In one cabin after another the good Father spoke to the chiefs and warriors who gathered to hear him. Finding the cabins too small, he held a great meeting in the open air on a broad level prairie. Here the whole village gathered. The chiefs and elders seated themselves next to the priest; and around them stood hundreds of young Indian braves; and still farther from the centre of the vast circle of red men were gathered the women and children of the tribe. For a long time he talked to them, and with each message he gave them presents after the manner of Indian councils.
This was the last visit of the black-robed priest to the Illinois Indians. His strength soon failed him, and with Jacques and Pierre he started back up the river and across to the Lake, hoping against hope that he might reach the Mission of St. Ignace at Mackinac before he died. Friendly Indians went with them more than thirty leagues of the way, contending with one another for the privilege of carrying his few belongings.
Finally they reached the Lake and embarked. Jacques and Pierre paddled the canoe along the shore, as each day the priest grew weaker. He had always prayed that he might die like his patron saint, St. Francis Xavier, in the far and lonely wilderness of his ministry. One Friday evening, about the middle of May, he told his companions with great joy that he would die on the morrow. As they passed the mouth of a small river, Marquette, pointing to a low hill rising beside it, asked his two men to bury him there.
They carried him ashore and built for his protection a rude cabin of bark. There he died quietly on Saturday, May 18, 1675. He was buried by his two men on the rising knoll which he had chosen; and over his grave they rang his little chapel bell, and erected a rude cross to mark the spot.
Some time later a party of Kiskakon Indians, returning from a hunting trip, came by the site of the lonely grave. They had known Father Marquette years before when he lived on the shores of Lake Superior. Now they determined to carry his remains to the church at the Mission of St. Ignace. Reverently they gathered up the precious bones, dried and prepared them after their own Indian fashion, laid them in a box of birch bark, and bore them in state with a convoy of thirty canoes to the Mission at Mackinac. There in a vault of the church the remains of Father Marquette were laid away with funeral honors; and there priests and traders venerated his memory and Indians came to pray at his tomb.
And out in the valley of the Illinois, the tribes to whom he had made his last pilgrimage mourned the death of their gentle-spirited visitor; and the Peorias, as they went about their daily occupations in fields or lodges, on the prairies or on the streams, often thought of the day in June when the black-robed priest and his French companion had walked up the little pathway and stood out to meet them in the glorious sunshine at their old village on the banks of the Iowa River.
CHAPTER VI
“THE IROQUOIS ARE COMING”
“The Iroquois are coming!” It was a cry that shook the heart of even the boldest among the Illinois Indians. Fierce as the northwest wind in winter, the cruel, bloodthirsty red men from the East had spread terror in their path all along the Great Lakes and out as far as the Mississippi. Down near the mouth of the Ohio, Marquette and Joliet on their memorable voyage in 1673 had found the Shawnee living in deadly fear of the warriors of the Five Nations.
Five years had passed over the lodges of the Peorias and Kaskaskias since that memorable summer; but fear still hung about the villages of the upper basin of the Great Valley. Three years of winter and summer hunts, of ripening corn and snow-locked landscape, had come and gone in the valley of the Illinois since the black-robed Marquette, gentle-faced and sick unto death, had bade farewell to the young Kaskaskia Indians and journeyed off with his two men along the shore of the Lake of the Illinois, never again to be seen alive save by his two faithful companions.