"Carry me ashore here," he whispered again.
So they entered the creek and took him ashore, building a fire and sheltering him as well as they could. There a few hours afterward he died, the weeping men holding up his cross before him, while he thanked the Divine Majesty for letting him die a poor missionary. When he could no longer speak, they repeated aloud the prayers he had taught them.
They left him buried on that shore with a large cross standing over his grave. Later his Indians removed his bones to the Mission of St. Ignace, with a procession of canoes and a priest intoning. They were placed under the altar of his own chapel. If you go to St. Ignace, you may see a monument now on that spot, and people have believed they traced the foundation of the old bark chapel. But the spot where he first lay was long venerated.
A great fur trader and pioneer named Gurdon Hubbard made this record about the place, which he visited in 1818:—
"We reached Marquette River, about where the town of Ludington now stands on the Michigan shore. This was where Father Marquette died, about one hundred and forty years before, and we saw the remains of a red-cedar cross, erected by his men at the time of his death to mark his grave; and though his remains had been removed to the Mission, at Point St. Ignace, the cross was held sacred by the voyageurs, who, in passing, paid reverence to it, by kneeling and making the sign of the cross. It was about three feet above the ground, and in a falling condition. We reset it, leaving it out of the ground about two feet, and as I never saw it after, I doubt not that it was covered by the drifting sands of the following winter, and that no white man ever saw it afterwards."