Marquette's Death
Inscription
On May 18, 1675, Father Jacques Marquette, the great Jesuit missionary and explorer, died and was buried by two French companions somewhere along the Lake Michigan shore of the Lower Peninsula. Marquette had been returning to his mission at St. Ignace, which he had left in 1673 to go on an exploring trip to the Mississippi and the Illinois country.
The exact location of Marquette’s death has long been a subject of controversy. Evidence presented in the 1960s indicates that this site, near the natural outlet of the Betsie River, at the northeast corner of a hill which was here until 1900, is the Marquette death site and that the Betsie is the Rivière du Père Marquette of early French accounts and maps.
Marquette’s bones were reburied at St. Ignace in 1677.
Location
Sources
More markers in Benzie
Benzonia College
Benzonia, MI
In 1858, in what was then a remote wilderness, the Reverend Charles E. Bailey and four families from his Ohio Congregational parish...
Benzonia Congregational Church
Benzonia, MI
Early in the 1850s Congregationalists came to this area to found the community of Benzonia and a Christian college.
Joyfield Cemetery
Benzonia, MI
William Davis, the son of a plantation owner and a slave woman, came here with his wife, Mildred Brand, and their children in 1863.
Pacific Salmon
Beulah, MI
Since 1870 several unsuccessful attempts have been made to establish Pacific salmon in the Great Lakes.
Bruce Catton
Benzonia, MI
Historian, author, editor, Bruce Catton (1899-1978) is best known for his two Civil War trilogies—The Army of the Potomac and The...