The remains of the pious missionary lay in the chapel undoubtedly as long as it subsisted. This, however, was not for many years. A new French post was begun at Detroit in 1701 by La Motte Cadillac. The Hurons and Ottawas at Michilimackinac immediately emigrated and planted new villages near the rising town. Michilimackinac became deserted, except by scattered bands of Indians or white bush-lopers, as savage as the red men among whom they lived. The missionaries were in constant peril and unable to produce any fruit. They could not follow their old flocks to Detroit, as the commandant was strongly opposed to them and had a Recollect father as chaplain of the post. There was no alternative except to abandon Michilimackinac. The missionaries, not wishing the church to be profaned or become a resort of the lawless, set fire to their house and chapel in 1706 and returned to Quebec. The mission ground became once more a wilderness.
In this disheartening departure what became of the remains of Father Marquette? If the missionaries bore them to Quebec as a precious deposit, some entry of their reinterment would appear on the Canadian registers, which are extremely full and well preserved. Father Nouvel and Father Pierson, who received and interred them at the mission, were both dead, and their successors might not recall the facts. The silence as to any removal, in Charlevoix and other writers, leads us to believe that the bones remained interred beneath the ruined church. Charlevoix, who notes, as we have seen, their removal to Mackinac, and is correct on this point, was at Quebec College in 1706 when the missionaries came down, and could scarcely have forgotten the ceremony of reinterring the remains of Father Marquette, had it taken place at Quebec.
Taking this as a fact, that the bones of the venerable missionary, buried in their bark box, were left there, the next question is: Where did the church stand?
A doubt at once arises. Three spots have borne the name of Michilimackinac: the island in the strait, Point St. Ignace on the shore to the north, and the extremity of the peninsula at the south. The Jesuit Relations as printed at the time, and those which remained in manuscript till they were printed in our time, Marquette’s journal and letter, do not speak in such positive terms that we can decide whether it was on the island or the northern shore. Arguments have been deduced from them on either side of the question. On the map annexed to the Relations of 1671 the words Mission de St. Ignace are on the mainland above, not on the island, and there is no cross or mark at the island to make the name refer to it. On Marquette’s own map the “St. Ignace” appears to refer to the northern shore, so that their testimony is in favor of that position.
The next work that treats of Michilimackinac is the Recollect Father Hennepin’s first volume, Description de la Louisiane, published in 1688. In this (p. 59) he distinctly says: “Missilimackinac is a point of land at the entrance and north of the strait by which Lake Dauphin [Michigan] empties into that of Orleans” (Huron). He mentions the Huron village with its palisade on a great point of land opposite Michilimackinac island, the Ottawas, and a chapel where he said Mass August 26, 1678. The map in Le Clercq’s Gaspesie, dated 1691, shows the Jesuit mission on the point north of the strait, and Father Membré, in Le Clercq’s Etablissement, mentions it as in that position. In Hennepin’s later work, the Nouvel Découverte, Utrecht, 1697, he says (p. 134): “There are Indian villages in these two places. Those who are established at the point of land of Missilimackinac are Hurons, and the others, who are at five or six arpens beyond, are named the Outtaouatz.” He then, as before, mentions saying Mass in the chapel at the Ottawas.
The Jesuit Relation of 1673–9 (pp. 58, 59) mentions the “house where we make our abode ordinarily, and where is the church of St. Ignatius, which serves for the Hurons,” and mentions a small bark chapel three-quarters of a league distant and near the Ottawas. This latter chapel was evidently the one where Father Hennepin officiated in 1678 or, as he says elsewhere, 1679.
The relative positions of the Indian villages and the church thus indicated in Hennepin’s account are fortunately laid down still more clearly on a small map of Michilimackinac found in the Nouveaux Voyages de M. le Baron de La Hontan, published at the Hague in 1703. Many of the statements in this work are preposterously false, and his map of his pretended Long River a pure invention, exciting caution as to any of his unsupported statements. But the map of the country around Michilimackinac agrees with the Jesuit Relation and with Father Hennepin’s account, and has all the appearance of having been copied from the work of some professed hydrographer, either one of the Jesuit Fathers like Raffeix, whose maps are known, or Jolliet, who was royal hydrographer of the colony. The whole map has a look of accuracy, the various soundings from the point to the island being carefully given. On this the French village, the house of the Jesuits, the Huron village, that of the Ottawas, and the cultivated fields of the Indians are all laid down on the northern shore. In the text, dated in 1688, he says: “The Hurons and the Ottawas have each a village, separated from one another by a simple palisade.... The Jesuits have a small house, besides a kind of church, in an enclosure of palisades which separates them from the Huron village.”
The publication a quarter of a century ago of the contemporaneous account of the death and burial of Father Marquette, the humble discoverer of a world, excited new interest as to his final resting-place. The West owed him a monument, and, though America gave his name to a city, and the Pope ennobled it by making it a bishop’s see, this was not enough to satisfy the yearnings of pious hearts, who grieved that his remains should lie forgotten and unknown. To some the lack of maps laying down the famous spots in the early Catholic missions has seemed strange: but the difficulty was very great. Every place required special study, and the random guesses of some writers have only created confusion, where truth is to be attained by close study of every ancient record and personal exploration of the ground. Michilimackinac is not the only one that has led to long discussion and investigation.[[62]]
Where was the chapel on the point? A structure of wood consumed by fire a hundred and seventy years ago could scarcely be traced or identified. A forest had grown up around the spots which in Marquette’s time were cleared and busy with human life. Twenty years ago this forest was in part cleared away, but nothing appeared to justify any hope of discovering the burial-place of him who bore the standard of Mary conceived without sin down the Mississippi valley. One pioneer kept up his hope, renewed his prayers, and pushed his inquiries. The Rev. Edward Jacker, continuing in the nineteenth century the labors of Marquette—missionary to the Catholic Indians and the pagan, a loving gatherer of all that related to the early heralds of the faith, tracing their footsteps, explaining much that was obscure, leading us to the very spot where Ménard labored and died—was to be rewarded at last.
A local tradition pointed to one spot as the site of an old church and the grave of a great priest, but nothing in the appearance of the ground seemed to justify it. Yet, hidden in a growth of low trees and bushes were preserved proofs that Indian tradition coincided with La Hontan’s map and the Jesuit records.