St. Ignace Mission: Where Marquette Is Buried

Just outside town is a small park where something genuinely rare happened: a famous explorer's remains were brought home by the people he served.

Father Jacques Marquette was a French Jesuit priest who founded Saint Ignace in sixteen seventy-one and set out two years later with Louis Jolliet to map the upper Mississippi River. He died in sixteen seventy-five on a return journey. He was thirty-seven, weakened by dysentery caught on the Mississippi trip, and the exact spot on the Lake Michigan shore where he died is still disputed. Two years after his death, Ottawa converts carried his bones back to Saint Ignace and buried him at his own mission. The Ottawa and Huron travelers who went with the bones came in about thirty canoes, and he was buried in the mission chapel on June ninth, sixteen seventy-seven.

The site you are passing is that mission. The chapel standing here today dates to eighteen thirty-seven and was moved to this location in nineteen fifty-four. It now serves as the Museum of Ojibwa Culture. A National Historic Landmark since nineteen sixty, it marks one of the earliest European presences in the Great Lakes, about a decade before the French fort was built nearby. The mission was abandoned and burned in seventeen oh five, and its site was found again by accident in eighteen seventy-seven. In twenty twenty-two, bones of Marquette that had been held at Marquette University were returned and reburied here on June eighteenth.