almost uninterrupted sequence of cultures, from the Red Ochre people of three thousand years ago, through the Hopewell tradition, to the effigy mound builders who shaped the landscape into forms that still survive here today. More than one hundred thirty mounds were once recorded within the park's boundaries. Sixty-nine survive, carefully preserved along the bluff crests, including a remarkable Procession Group of twenty-eight mounds, a single long line of conicals, linears, and bear effigies following the ridgeline like a slow procession of ancient ceremony.

The name Wyalusing comes from an Algonquian term meaning home of the warrior. Indigenous nations treated this confluence as neutral ground, a place for trade and peaceful council rather than conflict. The Ho-Chunk and others camped along these bluffs for generations, trading and gathering at the meeting of the waters.

Wyalusing became a state park in nineteen seventeen, making it one of Wisconsin's oldest. The driftless character of the land, never scraped by glaciers, means these bluffs and river valleys retain a jagged, ancient quality unlike the rolling farmland north and east. For drivers on Route Eighteen, this is where the Midwest reveals its most dramatic topography.