St. Ignace Mission

In sixteen seventy-one, the Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette founded a mission on the north shore of the Straits of Mackinac, naming it for Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. From here, two years later, Marquette set out on the journey that would carry him and Louis Jolliet down the Mississippi River as far as the mouth of the Arkansas River, several hundred miles short of the Gulf of Mexico.

He never returned to his mission. He died in sixteen seventy-five near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Two years after that, his bones were brought back by Odawa converts and reburied beneath the chapel altar. When the French abandoned St. Ignace in seventeen hundred and burned the fort and mission, they covered his grave. It was rediscovered in eighteen seventy-seven, and the spot is now a small park beside the Museum of Ojibwa Culture.